25-01-2021
“How do you understand the requirements for and preparation of leaders right now, under current conditions? You have studied leadership, and your insight is valuable.”
A critically important question. And a subject requiring a book.
The leaders of today and tomorrow must be freethinkers with moral and intellectual courage, honesty, and integrity.
While studying the history surrounding the American Revolution, I was struck by the fact that the major contributors to the creation of the United States were all such freethinkers with practical experience—the Founders and Framers such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton plus the radical thinkers and activists such as James Otis, Ethan Allen, Thomas Young, and Thomas Paine. And many more.
None of them were traditional and dogmatic Christians. In fact, most of them were more than once called infidels by orthodox Christians. The most radical amongst them, Thomas Young was all but forgotten, while Thomas Paine was ostracized from the country which he had helped to create. Yet, without a group of freethinkers like them, the independence and the establishment of the United States of America was not possible. These men were revolutionary freethinkers before they were revolutionaries.
In the history of ideas, they were in the Age of Reason under the influence of the (Newtonian) Scientific Revolution. Their freethought in intellectual integrity with the principles of reason made them what is called Deists, which was basically identical with Pantheism, developed by Benedict Spinoza, translated and modified by John Locke (and many other British-Scottish philosophers), and further developed in the American soil by the founding philosophers such as Thomas Jefferson.
Freethinkers disagree with one another but aligned in their commitment to and orientation toward truth, rationality, reason, and philosophic-scientific inquiry. In the history of humanity, there has never been a time when so many brilliant freethinkers with practical experience came together and became engaged in creative action. What we need today is the same.
That is, the leaders of today and tomorrow need not only be authentic freethinkers but also be skillful in creative collaborations with other leaders. President Trump is a brilliant freethinker, but unlike George Washington, he is not surrounded by many other freethinkers who can complement him in alignment. He needs more freethinkers who are leaders in their own light. He needs more world leaders who are freethinkers with moral and intellectual courage, honesty, and integrity with whom he can work.
The challenge is education. Our education systems do not produce freethinkers but (mostly) mediocre believers and followers. And the revolution in education involves a whole community because it is not only children and youth but also their parents and teachers that need to learn and unlearn in order to develop into freethinkers.
As you know, I am not a Christian. In fact, I have never been to a single Church service. I have never read the whole Bible. And yet, I think the United States of America is (or at least was) the greatest nation in the world and in history. Without reading “The Declaration of Independence” and Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and appreciating and loving them, I do not think that I would have become a naturalized citizen.
Buddhism, and Eastern religions in general, in their esoteric core, deal with inner freedom. Freedom or Liberty can be negatively defined as the condition of absence of compulsion (inner) and coercion (outer). Eastern spirituality made it possible for dedicated individuals to attain inner spiritual freedom, and yet no Eastern society ever achieved outer social freedom on its own.
Lao Tzu teaches the Way (道) of achieving inner freedom, but Confucian ethics and politics never have gone beyond external authority-oriented statism. That is why the Chinese have been better at creating a hyper-statist communist nation than the Russians.
Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most well-read and scholarly of the Founding Fathers, was also a radical freethinker who in his heart agreed with his friend Thomas Paine in his radicalism and revolutionary philosophy. He did not believe in the supernatural “miracle” parts of the Bible, and famously compiled the “Jefferson’s Bible” consisting of the Christ’s moral teachings. Toward the end of his life, he called himself “Epicurean” in the tradition of Lucretius whose “On the Nature of Things” he had read not only in its Latin original but also in translations in other languages he knew. In fact, the discovery of Lucretius in 1417 marked the beginning of the Scientific Revolution that later flourished.
One of my intellectual heroes, Giordano Bruno (who was more ahead in his cosmovision than his famous disciple Galileo), was profoundly influenced by Lucretius, and so was Benedict de Spinoza, whose radical theological, ethical, and political philosophy John Locke emulated and modified, along with other British and Scottish philosophers, which in turn profoundly influenced the Founders and Framers.
The “God” of the founding freethinkers and philosophers of the United States was not the traditional orthodox Christian God but the “God” of Spinoza and Bruno, which is closer in meaning and virtually synonymous with the concept of “Nature” in Natural Philosophy. In The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, the word “God” by itself was never used, except in the former as “Nature’s God” and the “Creator” in the sense of “Nature = God” and “Creator = Creation = Creativity”.
Christianity and all other organized religions can become (and historically have become) a mental tyranny in their dogmatism and a mind-control mechanism in the form of believing and beliefs. No one religion, if given a political power, will ever allow “religious freedom” and heterodoxy. It is only a philosophy of freedom and the mentality of freethinking that is extra-, supra-, or trans-religious that can allow such freedom and heterodoxy, while recognizing the essential importance of morality and ethics at the foundation of society about which Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus all agree.
In the history of humanity, such freethought philosophy and freethinking mentality never played such a decisive role as in the American Revolution. Although Jefferson, Paine, and many other Founders were called infidels by their religious opponents, they were not like today’s atheists, because atheism is a form of dogmatic belief system. The Founders’ and Framers’ “God” was not an object of blind belief or faith but of Reason (which they knew was fallible) and Understanding (which they knew was never complete).
“Nature’s God” can be used as the term of translating “Tao (道)” into English. The difference between the Eastern understanding and the Western understanding is that in the former the unknowability thereof as a whole is emphasized, while in the latter the inexhaustible knowability thereof by reason is emphasized. That which is eternal and infinite, Tao/Nature/Nature’s God, is never completely knowable and yet with the use of reason the possibility of knowledge is inexhaustible while the progress of knowledge is never ending.
The leaders of today and tomorrow thus need to be not only freethinkers but also original philosophers, that is, the 21st century version of the Founders and the Framers of the United States of America.