A Defense Of American Ideals, by Thomas J. Malone
Posted by ObjectiveAnalyst 10 years, 5 months ago to Books
A Defense Of American Ideals, by Thomas J. Malone
199 pages. ISBN 9781475184365
This is a book every American patriot should read, although it is bound to ruffle the feathers of some devoted theists due to its defense and assertion of America’s founding principles based only on secular, natural, unalienable rights. This should not however dissuade any reader from diving in, so long as they respect the basic principle of separation of Church and State. Nothing in it advocates a denial of one’s right to believe as they wish. On the contrary, it demands the rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution in every way be reinstated as originally intended. It only asks that consonant with the original intent, that individual beliefs not be forced upon others; that each may once again follow their own light in pursuit of happiness.
Filled with timeless wisdom in the form of quotes from our founders and several other brilliant defenders of the rights of the individual, this work explores the principles that created the greatest expansion of liberty and prosperity known. While exposing the inferiority of socialism to capitalism, it clearly demonstrates our folly, having allowed the statists to erode Liberty to our great loss and shame, while they instituted collectivist, altruist doctrine by incremental, continual sophistry.
The strength of the arguments against the socialist creep foisted upon us by the infiltration of the failed philosophies of Marx, Kant, Hegel, etc. are irrefutable. Contrasting them with the philosophies of Locke, Paine, Smith, Mill, Rand etc. which reflect the enlightenment and principles that created the legacy so many of us revere, one cannot help but look back with nostalgia while lamenting the degrading state of liberty and prosperity. Fortunately the author offers a worthy philosophy and direction for reconstitution.
Read this book and you will be inspired to fight for Liberty lost and “…grab the torch of Liberty. Hold it high. And never let it go again. Long Live Lady Liberty!” Thomas J.Malone
Respectfully,
O.A.
199 pages. ISBN 9781475184365
This is a book every American patriot should read, although it is bound to ruffle the feathers of some devoted theists due to its defense and assertion of America’s founding principles based only on secular, natural, unalienable rights. This should not however dissuade any reader from diving in, so long as they respect the basic principle of separation of Church and State. Nothing in it advocates a denial of one’s right to believe as they wish. On the contrary, it demands the rights guaranteed to us by our Constitution in every way be reinstated as originally intended. It only asks that consonant with the original intent, that individual beliefs not be forced upon others; that each may once again follow their own light in pursuit of happiness.
Filled with timeless wisdom in the form of quotes from our founders and several other brilliant defenders of the rights of the individual, this work explores the principles that created the greatest expansion of liberty and prosperity known. While exposing the inferiority of socialism to capitalism, it clearly demonstrates our folly, having allowed the statists to erode Liberty to our great loss and shame, while they instituted collectivist, altruist doctrine by incremental, continual sophistry.
The strength of the arguments against the socialist creep foisted upon us by the infiltration of the failed philosophies of Marx, Kant, Hegel, etc. are irrefutable. Contrasting them with the philosophies of Locke, Paine, Smith, Mill, Rand etc. which reflect the enlightenment and principles that created the legacy so many of us revere, one cannot help but look back with nostalgia while lamenting the degrading state of liberty and prosperity. Fortunately the author offers a worthy philosophy and direction for reconstitution.
Read this book and you will be inspired to fight for Liberty lost and “…grab the torch of Liberty. Hold it high. And never let it go again. Long Live Lady Liberty!” Thomas J.Malone
Respectfully,
O.A.
The introduction and table of contents is posted on my website for those interested: http://americanideals.info
You are welcome. Thank you for providing the great material. Yes, you do take religion to task, but I appreciated your humility and tolerance at the end.
Incidentally, I posted the same review on the B&N site, but the formatting came out strange...
It was the first review, I believe. I hope it helps your prospects.
Regards,
O.A.
