Finding the Founding (Part IV): A Diatribe on the Nature of Power and Liberty and the Dilemma of Great and Better

We often hear the phrase “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Scientifically, it has a more specialized meaning than we conventionally give it—it really does mean something. So what does it mean? Where there is emptiness in nature, something will move to fill that void. That’s physics and it seems to be true. But what is the truth, what is the real meaning when most of the universe is made up of emptiness, the void between matter. Is that always being filled? Seems to me that matter is losing that battle to the void, seems emptiness overmatches whatever is trying to fill it.
          But our little phrase, “nature abhors a vacuum,” is safe enough to have real impact when we use it in everyday speech to help justify or explain whatever it is that made us think of vacuums. To be sure, we often just substitute convenient nouns to replace nature because it appears that most everything abhors a vacuum. Take “power” for instance – I recently heard power substituted for nature – and that presented an opportunity to think about one of the main problems pondered by the Founders of the United States.

I know dogs don't like it, but why would
Nature find this offensive?

       The question is whether power abhors a vacuum? (though it seems that every vacuum that I’ve had doesn’t have nearly enough power, badump bump). When it comes to power filling voids it seems to be a valid substitution for nature -- where there is no power, some form of power will move in to establish itself. Though the Founders never talked about vacuums, after all, Hoover would not become President until a century and a half after the Revolution, the Founders were obsessed with the qualities and nature of power, especially in Power’s inherent conflict with Liberty. And the one uniform ideological truth that they seemed to comprehend was that where Liberty is not vigilant, Power will move in and eradicate it. So in other words, putting the 18^th into the 21^st century idiom (adopted from Aristotle 2,500 years ago) the “void” will naturally be filled with Power – Liberty is not greater, it is weaker, but the Founder’s understood that questions of greater and lesser serve very little purpose in civil society and so they sought Liberty because it was better.

Talk about cold dead eyes --
But that goes with being a Philosopher!

           But what is better? What is better for me might not be better for you. Political discourse and philosophy of the Enlightenment Period, of which the Founders were part of that period’s last generation, focused on “better” quite a bit, and just what “better” would mean when it came to the relationship between individuals. Increasingly, Enlightened minds saw Government as an institution which ought to define relationships between individuals in a society. No longer was government merely an instrument of Power. Borrowing from ancient ideas of demos (people) cracy (rule) and res (rule) publica (of the public), Enlightenment writers discarded the previous Middle Age philosophy where government was all about power and a power wielded by those ruthless enough to assert their will over others, and therefore  government was not really a part of the “society of us.” Government for most of human history in Civilization was the ultimate “other” that neither stemmed from the people nor ruled on behalf of the people. Instead government was of power, by power, to protect and serve the powerful. Even ancient Athens, the home of so-called Democracy, was a blood based system bent on expanding the power of those who possessed the ability to be part of government by the accident of their birth – and they even had a word for the powerless “society of us,” the common people, workers, servants, slaves, women and children – we were the “idiots” who were not part of the power of the state. As I have said for nearly a quarter of a century, "French fries came out of grease (Greece) not our idea of democracy!"
               So it is an important historical departure made during the Enlightenment that thinkers and writers and even some of the powerful were reconceptualizing government not as an alien among us (or over us) but rather as a function of us for the betterment of us. And back to the what is better? Better was an off-shoot of that very monster of “Power” that those producing the Enlightenment (including the Founders) were trying to get away from. Power was the ability to control others, but the new formulization was a “what if you had power over yourself?” sort of proposition. Control over your own actions, and even who “you” were, was not really the same as the predatory filling vacuum nature of regular old power – this was something different, something liberating, especially if we all agreed to support each other’s control over our own lives. Liberty!
          Liberty, is it Athena springing from the mind of Zeus? In a way, yes. It is a form of power, but not power, and obviously to mix this metaphor even further, if Zeus had the chance he would do what his father Kronos did and eat Athena – Liberty. The Founders, like other Enlightenment politicos going back to Machiavelli of all people – realized that most of us are more like the vulnerable Athena and less like Zeus. Further they realized that having this personal power realized by more of us, was better than great big Olympian power held by the few. Liberty can only find strength in numbers because it is weak and because power will seek to displace it, not because power is better, but because power is greater.
              As humans we seem be drawn to that which we define as great. Bigger and badder mean better, instead of what better ought to mean as that which serves our common desire to control who and what we are. Phhht. Instead of protecting Liberty we seem to naturally laud Power. We love to, we’re obsessed with, we have a weird need to define things as greater or lesser. We infuse it in our children at the very earliest stages with the “What’s your favorite” games we like to play and it finds a variety of ways to influence our conversational lives. “What’s the best ….?” “Who was the greatest …. ?” And in our little brains we make certain assumptions about “best,” “favorite,” – not that they are tangible qualities to be defined in and of themselves, but mostly as they are tools to teach about the omnipotence of “great.” And we teach a mistaken idea about greatness – that it is good and of the quality of goodness, that it is helpful and of the quality of helpfulness, that it will promote a general welfare and well being that will enable you and I to live by our own design. But we are wrong. Greatness is really just the predatory nature of Power rebranded and therefore always destructive of Liberty and that which is “better.”

              We assume that love will overcome hate, that freedom can defeat tyranny, that the something which will fill the nothing will include ponies and rainbows and lots of chocolate things, after all nature abhors a vacuum… but we’re wrong, and the Founder’s knew that. From all the Enlightenment words they read, from all of the experience with colonization they had, from just simple observation of the human condition and the laws of the universe they knew that power ultimately will fill the void …. And they knew that was not a good thing.
             Colonization in the Caribbean developed power, power in wealth creation, power over an enslaved labor force, power to protect and serve the needs of the powerful. The European invasion of North America did much the same thing, especially as it related to the Paleolithic Asian Immigrant populations now referred to as Native Americans. But North America did not provide as fertile a ground for the growth of power in the same way that the Caribbean did – mostly because the soils and climate of North America were not productive of Sugar. In the next two installments, North American settlement will be viewed to present an opportunity to challenge prevailing social, political and economic systems as established in the Caribbean and to produce something “better” for those who were willing to fight for it.
                But just because something is better does not mean it will readily be adopted by humans …. in part because those adoptions are usually made by those who have power.