Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The Salvation of Benjamin Franklin
It's been suggested that Benjamin Franklin is the only President of the United States not to have actually served as President of the United States. His various achievements in science and the humanities are deserving of an honorary presidency. For example, he served on the committee of 5, which included Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, that drafted the Deceleration of Independence. He signed the U.S. Constitution, served as ambassador to France, and Governor of Pennsylvania.
As a citizen of Philadelphia, he created forums for discussion of useful topics including political and self-help advice. He solicited donations and public money to create a non-denominational church, a fire department, a militia, public education, and a hospital for treating the poor and community guests at no cost.
As a scientist, he proved the electrical nature of storm clouds and lightning. He was the first to use the positive and negative convention in describing electric potential, demonstrating they were one and the same force. He also demonstrated conservation of electric charge. These two concepts greatly improved the understanding of electricity at that time. He was given honorary master's degrees at Yale and Harvard for these achievements even though he had no formal collegiate schooling. On his own injunction, he studied meteorology, the effects of cooling, and oceanography.
As an inventor, he's responsible for bifocals, lightning rods, and an efficient air warming stove. He was offered a patent for the "Franklin Stove," but denied it preferring to let the people benefit without paying him royalties.
As a businessman, he worked as a printer and publisher. He advocated and printed paper fiat money which greatly benefited money-starved Philadelphia and promoted economic growth. This he did in spite of the opposition of wealthier citizens who feared the loss of value to their savings. Numerous times in his autobiography, he helps the local community pool resources toward public goods to include street paving, sweeping, and lighting.
There's plenty more to admire in Benjamin Franklin's list of achievements, but this essay would go on too long in singing his praises and I'd miss the point. Ben Franklin was also a human. A very dualistic human with some ugly vices, but also with exceptional tendency toward practical reasoning. Ironically, his focus on the practical may have weakened him to those vices, but it also enabled him to overcome them.
As a teenage boy, Franklin's father hoped he'd chose the clergy as a profession. However, his rationality lead him to dislike organized religion and the concept of personal revelation. While reading a Christian essay against Deism, the opposite intention of the book found place in his heart and mind. He, like Thomas Jefferson, denied the importance of revealed and organized religion. To the young Benjamin Franklin, God existed, but He did not interfere with man or suspend his laws to do miracles. To the Deist, we discover God only by reason and natural observation.
While believing in this manner, Franklin lead a mixed life. Very pragmatic and sensible he was therefore frugal and sociable. He generally obtained the skills of someone who strives to understand how the world works and how to work with it. He had many friends who followed his Deistic thinking and with them, did many things that were very bad, some of them understandable and funny, others I find incomprehensible. These are self-admitted in his autobiography:
"I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not very useful...that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions, no such things existing, appeared now not so clever a performance as I once thought it...I grew convinc'd that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I form'd written resolutions, which still remain in my journal book, to practice them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertain'd an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by [revelation], or good because [revelation] commanded them, yet probably these actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered."
Here Franklin states the utilitarian philosophy of morality. Sometimes called the "golden rule" or the "greatest good" principle advocated by John Stuart Mill. Franklin's realization that moral actions are for the best benefit of all society is very similar to the great commandment Jesus of Nazereth gave to the lawyer when asked:
"Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Mathew 22:36-40.
While it may seem to some that there is a clear distinction here between loving ones' neighbor and God. That somehow Jesus adds God to complicate the golden rule, It may help to recall the words Jesus spoke that "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
Benjamin Franklin never joined any congregation and wasn't an active churchgoer. However, he often proved an easy target for those soliciting donations to any sect wishing to build a chapel, understanding that the net effect on the community was good. Recalling his helping to build a non-denominational hall for visiting preachers, he even imagined a preacher of Islam might be welcome there.
One sect, the Dunkers, particularly impressed Franklin by its humility. A leader of the sect expressed to Franklin his disappointment with the false representations of their beliefs circulated by "zealots of other persuasions." [I think we Mormons can relate] In response, Franklin suggested the Dunkers officially publish the rules of their faith. According to Franklin: "He said that it had been propos'd among them, but not agreed to, for this reason: 'when we were first drawn together as a society,' says he, 'it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths...and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive farther improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.'"
Franklin remarks that "This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them."
This understanding leads us to question in a productive way. Do we as Mormons (or your own religious or philosophical preference) have a "better" view of the truth? Do we have a perfect view of all truth? Can we see another's situation well enough to truly give them good advice? Am I more interested in how human nature and the natural world actually work or demanding how I think it should all work? These are tough, but practical questions. When asked and answered honestly, we can benefit as Franklin did. By intellectual humility, Franklin discovered truths in science, economics, and human nature. We can too.
As a citizen of Philadelphia, he created forums for discussion of useful topics including political and self-help advice. He solicited donations and public money to create a non-denominational church, a fire department, a militia, public education, and a hospital for treating the poor and community guests at no cost.
