 Today we're talking about Brad's latest book, which is a book on, really the way I think about it is, it's the book on the Declaration of Independence, but it's title is America's Revolutionary Mind, and I want to ask you about that in a minute, about the title. So yeah, let's start with that, actually. So first, how are you doing, Brad? I'm going on and on. I'm doing fine. Your audience probably doesn't know we've had some technical difficulties making this happen, but you're in Puerto Rico. I'm in Clemson, South Carolina, and I think we're going to make this work. So, Brad, what do you mean by America's mind? That is, what does it mean to say America's Revolutionary Mind and to assign a mind and a silence to America? Yeah, so I got the idea for the title from a famous letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee in 1825, just before he died, in which he described the Declaration of Independence and its purpose as an expression of the American mind. And I think that's right. I think the Declaration is an expression of the American mind. It sums up the fundamental core moral and political principles on which this country was founded. But you'll note that I did not title the book The American Mind. It's America's Revolutionary Mind. So I was trying to be more intentional and focus on the ideas of the American Revolution per se. So, I mean, because if it were a book on the American mind, then it would have to be a book that takes up all kinds of issues about which I was not interested. It would have to take up issues and questions with regard to culture, American views on all kinds of issues, on marriage, on religion, on food, you name it. I wanted to limit the focus of the book to essentially both the causes and meaning of the American Revolution. So that's the American, America's Revolutionary Mind part of the title. Now, the second part of the title after the colon is a moral history of the American Revolution and the Declaration that defined it. So first, let's parse American Revolution and Declaration. So initially, when I began to write the book, the idea was to write a book just on the Declaration of Independence. That was the goal. The idea was to write a relatively short book on the moral political philosophy of the Declaration. But very quickly, maybe a month into the writing of the book, I read another famous letter this time from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in which Adams described the American Revolution not as the war, but rather as a revolution in the minds of the American people. And that revolution, he said, took place in the 15 years before shots were fired at Lexington and conquered in 1775. So that really, that was the tripwire, the intellectual tripwire for me when I realized that there was something much bigger, much deeper than what historians had previously told us about the American Revolution. It was a revolution in the minds of the American people. And that revolution was a moral revolution. And Adams equates that moral revolution with the Americans' understanding of the doctrine of individual rights. Now, let me add one other quotation that I read at almost the same time that I think really sums up what Adams is saying. And that was a quote that was something I read in a letter from Tom Payne to the Abbey Mebley in which Tom Payne said of the American Revolution that we see with new eyes, hear with new ears, and think new thoughts. So the idea is that there was a revolution of ideas. And Payne, likewise, in addition to Adams, says that this moral revolution was directly connected to the Americans' understanding of the nature of rights. So that was the moment when the book went from being something about just the declaration of independence to really being a book about the entire revolutionary period. And so what I do is I use the declaration of independence as a kind of ideological roadmap by which to understand the revolution as a whole. So the book, let me mention that what I do is I take the declarations for self-evident truths which can be summed up in one word each, equality, rights, consent, and revolution. And I devote two chapters to each of the self-evident truths. And then what I do is I provide a kind of intellectual history going back to the late 17th century, usually beginning with John Locke, and then trace how colonial Americans understood and transformed the ideas of the declaration, equality, rights, consent, and revolution. But most of the book though is focused on the 1760s and the 1770s during the so-called years of the imperial crisis. So it's a kind of comprehensive intellectual history of the revolution as a whole. So Tom reminds us, I didn't realize this, I don't know if you did, that today's Patriots Day. So yeah, I didn't know there was a Patriots Day and here it is today. And really, it's amazingly fitting because if you think about where we are today politically, and I don't wanna get too much into this, but really, we've got political parties that are basically both reverted to tribalism, both explicitly and certainly implicitly for decades now have rejected the very founding principles of this country. We're in the middle of this unbelievable mess which is this corona mess. But we're in this unbelievable political mess where both political parties have completely rejected these principles. So I can't think of a period in American history where this book is more important, would be more important than right now. When these ideas are being lost, these ideas are being forgotten, ideas are being forgotten even by the people who supposedly are trying to preserve them, conservatives. We've got now national conservatives and this