“There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.”

In Thomas Paine’s time, people did not all agree in one moment that a war of independence from Great Britain was prudent or wise. After the war was won, bitterness ensued between the Federalists and Republicans on what exact form our new government should take.

Throughout history, principles, ideas, ways of life that today we take for granted or that seem natural did not appear in the aggregate human psyche in one flash of inspired change. Some “saw the light” and many others weren’t so sure that the light wasn’t blinding to what was right.

Today has its issues which divide people on one side of belief or another. As Thomas Paine said long ago, time and reason will establish these issues as valid or not. Is modern society exacerbating a warming climate, is preemptive warfare sound foreign policy, what is the right balance between personal liberty and government intrusion on that liberty to protect the whole?

These are just some of the questions we face today that engenders bitter debate. Nobody wins when people engage in a contest of personal destruction. A right principle, put forth by a sound and respectful argument, will carry the day. All too often from the lowest echelon of society straight up to the pinnacle of power, we see the exact opposite, and then nothing is served but division, suspicion, and bitterness.

Thomas Paine current events

“The most effectual method to keep men honest is to enable them to live so. The tenderness of conscience is too often overmatched by the sharpness of want; and principle, like chastity, yields with just reluctance enough to excuse itself.”

Immediately after a 1989 international trade ban on ivory, illegal elephant poaching was nearly stopped dead in its tracks. Now, some eighteen years later, poachers have come back with a vengeance, due in large part to the fact the enforcement of the trade ban has declined through lack of funding from countries most effected by the poaching.

Many of these countries, such as Zambia and Zimbabwe, are poor and ensnared in economic and political turmoil. It is difficult for such governments to fund the enforcement necessary to protect the African Elephant from poachers. In the year ending August of 2006, up to five percent of the remaining elephant population in Africa was slaughtered, amounting to more than 23,000 elephants and 240 tons of ivory.

We here in the West probably don’t think of Elephants too much. We’ve got other things to worry about. For those that have perhaps only seen an elephant in the zoo, mere words will fall short in describing what it is to be there, in the Land of the Elephant.

To listen as they trumpet and wail in the night. To quietly watch as they lumber single file out of the hills to drink and wash in the river. To look sorrowfully and heartbroken at the site of a baby calf, lying still on the ground with no apparent wounds, very recently and mysteriously deceased; and then remember the haunting wail heard the night before; the sound of a mother mourning her young.

Later to witness the joy of two adolescents as they happily and playfully cross the river, splashing mischievously, much like any adolescent would.

Watching the slow, almost reverent, familial procession through the bush to the river, a great matriarch dipping her massive trunk for a drink; the reflection of her majestic frame rolling gently in the placid Chobe.

I am able to feel such feelings for the elephant because I am allowed. I do not burn with hunger and poverty, and I live in a land that is relatively free from political strife.

Many of Humankind’s problems are solved, at least initially, through economic incentive. If countries too poor to feed and protect their own human population are expected to fund enforcement of illegal trade laws and stop poaching, then perhaps we fail to heed the words of Thomas Paine. The international community needs to step up and provide funding and support to enforce the ban on the illegal ivory trade. It isn’t hard, or even that expensive, for rich nations to do so, it takes nothing but a desire to get it done. We did it before, and we must do it again. Saving the elephant is, in part, saving ourselves.

I wish to believe that the money I spent two years ago to journey to the Land of the Elephant helped to provide, if just a little bit, the means for those living in Botswana to live an honest life. And they, in turn, helped me do the same, if just a little bit, by allowing me to witness first-hand the power and majestic beauty of the Elephant and the land she occupies.

Nothing connects one to the earth and all its creatures more than standing quietly in the yawning dusk of the African savannah, watching a family of great elephants move quietly through the tall grass. To this day, chills go up my spine remembering that day, how humbled and awestruck it was to actually be there, in the Land of the Elephant.

Help save the elephant, and be true to the words of Thomas Paine.

elephant poaching save the elephant african elephant thomas paine

“For as certainly as a man predicts ill, he becomes inclined to wish it. The pride of having his judgment right hardens his heart, till at last he beholds with satisfaction, or sees with disappointment, the accomplishment or the failure of his predictions.”

It is a disquieting tendency, one we’d rather pretend didn’t exist; but it does and is only made worse if it is ignored.

It isn’t that the assumed worst would not have happened anyway. Events are set in motion that most of us have little control over. In our frustration at what we see as a clumsy, misguided lurch toward disaster (or worse) we voice outrage, indignation, and anger .

Indignation soon turns righteous. Our hearts are pure and our cause is just.

But pride and a desire for vindication belies the truer nature of our professed righteousness and makes that cause less just than we’d care to admit. Being proved right becomes more important than the real cause we claim to believe in; our compassion is diminished for we lose sight, even if just a little bit, of an underlying tragedy.

Even though we’d certainly disavow such feelings, we must acknowledge the darkness that lies buried in all of us.

When we don’t face the frailties of human nature head-on those frailties harden and grow and become the true enemy that we embolden.

“No human foresight can discern, no conclusion can be formed, what turn a war might take, if once set on foot by an invasion.”

Now, almost four years since the invasion of Iraq, and in light of the reasons given for it at the time of its commencement, the reassurances years ago of a mission accomplished, and the assumptions of positive outcomes through the use of minimal force, it is clear that from arrogance and negligence of judgement has come the abandonment of foresight, reason, and truth.

thomas paine, iraq war

“Can we possibly suppose that if Governments had originated in a right principal, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it?”

Thomas Paine believed in the tendency of concentrated power to corrupt and that the power of any government should be derived from those governed.