Thanks again. I do think we should be tolerant. Most of the people I know and love in this world are Christians. I have no animosity toward them... I'm just not a fan of the creed. I am in the camp that says all of us of us who love liberty and uphold individual rights have a common cause, even if we may disagree about the source of those rights. But while we try to shore up the foundations of liberty, I do think it behooves us to present our ideas and see which ones hold up under the scrutiny of "Objective Analysis." :-)
it is sad that people cannot see the effective
equivalence between "natural rights" and
"God-given-rights" when evaluating our
founding. I wish that they could.
Thank You! -- john
Thanks for your note, I hope you enjoy the book!
Fred Speckmann
commonsenseforamericans@yahoo.com
God help us! I choose liberty over the death of the American dream.
Thank for sharing.
---
That actually doesn't dissuade me at all. In fact, it makes the book *far* more appealing. If the book had advocated some nonsense about restoring so called "Christian values," that would have been a huge turn off, and I would have ignored the book completely. But if this book actually defends the separation of church and state, as you say it does, I may just have to pick it up at some point. Thanks for sharing. ;)
Considering your reply, I predict you will like it. If anything it is a rejection of "Christian values"... at least the altruistic ones.
Regards,
O.A.
____________________
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
— Immanuel Kant
____________________
The way that I interpret this is that Kant is simply saying everyone should behave in such a way that things would be better if everyone else behaved that way as well. Of course there are some absurd conclusions we could reach if we tried to interpret the categorical imperative in a strictly robotic sense (for example, no one can become a doctor unless everyone becomes a doctor), but I don't think Kant intended his statement to be interpreted so rigidly.
O. A. is quite right... the list of what's wrong with Kant and Hegel would take a book and much of what they theorized (especially Hegel) is nonsense. Suffice to say, they are both Platonists (mystics) who preached that reality is unknowable and A is non-A. Hegel postulated that reality was a series of "colliding contradictions" (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) and that everything was one, which he called the "Absolute." Unlike Plato himself, they had no respect for reason and essentially argued that man's mind is unable to acquire any knowledge of reality. Kant wrote, "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith."
Hegel was a post-Kantian who had a great influence in Germany and Europe (and to a lesser extent in America) in the 19th century and the subsequent 20th century totalitarian regimes (Fascism and Nazism) were built on a Hegelian foundation to a large extent. In his "Philosophy Of Right" he wrote, "A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it." He believed that the State was a mystic entity who swallowed up individuals and became a self-sustaining organism of its own. "All the worth which the human being possesses," he wrote, "all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." Need we say more?
As far as the categorical imperative, think about the logical end of "willing" something you thing is good as "universal law." This is what is commonly known today as liberal fascism, i.e, politicians who say "I know better than you -- this is a good thing and by god everyone should be forced to do it by law."
For more I would recommend Leonard Peikoff's book "The Ominous Parallels," in which he does a very commendable dissection of both Kant and Hegel (among others).
Also, I try to avoid reading anything written by Leonard Peikoff.
Kant's ethics are based on total self-abnegation and "duty." He claimed that an action was only moral if one did it out of a sense of duty and derived no personal benefit from it. That type of ethics naturally leads to statism in politics and is the opposite of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The over-arching theme of Kant and Hegel is subservience of the individual to the collective. That's why Kant was Rand's philosophical nemesis.
You may not like Peikoff (and I too disagree with some stances he's taken and things he's said), but I would submit to you that in that particular book he did a thorough job of showing which philosophers paved the way for 20th century Totalitarianism.
And to O. A.'s original point about my book: the tragedy is that we were once a country founded on Enlightenment principles and the ideas of Locke, Jefferson, Adams, et al, and have since followed Europe down the path of post-Kantian irrationalism and collectivist ideologies (albeit at a slower pace). One of my purposes in writing the book was to show that Rand's moral philosophy of ethical egoism is the antidote to these collectivist philosophers and the much needed complement to the Founder's individualist political system.
"See, here we're going on about that whole individual vs. collective thing again. As far as I can tell, that was an idea that Rand invented, and it was never part of the principles of the Founding Fathers of America."
Surely you're joking. Those terms far pre-date Rand. You never heard the 19th century phrase "rugged individualism" applied to Americans? Tocqueville used the phrase individualism often, and "collectivism" was commonly used in 19th century socialist literature. It was also used in popular literature by writers such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Look it up.
