The second session of my Osher class on Benjamin Franklin meets today, and in it I’ll be talking about the middle section of his life – when he focused on community organizing and on science.
Franklin’s focus on community organization – as a Mason, and his role in founding a public library, a fire department, a university, an insurance company, and a colonial militia – stem from his belief that salvation is achieved through works, not through faith.
Growing up in Puritan Boston, and nurtured by faithful (although dissenting) Puritan parents, religion was all around Ben while he was a child. He says that he had read the Bible by the time he was five (we have only his word for that). His family lived across the street from the Old South Meeting House in Boston (the 1669 wooden meeting house they knew was replaced in 1729 by the brick building that stands today). Although Ben’s father Josiah was not accepted into full membership in the church until sometime in the 1690s (probably 15 years after the family moved from England to Boston) Ben’s family generally attended church up to three times a week.
Josiah at one point encouraged Ben to enter into ministry – as Josiah described it, this would be his “tithe” to the church, as Ben was his tenth son. But the schooling was expensive, and, more importantly, Ben didn’t take to it well.
It’s important to recognize that a new strain of thought we call “The Enlightenment” was in its formative years while Ben was growing up. The first generation of Enlightenment thinkers – including Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke – had preceded Ben by a generation or two, but the explosion of books, pamphlets, and newspapers in this era provided Ben with a lot of alternative ways of viewing the world (and the role of human beings in the world). He particularly became enamored of The Spectator, a periodical published in London by Addison and Steele in 1711 and 1712. Its witty and sophisticated prose, often satirical in tone, appealed to Ben. He says that he taught himself to write by taking articles from The Spectator, literally cutting them apart, trying to figure out how they went together to make the best arguments, and then comparing them with the originals. The Spectator also introduced Ben to a kind of observational style – reporting on what he saw around him but distancing himself from participation in it – that he continued to use throughout his life.
All of this led Ben to abjure doctrine as a basis for religious belief and to embrace “doing good” instead.
Ben’s scientific endeavors sprang from the same roots as his community activities – the desire to do good. He was initially drawn to the study of electricity because of his interest in thunderstorms. He recognized that lightning was a form of electricity (not new to us today, but new to his time) and that as a natural phenomenon it was subject to natural laws (not the term they used then.) If it could be understood, it could be controlled – or at least redirected from its harmful effects. This led him to invent the lightning rod, but the lightning rod was more than an invention. It connected fundamentally to faith, because the whole idea that “God will strike you dead” if you believed or failed to believe properly was the bedrock of Puritan religion. If man could control (or impede) lightening, what did this say about the power of God? There were people who opposed the promulgation of the lightning rod, because they said it represented an effort by mankind to put themselves above God.
Preparing for and teaching this class has taught me a lot about Ben Franklin, but also about the intellectual world of the middle of the 18th century. One quote I found was very interesting – I’ll paraphrase it – “To us, Benjamin Franklin was a diplomat who dabbled in science; to the world, Ben Franklin was a scientist who dabbled in diplomacy.”
So sorry I couldn't get into this class. Next time I'll be more quickly responsive to Osher!