kind of conservative and that kind of conservative. All I would sum up as anti-American conservatives because they've abandoned these ideas. And I think what Brad's book is doing is it's reminding us of these ideas and then digging deep into their origin and into their philosophical foundations to really help us lay a foundation for a new American revolution because nothing short of a new American revolution I've come to believe is going to save us from the continued decline of this country. So let's delve into this because I think this stuff is really, really, really important. And it's a chapter one, and I don't intend to go by chapter, but chapter one I think is really important because it lays kind of the intellectual foundations for everything else. Because the founding of America is kind of the crowning achievement and the enlightenment. And you have to understand the enlightenment and the foundation and the declaration. And what you do here is you lay down kind of the philosophical highlights and the essential characteristics of what the enlightenment is. So tell us about what are the ideas that at the heart and at the core of the enlightenment that then in a sense made real politically at least because I think in other aspects that made real earlier, but politically they made real with the founding of America. I'd say the key concept of the enlightenment is the idea of the laws of nature and the rights of nature. So in other words, it's a rediscovery of nature. Speaking metaphorically, it's the rediscovery of the book of nature which is now to be read through what 17th century philosophers called right reason. So it's both metaphysical and epistemological. The rediscovery of really both of the idea of nature that nature is governed by certain causal laws that can be discovered and understood by human reason. And the three principle philosophers, I'd say 17th century English enlightenment were Bacon, Newton and Locke. Bacon's, his Novum Organum which established the kind of intellectual or inductive mode of reasoning for reading and interpreting the book of nature. Newton's Principia Mathematica which laid out the scientific laws of nature and then two books by John Locke. The first was his ethic concerning human understanding which laid out a kind of empirical inductive mode of reasoning. It said that reason is efficacious, reason can understand relations of cause and effect not just in nature but also in human nature and in human action. And then along with the ethic concerning human understanding I would add the most famous book of the American Revolution which was Locke's Second Treatise of Government which established the idea of rights that the purpose of government was the protection of rights and it established kind of a limited form of government which had at its heart the idea of individual self-ownership and self-governance, right? So Locke's great contribution, intellectual contribution to the revolution I would say is the rediscovery of the individual. The individual who is self-owning and self-governing, self-reliant and is the master of his own life and of his future. But narrowing it down, I would say that the single most important thing that comes out of the Enlightenment for colonial American is the idea that the so-called laws of nature can actually be applied not just to nature out there, not just to planetary motion but it can also be applied to the human condition, to human life, to human nature. And so you get primarily, I would say, beginning with Locke and his ethic concerning human understanding an attempt to establish a demonstrative science of ethics which he said should be as certain as mathematics. So it's taking, in other words, the methodology, the modes of reasoning that Newton used and applied to discovering the scientific laws of nature to trying to discover certain moral laws and rights of nature. And I'd say that's the single most important contribution of the Enlightenment to the American Revolution which then as it's transported to America beginning in the 1730s and 1740s, Bacon, Newton and Locke are being taught in America's universities for the first time and take the case of John Adams, for instance. When Adams was an undergraduate at Harvard College, that's where he was first introduced to these great thinkers. And you can see Adams in his diary as a 20-year-old trying himself to apply Newton's methodology to discovering moral laws of nature. And he does it in three ways. First is extra-spection. You look out into the world and you observe human nature, human action and human interaction. And from that, you try to discover the underlying causes of certain forms of human action. And then from that, you can induce Adams argued as a 20-year-old, you can induce certain moral principles that will guide man towards a flourishing kind of life. And then from there, then it's a very short step to applying that methodology and the idea of a demonstrative science of ethics to the idea of rights. And that really is the first division between American colonials and British imperial officials in 1765 with the passage of the Stamp Act. So it's interesting. I mean, three of the four books you mentioned are really books in epistemology, right? And right, I mean, the way I always put it is the great achievement in Enlightenment, not me. I mean, Ayn Rand and others have put it is the, in a sense, the rediscovery of the efficacy of reason and the application of reason to discovery the laws of nature and the laws of man. And then it's application to morality is incomplete as maybe they applied it but they want the right path that it was in the right direction that they were trying to