As a scientist, he proved the electrical nature of storm clouds and lightning. He was the first to use the positive and negative convention in describing electric potential, demonstrating they were one and the same force. He also demonstrated conservation of electric charge. These two concepts greatly improved the understanding of electricity at that time. He was given honorary master's degrees at Yale and Harvard for these achievements even though he had no formal collegiate schooling. On his own injunction, he studied meteorology, the effects of cooling, and oceanography.
As an inventor, he's responsible for bifocals, lightning rods, and an efficient air warming stove. He was offered a patent for the "Franklin Stove," but denied it preferring to let the people benefit without paying him royalties.
As a businessman, he worked as a printer and publisher. He advocated and printed paper fiat money which greatly benefited money-starved Philadelphia and promoted economic growth. This he did in spite of the opposition of wealthier citizens who feared the loss of value to their savings. Numerous times in his autobiography, he helps the local community pool resources toward public goods to include street paving, sweeping, and lighting.
There's plenty more to admire in Benjamin Franklin's list of achievements, but this essay would go on too long in singing his praises and I'd miss the point. Ben Franklin was also a human. A very dualistic human with some ugly vices, but also with exceptional tendency toward practical reasoning. Ironically, his focus on the practical may have weakened him to those vices, but it also enabled him to overcome them.
As a teenage boy, Franklin's father hoped he'd chose the clergy as a profession. However, his rationality lead him to dislike organized religion and the concept of personal revelation. While reading a Christian essay against Deism, the opposite intention of the book found place in his heart and mind. He, like Thomas Jefferson, denied the importance of revealed and organized religion. To the young Benjamin Franklin, God existed, but He did not interfere with man or suspend his laws to do miracles. To the Deist, we discover God only by reason and natural observation.
While believing in this manner, Franklin lead a mixed life. Very pragmatic and sensible he was therefore frugal and sociable. He generally obtained the skills of someone who strives to understand how the world works and how to work with it. He had many friends who followed his Deistic thinking and with them, did many things that were very bad, some of them understandable and funny, others I find incomprehensible. These are self-admitted in his autobiography:
- Stole rocks intended for a construction project to make a fishing wharf for his friends. Unlike the Washington and the cherry tree myth, Franklin didn't admit he was wrong and tried to justify the theft to his father on grounds of utility to his friends.
- Conspired to start a new religious order with a friend that had rules to abstain from meat products and shaving.
- Ran away from his family and an apprenticeship with his brother with whom he often quarreled.
- Libel of political opponents.
- Rationalize deeply held personal principles, such as abstaining from meat, when convenience and desire overcame him.
- Used his position as money lender and friend to a certain man to unsuccessfully solicit his wife for sex. This friend never paid him back.
- Having borrowed money to start a printing business and having an interest in marrying a young woman, he demanded a dowry large enough to pay off his debts from her family. They refused and he didn't marry her.
- Wasted much money and risked his health for relations with "low women," or prostitutes. He fathered and took responsibility for an illegitimate son.
"I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not very useful...that nothing could possibly be wrong in the world, and that vice and virtue were empty distinctions, no such things existing, appeared now not so clever a performance as I once thought it...I grew convinc'd that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I form'd written resolutions, which still remain in my journal book, to practice them ever while I lived. Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertain'd an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by [revelation], or good because [revelation] commanded them, yet probably these actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered."
Here Franklin states the utilitarian philosophy of morality. Sometimes called the "golden rule" or the "greatest good" principle advocated by John Stuart Mill. Franklin's realization that moral actions are for the best benefit of all society is very similar to the great commandment Jesus of Nazereth gave to the lawyer when asked:
"Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus said unto him, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Mathew 22:36-40.
While it may seem to some that there is a clear distinction here between loving ones' neighbor and God. That somehow Jesus adds God to complicate the golden rule, It may help to recall the words Jesus spoke that "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
Benjamin Franklin never joined any congregation and wasn't an active churchgoer. However, he often proved an easy target for those soliciting donations to any sect wishing to build a chapel, understanding that the net effect on the community was good. Recalling his helping to build a non-denominational hall for visiting preachers, he even imagined a preacher of Islam might be welcome there.
One sect, the Dunkers, particularly impressed Franklin by its humility. A leader of the sect expressed to Franklin his disappointment with the false representations of their beliefs circulated by "zealots of other persuasions." [I think we Mormons can relate] In response, Franklin suggested the Dunkers officially publish the rules of their faith. According to Franklin: "He said that it had been propos'd among them, but not agreed to, for this reason: 'when we were first drawn together as a society,' says he, 'it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths...and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive farther improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.'"
Franklin remarks that "This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them."
This understanding leads us to question in a productive way. Do we as Mormons (or your own religious or philosophical preference) have a "better" view of the truth? Do we have a perfect view of all truth? Can we see another's situation well enough to truly give them good advice? Am I more interested in how human nature and the natural world actually work or demanding how I think it should all work? These are tough, but practical questions. When asked and answered honestly, we can benefit as Franklin did. By intellectual humility, Franklin discovered truths in science, economics, and human nature. We can too.
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