Reflections on the Fourth
By W. David Montgomery
On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. That statement explained the reasons why the 13 colonies at war with Great Britain considered themselves to be independent, sovereign states. For most of us for most of our lives, the second sentence “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has been a clear statement of what makes America exceptional. The men who wrote the Declaration and led the war against the King of England were all white and generally prosperous.
Now, they, and the Declaration itself, are vilified by some, including a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who tweeted “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.” Now some crazies want to remove murals depicting their momentous actions from the Capitol rotunda.
Apparently the National Archives created a “Racism Task Force.” It was headed, typically, by the Director of Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and the Director of Workforce Strategy and Analysis. Just the titles suggest their prejudices on racism. Its primary target was the Capitol Rotunda, a space that contains the Declaration of Independence itself and murals depicting the great events in which the Founders participated. They see no beauty, but a horrible example of structural racism: “a Rotunda in our flagship building that lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC, women, and other communities.” The presence of Jefferson, in particular, is a grievance. Their sensitivities are so outraged that they recommend “trigger warnings” to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological [sic] and psychological symptoms.”
Those who hate the United States are fascinated by the word “men” in the Declaration. It does not trouble me. As one historian put it, if the signers meant to restrict the scope of equality, they would have substituted “Englishmen.” At that time and until very recently, one meaning of the word “men” has been “all of humanity.” It is the same usage found in the Nicene Creed, when we recite “…for us men and our salvation, he came down from heaven and became man.” Despite the necessity that some have felt to delete “men” in the name of inclusiveness, the clear teaching behind the Creed has always been that the gospel is for “all people”.
It is true that the glaring contrast between the equality of all men and the practice of slavery has caused the intent of those words to debated since 1776. Jefferson himself, that target of the self-appointed judges of historical figures, wanted to add the words “determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold” to the list of claims against the British crown. That it was not included shows that the 13 colonies were divided in their support of slavery, as they continued to be until 1865. But it also shows that there were white men in 1776 that were strongly opposed to the institution. And the abolitionists – almost all white and many of them men — used the words of the Declaration as a foundation for their fight against slavery throughout the years after the Declaration was written.
The simplest and most attractive appreciation of the meaning of the second sentence is that stated by Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates:
I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal, equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.
They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.
Whether or not that is an accurate statement of the mindset of every signer of the Declaration, it was certainly the belief of some. And since Lincoln it is the meaning that was taught to school children and became a fundamental part of the culture that unified this country.
I am a student, as well as a fond reader, of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and they believed in the usefulness and power of good myths. I might put Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration of Independence into that category. Good myths lead us to better understanding of virtue and give us examples to emulate. Evil myths lead us to despair or, perhaps worse, to see evil everywhere and virtue nowhere so that we become destroyers of all that is good. Even if the good intentions of the Founding Fathers described by Lincoln are a myth, they are a good one that I want to perpetuate.
Sharing a belief that our institutions were founded with aims like those that Lincoln describes (even for those of us who question his methods) provides a shared belief that this country has been and can in the future be an instrument of good. It makes us willing to participate in advancing that goodness – like the Greatest Generation that went off to war to end the reign of an inhuman tyrant – and all the other stories of self-sacrifice and putting the needs of others first that have in fact been part of our history.
That shared culture is based on many more shared memories and aspirations than the 4th of July Declaration that motived me to write this. It is essential that our entire shared culture be preserved if this nation is to reverse its current race to destruction. Rod Dreher put it so well that I quote him at length:
The Cambridge University social anthropologist Paul Connerton has written profoundly about the modern condition, and the loss of cultural memory. He writes that “our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past,” and that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.”
When a new regime or revolutionary social order takes over, says Connerton, the first thing it does is to find ways to sever society’s connection to its past. ISIS has been doing that in the areas it controls, by erasing any physical embodiment of the memory of those areas’ pre-Islamic past. Says Connerton: “The more total the aspirations of the new regime, the more imperiously will it seek to introduce an era of forced forgetting.”
ISIS is an extreme example, but this happens in all societies that are undergoing revolutionary change. The communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe tried this too. Speaking of those societies, Connerton writes that “there were people there who realized that the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting.”
A people that has been forced to forget its culture is a people who are easier to control. This is one of the fundamental lessons of totalitarianism. In communist societies, as in revolutionary France, the masses had their cultural memories persecuted, denied, and to a great extent washed from their brains. In our society, the chief agents attempting to accomplish this barbarization are the Social Justice Warriors within universities, media, corporate diversity offices, law, and other institutions
So there we are, right back at home and in the present. It is not just the tearing down of statues that are a “physical embodiment of the memory” of our past. Far too many school districts are choosing to adopt materials that indoctrinate children in destructive myths designed to inculcate hatred of our country’s past and present – and one such effort was right next door.
How this has happened has to be the subject of another essay. It seems to me that a great deal of the moralizing about and condemnation of systemic racism in American history is an example of “presentism,” or in more colorful words “chronological snobbery.” C.S. Lewis defined this as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” As a professional historian put it almost 20 years ago (he has probably lost his job by now for saying this):
Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards.
Recognizing the limitations of presentism is not an endorsement of relativism – which is the position that there are no moral absolutes so that every person, society and period is entitled to make up its own morality. Ironically, those who are most eager to impose moral absolutes on our forebears are usually strong advocates of relativism when it applies to sexuality, abortion, crime and other popular violations of fundamental moral laws.
Today’s problem is that a nation cannot exist without a shared cultural appreciation of its history, and that must include good myths that inspire and unite. A purely negative view of our history that “problematizes” every historical figure and event dissolves that unity. Once upon a time we were taught a history that shed light uniformly on the good and the bad. We learned that for every bad occurrence, like the exploitation of workers in the Industrial Revolution, there was a good opponent, like Sinclair Lewis whose novels exposed those conditions.
That is what we must once again teach in schools, what those who were badly taught need to see in popular media and books, and what those of us old enough to remember must pass on. Evil exists, but good has triumphed when we had the virtues necessary to fight for it. Our Founding Fathers had those virtues, along with faults, as have many other leaders and ordinary citizens over the last 245 years. We need to cultivate them again.
