Ben Franklin's Principles

 

 

 

Benjamin Franklin has long been my favorite Founding Father. This dates back to my childhood when my parents would take me via the Reading Railroad on Sunday trips to Philadelphia. It was quite a walk from the Reading Terminal at 12th and Arch in center city Philly to the Franklin Institute but that was my favorite destination. The Franklin Institute is a wonderful science museum with artifacts from Franklin’s long life. We also would walk to Christ Church Burial Ground at 5th and Arch where I always insisted on putting a penny on Franklin’s grave (that tradition pitted the gravestone and has now been replaced with a bin to put pennies into, in accord with Franklin’s aphorism “a penny saved is a penny earned”).

 

Franklin’s forebears were devout Puritans of the Calvinist stripe but as a teenager, he declared himself a deist but an interesting deist. Thomas Kidd wrote that Franklin adhered to what might be called a doctrineless, moralized Christianity, where what one believes about God is not as important as living a life of love and significance. In Nick Bunker’s book Young Ben Franklin (I am listening currently to the audiobook), Franklin determined that life should be devoted to benevolence, justice, temperance, and prudence. Parenthetically, Bunker notes that in the early 18th century, the clergy of organized religions equated deism with atheism. 

 

Benevolence is the quality of being well-meaning and kind. Justice is just behavior or treatment, equating with fairness and equity. Temperance in its strictest definition is abstinence from alcoholic drink but more generally is sobriety, a seriousness and gravity of thought. Prudence includes cautiousness, wisdom, and sagacity. Thus the young Ben Franklin carried this philosophy for the next 70 years until his death.

 

Which leaves me thinking – what would Franklin think today of our political situation in the United States? Now, I profess no originalism here; I think that the current SCOTUS conservative majority who profess to know how the Founding Fathers thought is, well, full of beans. But Franklin did give us the clues above about how he thought life should be lived (vide supra) and I suspect that this is not how Franklin would have approached the decisions that SCOTUS made over the past several months. 

 

Guns were part of the world Franklin inhabited and the times were fraught with dangers from other nations and from the wars with Native Americans. Franklin was an ingenious man and I think would recognize that the guns of today (semiautomatic rifles and pistols) were different from the muzzle-loading weapons of his era. Prudence still says that having every person armed with such devices is a fool’s position. 

 

Franklin loved women (and they loved him) and he was not celibate. In the colonies, abortion was a practice well-known and often used. Franklin printed a math book that included a recipe for inducing abortion. The current brouhaha about abortion is contrived; historically, abortion has always existed and always will. Perhaps Franklin’s views of benevolence and justice ought to be in play today, as they were for Franklin. I cannot see him agreeing with holding women prisoner in their state, nor expecting 10-year-olds who were raped and are now pregnant, nor women with ectopic pregnancies being denied modern medical care to save their lives. And where is the justice in treating women as second-class citizens?

 

As for insurrectionists overthrowing the government, Franklin the elder certainly knew the consequences. He was a revolutionary although a reluctant one. But he recognized the gravity of what was done in 1776 and told his peers that we must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately. No, Franklin would have nothing to do with Trumpism or MAGA or QAnon. He was a man of reason and rationality and would have recognized instantly that they are demagoguery designed to return the United States to an autocracy that was not benevolent, just, temperate, or prudent. One wishes that the spirit of Franklin would visit the likes of Thomas and Alito and Roberts and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett and instill benevolence, justice, temperance, and prudence into them. If there is an afterlife, I will bet Franklin would like to have some long conversations with each of them.