Howard Burton - The Epicurean Republic: A Conversation with Matthew Stewart

How does an idea gain currency? By what process does it move from one persons private musings to suddenly becoming a characteristic feature of our common understanding?

Of course, there is no one single answer here, no well-defined law-like mechanism to universally describe the tipping-point of ideas. Intellectual history is hardly an exact science like chemistry or mathematics. Not only are we unable to precisely determine how ideas become popular, there will always be considerable debate on which ideas are, in fact, the most influential in the first place.

But that shouldnt stop us from trying.

Matthew Stewart certainly hasnt. Stewart is an intriguing example of a curiously increasing modern phenomenon: the independent scholar. Equipped with an undergraduate degree in political philosophy from Princeton and a DPhil in 19th-century German philosophy from Oxford, he left academe after his doctorate to become a management consultant, before happily escaping to write books on the history of philosophy, a submarine inventor and, inevitably, a stinging critique of the world of management consulting.

In his book, Natures God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, Stewart focuses his intellectual microscope on the American Revolution, acutely exploring the beliefs and convictions behind this watershed moment in political history.

His approach, typically, is unorthodox, and begins in an unexpected place: Ethan Allen, the hero of the Green Mountain Boys whose legacy has largely faded into a curious mixture of obscurity and caricaturethe wild mountain man of Vermont.

Allen, it turns out, also wrote a 477-page work of philosophy informally known as Ethan Allens Bible, which was loudly derided in its day as dangerously blasphemous for its overtly deist orientation. Indeed, the work was considered so perniciously sophisticated, it was generally concluded that it clearly couldnt have been the work of Allen at all (who was summarily transformed from a philosophical scoundrel to a plagiarist scoundrel), and was generally attributed to Thomas Young, political agitator and largely forgotten Founding Father who was the primary activist behind the Boston Tea Party. Young, it should be emphasized, was also an unabashedly self-proclaimed deist, albeit of a slightly different hue according to Matthew.

Because Matthew, as it happens, doesnt buy the story that Thomas Young was the author of Ethan Allens Bible. But thats not the main point of the story. What matters to him is that the existence of Ethan Allens Bible serves as direct evidence of a spectrum of deist ideas and principles that were clearly prevalent at the time of the American Revolutionideas and principles that were, with varying degrees of clarity and specificity, espoused by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and others.

More specifically, by denying divine miracles and other trappings of superstition, these deist perspectives naturally lead one down the path towards the Spinozistic conclusion that God is equivalent to Nature, rather than an anthropomorphic creator who is watching over us.

Well, so what? Perhaps the Founding Fathers had a different view of religious sentiment than that which is commonly attributed to them. Does that matter?

Yes, Matthew maintains. Very much so.

At the end of the day, he told me, Im not that concerned about whether this guy believed in God and that guy didnt. What matters is, Wheres the payoff? What are the implications of the commitments that they have? And I think that when you boil it down, the core position of deism is the commitment to the lawfulness of nature; or the idea that, as the ancient philosophers said, Nothing comes from nothing or that Everything is explicable. Theyre basically committed to that fundamental notion.

And that notion excludes most of what we ordinarily think of as supernatural religion. Im not saying it excludes any form of piety, but it does exclude a lot of what most people understand by religion, the common concept of religion.

And heres the interesting tie-in, why I think thats important, both for us and for the world: Thats in the Declaration of Independence. Yes, there may be this deity of some sort, but hes Natures God; and when we claim independence from Great Britain, for example, we claim it in virtue of the laws of nature and of Natures God.

The important thing is that youre committed to the lawfulness of nature and to its intelligibility, and therefore essentially to a fundamentally rationalist position that I think inherently excludes supernatural religion.

And that was, I think, an essential part of the American Revolution and what made the American Revolution work.

To gain a deeper sense of how, precisely, these deist views made the American Revolution workhow they influenced the wording of the Declaration of Independence, for example, and quickly enabled the revolution to take on a symbolic value vastly more significant than merely the rebellion of one group of colonials against a distant governmentone needs to listen carefully to Matthews more detailed arguments.

But for the moment, its worth pointing out that we havent yet answered our original question: How do such ideas become prevalent in the first place? How, exactly, did this fundamentally rationalist position gain such influence? Were all the inhabitants of late 18th-century America rigorous rational philosophers? Hardly, admits Matthew.

There seems to be a common idea that the way ideas matter in history is that you get buy-in from large groups of people, that if everybody in society subscribes to some particular ideology or creed, then thats the way ideas have influence.

And I dont think that thats quite right. I think if youre going to understand the modern revolution, you need to understand that the ideas that matter are not always the ones that are most common or most popular or those of a handful of brilliant leaders.

You need to understand that ideas have an effect, really, through their truth. They have an impact because they clear out certain spaces of action for human beings that then allows for the creation of new orders and new situations.