Now I don’t think the government should even be running schools, so
I’m bound to have mixed feelings about a state senator seeking to
require a little piece of curriculum for all the government schools in
his state. But of all the bits of knowledge neglected (and perhaps for
good reason by their lights) by most government schools, the actual
words of the Declaration of Independence are one of the most important
to Americans. So I must confess to a sneaking bit of sympathy for Sen.
Gerald Cardinale of New Jersey, who is trying to get students in that
state to recite the “We hold these truths to be self-evident” section
every day along with the pledge.
It has apparently been tough sledding. Sen. Cardinale has been trying
to get it done for 13 years, and it just passed the state Senate with 21
votes, the minimum majority required. It will go to the Assembly in the
fall. A Sen. Wayne Bryant of Camden is opposing it because Thomas
Jefferson held slaves and didn’t free them.
That misses the point of the Declaration, of course. But I think
resistance also reflects the enduring power of Jefferson’s words and the
ideals they embodied — ideals this country has never lived up to but
are still worth striving toward. Jefferson’s words still have power to
chasten those who fear freedom.
It is hardly uncommon to view the Declaration of Independence and
other founding American documents as musty manifestations of the
conventional wisdom of the time, interesting as historic artifacts but
hardly relevant to life more than 200 years later. It might be more
useful to view the Declaration, in particular, as a set of principles to
which Americans can and should aspire, and which some day they might
even implement.
In one of his newspaper columns written in 1956, R.C. Hoiles, for
decades the owner and publisher of the Orange County Register, put it
this way:
- For thousands of years people have believed in the divine right
of government to plunder and rob individuals. For thousands of years
people believed in slavery. We abandoned it about 90 years ago in the
United States. Maybe in another 90 years people will adopt the
ideologies set forth in the Declaration of Independence that governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That means
the government would have to render service efficiently enough that
people would voluntarily pay for protection.
That’s pretty radical. Does the Declaration really imply that? A
pretty solid case can be made that the Declaration not only implies that
and much else besides, but that the Declaration of Independence is the
most radical, revolutionary document in history, both in the philosophy
of governance it set forth and in the impact it has had upon the world.
Whether or not people believed in the “divine right” of governments
to plunder and rob, there’s little question that in most of human
history the notion that some people had the right to rule over and
sometimes even to lord it over others was pretty firmly entrenched. The
Roman Republic was the closest thing in human history to a regime of
ordered liberty guaranteed by a system of laws and regulations that
applied to those who ran things as well as to those who were run. But
the system as did most theories about the Greek polis assumed the
rightful rule of the state, the government, the polity, the collective,
over the individual citizen. Both Greeks and Romans assumed that slavery
— the system in which one human being could actually assert ownership
rights over another human being — was the natural order of things, and
even Aristotle, probably the most liberty-oriented of the Greek
philosophers, erected an elaborate defense of slavery.
As the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, citizens of Rome were
granted certain privileges denied to those who were not citizens, which
gave them certain advantages when they came in contact with the minions
of the state. But there was no question that these were privileges
granted by the state and that they could be rescinded, or in some cases
abrogated, at the whim of the state. Proper citizens were to be treated
with a modicum of respect, but not all Romans were citizens, while
slaves and foreigners had few if any privileges at all, let alone
rights.
The notion that each person possessed an inherent dignity and worth
began to develop as Christianity became the dominant religion in Western
Europe. Jesus talked of “the least of these my brethren” and of God
viewing all of humankind as His children. The notion of “equal in the
eyes of God” began to take hold among Christian theologians and
philosophers. But the church founded to expound these ideals became
distinctly hierarchical before long, and the secular institutions of the
Middle Ages — some working closely with the church, some in opposition
— would have viewed the notion that all people had inherent rights as a
dangerous fantasy. Slavery was still fairly common and the serfs who
were graciously allowed to work the land the upper classes had acquired
(usually by having an ancestor who was notably efficient at slaughtering
enemies on the battlefield) were viewed as little more than farm
implements. Kings ruled by “divine right,” trying to make God an
accessory to their plunder.
The most influential English theorist of the nation-state as that
institution was emerging in Europe, Thomas Hobbes, viewed the state as
an organic entity, superior in all respects to the individual cogs who
made it up, even as a human body is superior to the cells that make it
up, and with the right to dispose of those human resources as it willed,
whether by sending them to war or pressing them into service.