do it. So how do you get from there from you've got this idea of reason and you've got applying reason to morality how do you get from there to the declaration? All right, so that's a long story. That's a big question. About four. But make it short. Short version. Yeah, it's a big question. I have about 400 pages on that. On that question, yeah. So, what I would say is the crucial moment in the coming of the American Revolution was 1765 when the British Parliament passed the so-called Stamp Act which for the first time in colonial history imposed the tax on the Americans without any kind of representation hence the famous slogan no taxation without representation. This was a crucial turning point. Let me just put this in context because you have to understand that for the previous 40 years or so the British policy toward the American colonies was what they called salutary neglect. It was a kind of laissez-faire policy, a hands-off policy. And during those years from approximately 1720 let's say to the early 1760s the Americans were basically left alone to govern themselves without any British interference at all. But then in 1756, Britain engages in the so-called French and Indian War, the Seven Years War against France which they won. And in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris it's as though Great Britain woke up and remembered that they had these colonies and they tried to reassert both political and economic control over their colonies. And the laws that were passed during the 1760s the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, Declaratory and Townsend Acts where you might say it was an attempt by British imperial officials to superimpose the British deep state on American political life. So they shipped over hundreds, if not thousands of tax collectors and administrators and most importantly, they sent the British Navy and the British Army. So now all of a sudden in 1764, 1765 the Americans look around them and they see all kinds, they see an expanded British state in the colonies and then all of a sudden they're passing these laws. So I would say that as I mentioned the crucial moment was 1765 with the passage of the Stamp Act which caused the Americans to reconsider not just their relationship with Great Britain but the two most core principles that tied the colonies together with the mother country. And that was first their understanding of rights and secondly their understanding of the Constitution. So let's start with the Constitution. Up until 1765, virtually all colonial Americans were fans of the British Constitution. They called it repeatedly the greatest constitution in the history of the world. But they realized now with the passage of the Stamp Act that there was one major problem with the British Constitution which of course there is no, right? So somewhere here I've got my show your audience I've got my handy pocket Constitution with me, right? So I can pull this Constitution out of my breast or back pocket and if Britain passes the Stamp Act I can turn to the relevant passage in my Constitution and say, ah, here's why the Stamp Act is a violation of the Constitution. Now the problem of course is that they couldn't do that because there was no British Constitution as a written document. The British Constitution at the time was simply an assemblage, a collection of common and statutory laws and customs and the form of government of the British government at any moment in time which had always been evolving. So in other words, the British Constitution was always evolving. There was, in other words, there was no there there. And so with regard to the Stamp Act British Imperial officials argued that the Stamp Act was legal and therefore unconstitutional. All right, so it was legal. Yeah, it was legal and therefore constitutional. The Americans by contrast argued that the Stamp Act was unjust and therefore unconstitutional, right? So that raises the question why was the Stamp Act from the American perspective unjust? Well, it was unjust because it violated their rights and this takes us to the next major moral concept that's really at the heart and soul of the American Revolution and that's the idea of rights. So colonial Americans up until 1765 were advocates of the so-called rights of Englishmen, right? All Englishmen were proponents of the so-called rights of Englishmen and England was, after all, at that time the freest nation in the history of the world, right? And they gloried in their rights as Englishmen but then they came to understand that there's a problem and with that notion of the rights of Englishmen. The rights of Englishmen is a doctrine which says there are rights of a particular people at a particular place, at a particular time. And those rights are always changing and evolving. And in the same way that the Americans would come to look for the idea or develop the idea of a written constitution as fundamental law, they also came to ground that they wanted to ground their constitution on an idea of rights that would be permanent and unmovable, right? And that foundation, of course, was nature. So they were looking for rights that are grounded in the nature of man, rights that would be absolute, certain, permanent and universal. And that was the critical moment, in my view, or during the Imperial crisis. When the Americans developed this and really filled out this new idea of what at the time they called natural rights, the idea that there are rights of nature or rights of human nature. So let's, I wanna get into what they meant by rights and how they defined rights, but let's kind of follow your outline a little bit. And I wanna, there's always this question