What's Your Viewpoint?

My father sent me the following - my response is posted at the bottom of this blog entry:

From SUN newspapers, 06Jul09

American revolution sustained by foresight, realism
As a nation, we were extraordinarily blessed in our revolutionaries. It wasn’t just that they were brave and determined. So were the avatars of revolution throughout the 20th century who wrecked nations and peoples. No, what makes them so wondrously distinct is that they were also just and wise, grounded always in a clear eyed view of human nature.
“There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, “which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” When revolutionaries talk of depravity, it is often to brand their class or ethnic enemies for destruction. Gas chambers, prison camps and killing fields inevitably follow.
The depravity of which our Founders spoke was different. It ran through the hearts of all men, themselves included. It tempered their expectations of what they could, and what they should attempt to, achieve. No secular millennium, no perfectly harmonious republic — because, as Madison wrote, “the latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man.”
“Enthusiasm there certainly was — a revolution is impossible without enthusiasm,” Irving Kristol writes of 1776, “but this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt, introspection, anxiety, skepticism. This may strike us as a very strange state of mind in which to make a revolution; and yet it is evidently the right state of mind for making a successful revolution.”
The Revolution was institutionalized in the Constitution, an inspired exercise in leveraging human failings against one another — “ambition counteracts ambition” — to create a stable structure of liberty.
“It may be a reflection on human nature,” Madison wrote in the famous passage in Federalist No. 51, “that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
How did the Founders come to know man as they did? They had broad, practical experience that exposed them to humanity in its glory and its folly: as lawyers, military officers and — especially important — legislators. Some knew hardship. Try, like Alexander Hamilton, making your way as a penniless, orphaned bastard from the West Indies and see if you don’t pick up a few hardboiled lessons about how the world works.
They read widely, knew the classics and soaked up history. John Adams studied and wrote a book about the French civil wars of the 16th century, concluding of human affairs: “Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.” Madison undertook a yearlong study of the history of republics and confederacies prior to the writing of the Constitution. Believing “experience is the oracle of truth,” he endeavored to learn from this long, unrelieved record of failure.
They didn’t let their view of reality get obscured by abstruse theories or sunny abstractions of the sort that perverted the French Revolution. No philosophes need apply. Instead, a residual Calvinism tinged their worldview. They admired the “country” tradition in England, characterized by a deep distrust of the crown and support for republican reforms to preserve English liberties. In this tradition, the late historian Martin Malia writes, “men were neither rational nor naturally good,” and “human government therefore invariably tended toward corruption and despotism.” In keeping with their lively view of human fallibility, our revolutionaries set about circumscribing government to limit its abuse. After a false start under the Articles of Confederation and its enfeebled federal government, the Constitution struck a proper and enduring balance. It wasn’t quite a “miracle.” It was assuredly the work of men — not just supremely talented statesmen and political thinkers, but some of the best social scientists the world has ever known.

My response:
Good article, Dad. Whereas Madison had to spend a year researching the history of republics and confederacies, quite possibly because it took a while to get the books he needed, we now have such history available to us via the Internet (if we allow ourselves free time to study history, of course). With the adoption of cell phones and the Internet, we humans have set a course for global connectivity which includes communicating instantly with one another across political borders. Hopefully, the lessons we humans learned in forming a government which promotes individual freedoms and rights will carry us to higher ground, freeing pockets of repressed people around the world without allowing large organizations to exploit the concept of freedom to enslave us economically by tying all of us together electronically in the name of free speech.

I wonder where we're headed. I hear many people speak of losing our freedom in many ways, from our credit/medical records being available everywhere to having CCTV and webcams pointed at unsuspecting citizens on the street. Instead of viewing this as the coming apocalypse or nightmare version of the books "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Animal Farm," I believe we humans are finding new ways to define what it's like to be a social species. For instance, by making our medical records publicly available, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to see trends that weren't readily available when all our records were private, allowing us to analyze human nutritional needs to improve quality of life and increase average lifespan.

You and Mom taught me to see the world optimistically. I am taking that optimistic view to incorporate technological changes positively, being active in promoting new inventions for the betterment of humanity and not sitting on the sideline worrying about losing freedoms. We see too many people whining and complaining about where the world's headed and not enough people doing something to make positive changes. Government belongs to the people and if we don't actively participate, then it's somebody else who decides what government does. I thank you all for teaching me social responsibility.

Love,
Rick