But more importantly: all the Founders talked about was Liberty -- what do you think that even means? The country was founded on the sovereignty of the individual. Have you read the Declaration of Independence? They declared the individual has an inalienable right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..." and that government's are instituted among men to "secure these rights." The fact that it was based on individuals rights is precisely what made the American founding unique in history.
It's been nice chatting with you my friend.
Also, the Declaration of Independence does not contain the word "individual." The exact wording of the opening paragraph reads as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
I see nothing about individualism in any of that. In fact, I see a whole lot of "we" and "they." That hardly seems individualistic to me. The whole idea of the "sovereignty of the individual" is a modern 20th century conception, and was never part of the principles of the Founding Fathers. Quite the contrary, from what I can tell, the Founding Fathers actually seemed to base the Constitution on the principle of equality, something I've noticed Objectivists tend to despise...
You seem like an intelligent person so I suspect you are being purposely obtuse here. Are you seriously telling me that simply because the words "We" and "They" are used, you think the Founder's were some kind of collectivists? The meaning of that paragraph is crystal clear.
The word "we" is used because they were speaking as a group of representatives proposing to establish a new country... a new country based on "inalienable rights," which are by definition individual rights that cannot be taken away or given away. To say "inalienable, individual rights" would be redundant in that context.
Further, they then asserted that ALL men were created equal and possessed those rights, not just the people of America, and that the proper purpose of government was to secure those rights. Clearly, their Declaration was not just about obtaining independence from England, it was a revolutionary statement asserting the universal rights of man -- which to the Founders were the rights to life, liberty, property, and the freedom to act in pursuit of your own happiness. That is essentially the definition of individualism.
You claim they based "the Constitution on the principle of equality?" The word equality is not even in the Constitution. Having said that, equality was an important principle to them -- but only in the sense of equality before objectively defined laws designed to protect individual rights.
This is from the 14th amendment:
"...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
This should never be confused with the socialist-communist version of "equality" of income or property via forced redistribution. This is all well established and irrefutable in terms of historic fact. But here it is in their own words anyway...
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." --Thomas Jefferson
"Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own." - James Madison
"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." - The Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776
"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can." --Samuel Adams
"The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted." -James Madison
"The whole of that Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals...[I]t establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." - Albert Gallatin, letter to Alexander Addison, October 7, 1789
"All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights - among which are, the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing, and protecting, property; and, in a word, of seeking and obtaining happiness.” - New Hampshire State Constitution, 1784)
"The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule." --Samuel Adams
“To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of
a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” -Thomas Jefferson
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." --Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." --Thomas Paine
"The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they
have a right to exist." -Thomas Paine
"I know not what others may choose but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death." --Patrick Henry
They were individualists one and all.
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Yes. Anything that is done by more than one person is collectivism. And while the word "equality" may not have been in the Constitution, it WAS in the Declaration of Independence. And I disagree with your claim that "inalienable rights" inherently means "individual rights." There is nothing in any of the statements made by the founding fathers that they believing that. The ideology of Objectivism is distorting your view of history.
Understood. I had very little time. I was preparing to go on vacation and just returned. Hegel and his Hegelian dialectic are quite problematic. His most notable contribution (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) is a short cut to more rigorous investigation that might bring objective precise truth to a situation, as apposed to a compromise. In my opinion it should be a last resort when reason is exhausted. Both Hegel's and Kant's philosophies were slanted heavily in altruism. There is so much to find fault with as they were both focused on greater good as opposed to what is right for the individual which often results by happy coincidence in the greater good, but it should never be the focus. It is a matter of objective and approach.
Kan't's "will that it should become a universal law." says it all. One can will all they want but it does not make it so. A is A.
They are both mindists, mystics and altruists in essence.
I see tjmalone has provided much food for thought. The subject matter is voluminous. I would recommend further study and comparison. Almost every notable philosopher has had something worthy of consideration or we would not hear of them, but to an objectivist, there is much to take issue with when it comes to these two.
Happy studies,
O.A.