in my mind, this idea of self-evident truths, right? When you read it, you go, particularly in the world we live in today, none of this is self-evident, right? I mean, nobody gets it, nobody gets it, particularly now. What did they mean by self-evident? And what was the context for them to talk about self-evident truths in the context of the declaration? Right, so I develop this idea in a chapter devoted to the seven words that open the second sentence of the declaration, which are, we hold these truths to be self-evident, which I think are the most important, if not the most beautiful words in the American lexicon. So, but it's also the most, it's the most complex chapter of the entire book philosophically. And it was complex because at the time, there was a very philosophically technical understanding or definition of what self-evidence meant. And a self-evident truth was a truth where the proposition, it was a proposition whose subject and predicate necessarily related to one another without contradiction. It has to be perceptually self-evident. So examples would be up is not down, black is not white, in is not out, right? Something that's immediately perceptually obvious, self-evident to you. But here's the problem. If you think about it in the context of the declaration of independence, that doesn't quite hold, right? So the declaration after the opening clause, we hold these truths to be self-evident, then lays out four truths, which are said to be self-evident, right? That all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights among which are the rights to the life of everybody in the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. And then the fourth truth, which let me just, for the sake of your audience, let me just, I haven't quite memorized it. It says that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form that the rest of them shall see most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Well, obviously, that fourth self-evident truth and the third self-evident truth are not self-evident. Well, but even the first one is not given slavery, it certainly is not self-evident. Well, it could be potentially self-evident if understood philosophically, right? If you just take the idea all men are created equal, right? You can interpret that in such a way that it kind of sort of comes close to being a self-evident truth. The second is much further away from the strict technical definition of self-evidentcy and the third and fourth clearly are not self-evident. So the question is this, I mean, the question that I really spent a lot of time thinking very hard about is, well, what did the founders mean by self-evident? Well, it's also important to understand and most scholars of the Declaration of Independence forget and don't, everybody focuses on self-evident. Nobody until my book, until the chapter in my book on self-evident truth has focused on the idea of truth, right? What did they mean, which I think is the much more important concept. What did they mean by truth? And it's important, particularly in the context of the world in which we live today because it is said, as you know, that we live in a post-truth society, right? The founders, the founding generation had a completely different understanding of what truth is. Truth denotes a relationship between an idea in the mind and an objective reality. And that meant that truths, they believed in the possibility of truths that was objective, absolute, certain, permanent and universal. That's the first thing to say, which means then that the principles that they are establishing in the Declaration of Independence are not principles that would have been true only for 1776, but not in 1876 or in 1776 or in 21st century America. They believe that their truths were true, period, right? All right, now, we hold these truths to be self-evident. I mean, if you just parse the words of the sentence, it's, this is a fascinating problem. Well, who is the we, right? Is it Thomas Jefferson and the other four committees, the other four committee members drafted the Declaration, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin? Did it mean the Continental Congress which signed the Declaration? Did it mean all of the American people, right? So then you ask the question, well, how could these truths be self-evident to all people? And then what does it mean to hold these truths? Sorry, so I don't wanna go too far into the weeds on this, but here's my bottom line position. Is that the American revolutionaries expanded the original understanding and definition of what self-evidence was. And what they argued was you begin with a foundational, even self-evident truth from which then you can carry forward with that core idea deductively principles which naturally issue from the core fundamental truth. And so the four truths all work together logically, right? From equality to the revolution truth. They all, the second, third and fourth truths, yeah, follow logically from the first one. And I think what ultimately what Jefferson was saying in the Declaration, but he said, we hold these truths to be self-evident. I mean, I think those truths, self-evident truths were self-evident to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams before they became self-evident to ordinary everyday Americans. But once those truths had been discovered and stated as they are in the Declaration of Independence, then they can become self-evident to those who then read those truths. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. Using the super chat, and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. 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