Premises

Teaching my students the art behind persuasion, I always emphasize the importance of knowing one's premise. If you don't know where you started, I tell them, you may be shocked where you end up. And, of course, if you're building an case on shaky assumptions, your audience is liable to turn off your argument before you begin it.

All of that sounds quite clear and impressive in the context of a freshman English essay. It is hardly apparent in practical application.

Social assumptions are the tectonic plates of culture. They are massive ideologies upon which daily life is built, and while thy support everything done in the hustle and bustle of existence, they are unseen and easily forgotten. Certainly, they occasionally emerge in dramatic ideological earthquakes, changing the geography of thought with revolution or pogrom, but for the most part, they remain deep beneath the surface, safely assumed rather than seen. Yet even forgotten, they persist, moving slowly beneath our feet, shifting and grinding against one another as the social landscape shifts across the centuries. They are, perhaps, most visible in the searchlight of history. Recognizing what they assumed occasionally casts into harsh relief what we assume, and makes the thinking individual realize that, in the course of human events, the premise of our social beliefs has changed.

Take, for example, the idea of human nature and personal morality. From the earliest recorded history, the idea emerges that human nature was somehow flawed or imperfect, and that the individual had a mandate to strive for a standard of moral "good." That morality was in keeping with some higher entity – a sense of obligation and improvement in striving for an ideal. Societies were structured around that conviction of punishment, reward, and obligation because of divine standards. There was a pervasive belief that, rather than merely benefiting the majority of society, moral standards and personal virtue benefited the individual and met some deeper, less tangible requirement. They spoke not just to the greater good; they spoke to the soul and the improvement of the individual.

That assumption is highly visible in the opening paragraphs of Common Sense. Paine writes that government and society are quite different from one another. Government, he says, is "the badge of lost innocence," a necessity rising out of flawed human nature to protect ourselves from one another. It comes from man's need to "surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest." His premise intrudes. For Paine, the assumption of a Judeo-Christian "fallen" man, morally imperfect and imperfectable, is an inherent part of the need for government. Government is a policeman, a fall back for the times when individual moral obligations fail. It is not a desirable creation; it is, rather, a necessity rising out of shame. And, naturally then, its power must be limited and built upon the moral standards and obligations of those under its rule. It rises from the individual rather than imposing upon him.

Yet that premise has shifted. As recognized as Paine's pamphlet may be as part of American history, its premises are uncomfortable for much of modern society. The real conviction of moral standards presented by an immutable divine authority that require the personal responsibility of each individual has faded. The undergirding foundation of faith has shifted away from religious morality and into the realm of science, and that gradual change in underpinning has altered the world built upon the premise.

Science dominates the past century. It bears remarkable gifts that comfortably occupy the place that our ancestors reserved for magic and miracle. Over the decades, science has, with increasing confidence, come to offer all of the answers provided in the past by religion with the ringing comfort that its assertions, unlike those of the ideas it replaces, are based on rationality tested by quantifiable human logic. It is tangible, accessible, and repeatable; it vanquishes the intangible with the power of the rational. Yet in so doing, science sets itself up as a sort of new, human faith. It requires belief in the ability of humans to reach perfection and infallibility through experimentation. It also generates a deep, rumbling shift in the premise of the society that lives on its tenets.

If science provides the answers to a better world, then the idea of "right" and "wrong" as coming from a higher authority and relying upon the responsibility of the individual is replaced by the idea of "right" and "wrong" as a means to the greater good. Morality is neither individual nor absolute. It is a matter of serving the needs of the majority. What benefits the largest part of society, is, morally, right.

In all of the wailing and mudslinging of modern American politics, the words "socialist" and "communist" appear with astounding frequency. They are applied to pundits, policies, and politicians. Yet few realize that the ideas behind them are indeed visible across the political landscape, and they are not only common, they are natural outgrowths of the foundation beneath them. America's foundation is secularly scientific; it is no longer operating under the Judeo-Christian premise of individual responsibility and morality of the founding fathers.

In his vivid description of the psychology behind the soviet show trials of Stalin's era, Arthur Koestler discusses the foundational premises of soviet communism/fascism and points out the natural progression of cause and effect between premise and society. His interrogator, Ivanov, declares that "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community….Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible." We have not yet admitted it to ourselves, but we are steadily sliding toward what Koestler's interrogator calls "vivisection morality." We judge all things by the power of arithmetic and statistical efficacy rather than the moral value of the action or its preservation of personal liberty or integrity. Personal integrity has no statistical value, and without a belief in a moral value that supersedes rational quantification, it has no value at all.

Taxation to support social programs and the power of the government to force its constituents to buy products and services are reasonable and justifiable if one stands upon the new premise of society. If individual morality is no more than an outdated superstition without any higher authority to validate it, then government is no longer an unpleasant necessity to protect personal property. It is instead a means of guaranteeing that the greater good is maintained, a scientific, statistical mechanism that strives to make moral decisions based upon the standard of benefiting the largest number in a society. The government based upon those premises has no respect for individual liberty or the principles of protecting property, nor should it. Rather, it is interested in economic efficiency and distribution of wealth to guarantee the best for the most. It is not serving the purpose of some higher power interested in individuals improving themselves; it has, in fact, rejected the idea of any higher power than that of human logic and mathematical improvement.

Math, science, and the majority have replaced God, and their ascendance has invalidated most of the founding documents of the nation. The founding fathers, regardless of their personal religious beliefs which were varied indeed, shared a common premise – a belief in personal moral responsibility in relation to some higher power. They lived and wrote under the assumption of Judeo-Christian notions of the value of the individual and responsibility to an existent, genuine higher moral authority. If we accept the shift in our nation's premise, or at the very least, fail to recognize that our starting point has shifted, then the arguments those men made, the claimed founding documents of America so frequently and ignorantly cited in modern political argument, are essentially useless. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, all emerge from the notion of individual worth, personal morality, and the government as the protector of liberty rather than the moderator of the greater good.

Thomas Paine begins his notion of common sense with the idea that "society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness," yet his assertion is increasingly incorrect in a world moving away from the premise of Judeo-Christian morality. In that world, government is the moderator of our wants. Wickedness, by Paine's definition, has ceased to exist as statistical benefit supersedes notions of "right" and "wrong." And we are left with a logical conclusion that allows the government to weigh the benefits of the many as far more valuable than the price of individual liberty.