Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by
Matthew Stewart
My rating:
2 of 5 stars
This book caught my interest at the library, but at the same time, grokking the introduction made this secularist see enough for the skeptical antennae to go up. With that, let's dig in, on another extended version of my Goodreads review, to look at just what is wrong with this book
First, I knew most of the Ethan Allen story. Interestingly, Stewart does not relate the Allen deathbed anecdote, whether it's true or not. Supposedly, an "orthodox" minister told Allen that the angels were waiting for him, and he replied: "Waiting, are they? Well, goddammit, let them wait!"
I also knew a bit of Thomas Young's history, though I did learn more about him in this story. And, yes, "story" is a good name for this book. (Stewart, per another Goodreads reviewer, makes historical mistakes covering the pair of them and smallpox inoculation, too; that's another reason this is "story" and not "history" at bottom line.)
First of all, Stewart appears to be not just an atheist but quite possibly a Gnu Atheist, with all that entails. (I can't tell if he thinks this for sure, but his latest book, on U.S. slavery and emancipation? He may be one of those people who claims Lincoln was an atheist.) That gets you dinged right there, because it's totally not true. Second: His "The Truth About Everything" book makes me wonder how much of a scientism person he is. I think the first-in-order reviewer is themself.
Secondly, much of what I said about Epicurus and Epicureanism in
my review of “The Swerve” deserves repeating.
First, the inventors of atomic theory, Democritus and Leucippus were pre-Epicurean and even pre-Socratic. Greenblatt never mentions this. Nor does he mention that Greek philosophers in general were anti-empirical, and therefore antiscientific, as we know science today. (Indeed, one could argue that Archimedes and Eratosthenes were the only two real scientists the Hellenistic world produced.)
Ergo, especially if we start "modernity" with the Enlightenment and not the Renaissance, Epicureanism was not "how the world became modern." Not even close.
Second, he cherry-picks who was influenced by Lucretius, and how much, and how much influence they had. The late Renaissance world didn't see a flowering of Giordano Brunos.
Extending on that? Epicureanism may be a very good moral philosophy. As some kind of philosophy of science? Bupkis. As a political philosophy, tohu w’vohu, as it just doesn’t really say anything. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
offers more on how not just Spinoza, but 17th century philosophy in general, was still mired in the Socratic world on many issues, and yes, mired is correct, and hence, Whitehead's encomium to Plato is wrong.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
in its Epicurus page, further tackles the issue of "the swerve," which may or may not have originated with Epicurus; details of it are only discussed in Lucretius and Cicero. Related to that are larger issues with the atomism of Democritus and Leucippus, and why their ideas should in no way be conflated with today's atomic theory world. Basically, Epicurus, if one were to reference cosmology of the last century, was the Hellenistic version of steady-state Fred Hoyle or something kind of like that. Also per SEP, on
its Democritus page, it should be remembered that whole atomism project was philosophical, not scientific.
Related? Stewart’s note that Bruno became so infatuated with Lucretius that he couldn’t explain Copernican theory correctly. Gassendi had that problem, too.
See here.
AFAIK, Copernicus himself was uninfluenced by Lucretius and Epicurus. Besides, heliocentric theories existed back in ancient Greece. It wasn't until Ptolemy's version, which also through in epicycles to try to make planetary motion all based on perfect circles, that geocentrism took off, later boosted by the Christian church. (Copernicus' theory, as Kepler got more and more precise information on planetary motions, actually required MORE epicycles than Ptolemy. Then he had the light bulb moment to think of ellipses and poof.)
Also related? While Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons didn’t invent them into existence, nonetheless, it certainly offered the idea that Epicurean cosmology wasn’t the final answer. Even more so for Herschel's discovery of Uranus. I'm sure that if Napoleon had asked him about Epicurus, Laplace, whose nebular hypothesis of the solar system's origins put a wrap on Enlightenment-era science, would have said he had no need of that hypothesis, either.
All of this is important to note because the Enlightenment was about extending the world of science. The term "scientist" wasn't coined until post-Enlightenment 1833, but, the idea of a "natural philosopher" being called something that didn't have "philosophy" as part of the title extends into the 1700s. But, really, not into the 1600s. So, in that sense, Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza and Locke are all at least somewhat irrelevant to trying to scientifically ground what would eventually become political science. Ditto for Hobbes. Even today, 250 years later, you can have David Graeber and David Wengrow postulating a theory of everything that is largely wrong, and that also, per Stephanos Geroulanos in "
The Invention of Prehistory" is also wrong on its "framing."