To be sure, other strains of thought emerged from time to time
(largely when commercial development was such that it was feasible for
thinkers and intellectuals to hold positions and publish independently
of the whim of the king). The Common Law, which grew largely but not
solely out of English customs and practices, began to honor and codify
rules about private property and the idea of equal treatment before the
law. Parliaments became more formal and served as a check on arbitrary
actions by kings. John Locke, the philosopher of the English Glorious
Revolution that ousted the Puritan Cromwell, developed an elaborate
philosophical system of natural rights that built on Christian insights,
including work done by Catholic philosophers centuries before.
Locke and his cohorts were enormously influential among the American
colonists. But Locke had created a philosophical system. Those who
signed the Declaration of Independence were planning to declare
independence from a government and form a new one. They felt it only
proper, out of “a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind” to explain
what the proper function of government was, and how the government from
which they were seceding had fallen short of the model. They thus
declared their intention to try to put these principles into practice,
to build a government upon their sturdy foundation.
Almost every one of the eloquent words chosen by Thomas Jefferson and
ratified by the Continental Congress in 1776 resonates with history,
philosophical meaning and idealistic hope. “We hold these truths to be
self-evident” invokes the long history of the idea of natural law, a law
grounded in the nature of things and ascertainable by right reason a
“higher law” of right and wrong from which human law should ideally be
derived and against which the obviously imperfect version in place at a
given time can and should be measured and criticized. Proper governance
is grounded in moral reasoning, not political will.
So what does moral reasoning suggest? It suggests that “all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights.” None of the founders thought “created equal” meant
we were all the same or should have equal goods. It meant that we all
had certain rights equally, that no person’s rights were superior to any
other person’s rights, that no person should have privileges that were
not available on an equal basis to all other members of society.
Furthermore, these rights came from God, grounded in the nature of
things, rather than being a grant from government. In fact, those rights
are “unalienable,” meaning they are as much a part of us as our fingers
or our genes, and can’t be taken away without creating a great
rift, a dysfunction, in the natural order.
How much more radical a departure from the idea of the organic state
with the people as obedient cogs can one imagine?
The Lockean formulation of natural rights was “life, liberty and
property.” Jefferson altered it to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness,” which is infinitely more expansive. There’s not the least
bit of evidence that Jefferson meant to denigrate the idea of private
property, but to include it and expand it in recognition that life is
more than mere acquisition.
These rights, as Cato Institute legal scholar Roger Pilon wrote,
“imply the right to live our lives as we wish to pursue happiness as we
think best, by our own lights provided only that we respect the equal
rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common
law tradition of liberty, property, and contract its principles rooted
in ‘right reason’ the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a
free society.”
So what is the function of government in this scheme of things? The
Declaration is explicit and specific: “That to secure these Rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from
the Consent of the Governed.”
Government’s job is to secure our rights; no other purpose is
mentioned. Not to keep us safe or make us healthy, not to determine our
place in the economic pecking-order or massage our mental health, simply
to secure our rights and let us use those rights to handle those other
problems for ourselves. And the powers government might need to secure
those rights can only be exercised justly if we give our consent.
Without our consent — a term not strictly defined but which might
reasonably be inferred to mean something much more substantial than
50-percent-plus-one — government power, even used for the limited
purpose of securing our rights, is unjust.
How frightening would it be to politicians of both major parties if
every American child understood this concept? No wonder few of them are
eager to have the Declaration a daily part of the curriculum.
Furthermore, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of
these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
There is something close to a natural right to revolution, not just
against tyranny but against any government that fails to protect our
rights to our satisfaction.
These ideals were understood as something for which to strive, not as
a description of current reality, though the new country hoped to have
an advantage in that it would start with a fairly clean slate compared
to countries in the rest of the world. They weren’t realized
immediately; some might never be. If all are created with equal rights,
it clearly follows that no human being can rightfully own another. But
slavery was a political reality and it took about 90 years before
slavery was ended in America.
Of late America has hardly been moving in the direction of increasing
respect for the individual rights announced and celebrated in the
Declaration; indeed, a case can be made that we’ve been moving in the
opposite direction, as Jefferson expected was inevitable. But if we’re
inclined to change course, to move toward a country that relies as much
as possible on voluntary interaction and as little as possible on naked
coercion, by means short of outright revolution, the Declaration still
provides a pretty good chart.