In his day, more revolutionary than the war between the American colonies and Britain was the government born out of that conflict. A government for the people, by the people was eventually hammered out at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in order to form a more perfect Union

It can be argued, I believe, that herein lies the true American Revolution. But of course, the devil is in the details.

It was a long, hot summer, and what came out of the Philadelphia State House was a document that, as close as any produced by Mankind, brings the high ideals set forth eleven years earlier in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence down to brass tacks. Okay, this is how we’re going to do this

The cornerstone of reigning in unchecked power is the concept of spreading it around, through a three-pronged government built on the concept of checks and balances.

It is not only the right, but the duty, of each branch of government to check the power of the other two. Otherwise, we can but remember the words of Thomas Paine.

The President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces (and, incidentally, only of the armed forces, and not of the citizenry in general), and executes the laws of the United States. Congress writes those laws, holds the purse strings and conducts oversight on the executive. The judiciary interprets the law and insures that the Constitution is at all times upheld.

It is only through diligent adherence to the idea and practice of checks and balances that any government can stay true to the principals of the American Experiment. When any one branch of government flags in their duty, or strives to reinterpret the law to serve their own grasp for more power, then the experiment is in jeopardy

And what of the people? This is, after all, a government for and by the people. It is incumbent upon every citizen, therefore, to do their part in assuring the balance of power.

Apathy and distraction from a citizenry too complacent to bother are sure to find themselves one day under the thumb of oppression, incompetence, and unresponsive rule for which they can do little but wish they had paid closer attention while they still had a chance.

“It is only by tracing things to their origin, that we can gain rightful ideas of them, and it is by gaining such ideas that we discover the boundary that divides right from wrong, and teaches every man to know his own.”

Thomas Paine, writing in one of his later works “Agrarian Justice” speaks of how, through diligence of thought, by following a logical path back to the origin of a thing, or to what is hidden to any that do not pursue this path, we can begin to learn of the true nature of things.

This concept pervades our daily lives, both of individuals and of nations.

We may see a homeless man laying on the sidewalk early one morning and instinctively feel a sense of mild disgust, or pity, or superiority. But what do we know of this man? It is easy to make wide sweeping generalizations. But unless we know his story, trace back the path of events and situations, decisions this man may have made, or events that shaped his life, we can not know in any real sense what it is that brought him now to lie on the sidewalk with nothing more than the ragged clothes on his back for warmth and a cardboard box for protection.

In such a situation, where we can’t possibly hope to know what is true for this man, we do well to trace back our own route that has led us to be walking by this man just now, and perhaps be thankful of our own fortune, than to be disgusted or pitiful of another’s perceived misfortune.

And from this example we see our days are peppered with such happenstance; where, with just a moment of reflection, we understand that much of what we think we know of something or someone before us is but a facade of the truth that lay beneath. And through that moment of reflection, we are allowed the opportunity to, at the very least, acknowledge that there is much in this world we will never comprehend unless we take the time to stop and really look.

“To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evils it has produced, ought to be considered as one of the first objectives of reformed legislation”

In Agrarian Justice, one of Thomas Paine’s later works written in 1797, Paine lays out his ideal vision for society, one that combines human equality with respect for the natural world.

Paine could surely have had no notion the impact the birth of the industrial revolution he witnessed would have some two centuries later. The benefits anyone reading this blog has through the hyper-accelerated technological advances of human society since Paine’s time have in turn created “evils” the likes of which could hardly have been imagined in the dawn of the Enlightenment. Not the least of which is the reality of a warming global environment.

Yet, legislation introduced today by the newly-sworn Congress calling for benchmarks toward a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050 reflect the notion Paine felt so long ago that our natural world is the foundation of all humanity’s higher endeavours.

Is it not an innate sense in all of us that only through the bounty of nature, the aggregate beneficence of our “Mother Earth” that we have any notion at all of life itself, let alone anything resembling the artistic expressions and higher aspirations that we consider civilized life?

“Civil Government does not consist in executions; but in making that provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to exclude , as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the other.”

In Baghdad last week a brutal dictator was hanged. For many, if not most, this was a just and deserved ending for a man whose own regard for human life sowed death and misery for millions of his own people, bringing an entire nation to its knees. If there is a case for the formalized, state-sanctioned execution of a human being, the killing of Saddam Hussein is a prime example.

And yet when a grainy video recording of his hanging emerges on the internet, complete with guards taunting him in his final moments with calls of “To hell!”, the execution, which in all cases should proceed with the tragic solemnity that any such event represents, loses some of righteous justification.

An “official” execution of another human being, even of a terrible and ruthless tyrant that arguably deserves it, should, as much as possible, remain a dignified affair – even sacred, as perverse as that may sound.

Execution is not random killing. It is not a senseless act of violence. When it is determined by the process of law that a person’s life is so abhorrent that it must end, it is, in fact, rendering what in other circumstances most consider to be the judgement of God.

When rendering such judgement, we are but a hare’s breath from becoming mere killers ourselves.

In such a moment, cries of “To Hell!” step across the line that we dance upon when putting a man to death. In human terms, the man is already condemned. He is to be no more of this world. Whatever may come of his soul once his body swings lifeless at the end of a rope is surely the realm of God.

It is for our own souls, and the soul of a nation, for which we should be concerned, when we presume to act as God and render his judgement.

“We have it within our power to begin the world over again”

An oft-quoted saying of Thomas Paine’s in this blog, a perfect expression of the quintesential faith of Thomas Paine in the continually emerging human spirit.

A New Year dawns and it is a time to consider Paine’s optimism as we strive for our better selfs, living in a better world.