Next? The idea that Spinoza was more important of an influence on American deism, the revolution, etc., than, say, Locke? Laughable. He may have been an influence THROUGH Locke; different story. And, it doesn’t fit with his Epicurean thesis, anyway; Epicurus had no real influence on Spinoza. That’s per a place like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where Epicurus isn’t even mentioned in the entry on Spinoza.
Per Gilbert Ryle, I could say that Stewart is committing something kind of like a category mistake, but that’s too charitable. Rather, he’s committing something kind of like a category conflation, which entails much greater willfulness.
Side note? Spinoza's first name actually is neither "Benedict" nor "Baruch." It's "Bento," from the Ladino.
Related? The idea that Locke was a sekrut radical is laughable. To riff on Cervantes, it’s tilting at Gnu Atheist skyhooks. And, it's no wonder that Stewart has to repeatedly talk about how other academics disagree with him. Later on, Stewart accepts that most American deists were the “clockwork god” folks, the “Newtonians” (this sets aside that Adam Smith was a “clockwork god” deist at the time of the American Revolution, which not only undercuts Stewart but is also generally hated by classical liberal economists, no matter that it’s true.) But Stewart never extends that same courtesy, or whatever we should call it, to Locke. Why not? IMO, it’s because it upsets Stewart’s program. If Locke really was a Newtonian, that means American deists weren’t dissembling in their Newtonianism, nor that they "really" had some Spinozist semi-atheism as their Ultima Thule.
Somewhat related? The American Revolution, and Constitutional revolution, was a moderate, and politically focused, revolution. The Articles of Confederation took a pass on a federal state church, and the Constitutional finalized that. That’s it.
The French Revolution didn’t IMMEDIATELY attack and abolish religion in general. But? By the time of Robespierre and Danton, though, it did.
To put it another way, as I repeatedly told a British Gnu Atheist who commented at some of Massimo Pigliucci's old philosophy sites? None of the American deist founders were interested in anything close to what became
laïcité in France. (Oh, and contra some French intellectuals and Francophile intellectuals in the Anglosphere, laïcité is not hard to grasp. It's just something that I reject.)
With that?
To the degree I determine a thesis in an ill-focused book, it’s that the founders wanted to inculcate a Spinoza-like semi-atheist deism, not just the Newtonian mechanical clock type, of god winding up the universe. IF SOME of the founders (Jefferson, maybe Franklin) wanted this, let alone tried to get it, it was as private individuals, not as founders of the American state. Even there, the all caps is deserved. There’s a second part to Stewart’s thesis, and that’s the insinuation they halfway succeeded. Anybody who’s read Antonin Scalia’s pronunciamentos from the Supreme Court bench about “civic religion” knows this is to laugh, as far as the American state. Anybody who knows most “Nones” are not atheists or agnostics knows this is to laugh in terms of private belief.
Related? Being long-listed for a book prize is nowhere near as big a deal as being short-listed. And, the use of the word "heretical" in the subhed is another — this time provocative or click-baity — instance of fluffery.
Per one other reviewer, who said this would make a great 300-page book or a great 800-page one? A la Paine, it might make a good but not great 150-page screed. And Stewart, IMO, could never write this into a great, quasi-academic 800-page book. That’s simply not his interest, and I doubt he would change that. He could have dropped his philosophical incorrectnesses, though, and perhaps written up a straight 300-page history of deism and the American Revolution.
Note: For quotes from Allen that may not be in this book, and references to the likes of Elihu Palmer who is not at all in this book, go to
this piece from non-Gnu secularist Ed Buckner.
Anyway, despite me grokking around here and there, it's not a total meh, because it had me doing some philosophical mind-honing. That's the main reason it's not one star for me. And, it's not a disappointment, per what I said at the top of the review. I wasn't expecting five stars when I picked it up, and by the time I grokked the intro, I wasn't expecting much more than a high three stars. Getting Ethan Allen better known, and Thomas Young much better known makes this book worth more than one star for other readers, or it should.
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And, per the editorial blurbs for "The Courtier and the Heretic," his calling Leibniz "foppish" and claiming late 1600s Amsterdam was "licentious" is enough reason right to pass on anything else he's written.
This, near the end of that blurb?
For Stewart, Leibniz's reaction to Spinoza and modernity set the tone for "the dominant form of modern philosophy"—a category that includes Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger and "the whole 'postmodern' project of deconstructing the phallogocentric tradition of western thought.
That one word, in case you're wondering? Invented by Derrida. Nuff ced.
Well, no. Unlike the scene of "Wittgenstein's Poker" or the ongoing action of "Rousseau's Dog" in the David Edmonds treatment, nobody knows what Leibniz and Spinoza said to each other, so this is historical fiction at best anyway in that book. And, the two one-star reviews of it make clear that Stewart is a "good" strawmanner.
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