If one is searching for the causes of today’s moral crisis, it is the premises of giants one should examine, not those of midgets. One should begin with Plato and graduate to his contemporary champions.
Thomas Jefferson the political philosopher is to be heeded more than is Jefferson the moral philosopher. The best thinkers of his time could not imagine a morality based on egoism and self-interest, except if it solely meant deriving personal pleasure or satisfaction from performing altruistic actions. Nor could he imagine it, even though he was intellectually acute enough to articulate the necessity of individual rights and of a government instituted to protect them.
Given the virtual monopoly that Christianity and altruism in his time exercised over the whole realm of morality, a morality of individualism could not be validated without discarding a millennium of mysticism, altruism and self-sacrifice. It was not just the doctrine and ubiquity of Christian morality that proved an insuperable barrier; I believe it was a psychological barrier, as well. Those barriers were non-existent to novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, who did perform the feat. In political philosophy, Jefferson was a radical; in moral philosophy, he was as confused as the best of his intellectual peers, resulting in his expressing not so much a conventional position on God, morality, and social relationships, as an eclectic one.
And, today, it is the moral philosophy of altruism, allied with its companion political philosophy of collectivism, that is responsible for erasing or nullifying the political philosophy of reason and capitalism bequeathed to us by giants such as Jefferson. We have also inherited their errors. This fact is no more evident than the recent presidential election. One candidate, John McCain, admired trust-busting, nature-worshipping Teddy Roosevelt and portrayed himself as his successor; Barack Obama admires Franklin D. Roosevelt, the consummate welfare-statist and hopes to emulate his policies on an even vaster scale. To the candidates, and to the news media, the Founders and their ideas were absolutely invisible.
On that note, I was startled to encounter a letter by Jefferson to John Adams (July 5, 1814) in which he criticized not only Plato but his advocates in and out of academe. Recounting his return from Poplar Forest, his other home in Virginia, he writes:
“Having more leisure there than here [Monticello] for reading, I amused myself with reading Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world indeed should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity.”
Further on, Jefferson chides Plato
