Thursday Americans mark this nation’s self-conception, which we call Independence Day. We do it with fireworks and parades, and while there are a few ceremonious intonations of the Declaration of Independence, we don’t really pay attention. We’re celebrating the nation.
Of course. But in the mid 21st Century, we find life’s norms and assumptions, and even things we take as realities, getting unceremoniously upended if not debunked. Scientists are conducting serious research into something called “anti-matter.” A gaggle of dictators is somehow gaining influence as an emerging “axis of resistance” to our “aggressions.” Boys and girls are not necessarily just that. And politically, we hear talk of civil war. The line about Russian propaganda seems to hold – “nothing is true and anything is possible.” The result is deep uncertainty about everything, which weakens all of us as we try to conduct business and live life. What’s the point? Rising numbers succumb to addictions and suicide, and more lash out in crime, abuse, or angry anti-conformity.
The nation’s founding carries a logic and a moral force that is too easily overlooked, which, if we pay attention, gives us a bedrock from which to face the doubts.
To start with, declaring independence did more than reject British rule. The colonies had never before acted as a single entity – “America” was not an existing country seeking liberation from foreign occupation; it was a bunch of British subjects who happened to live across the ocean. The Declaration, giving first voice to a “people … dissolv[ing] the Political Bands which have connected them with another,” brought this people, this nation, into existence.
How was this nation identified? Oddly. Immediately after saying that this people would explain its reasons for seceding from Britain, the Declaration says that “We” hold certain truths. Nowhere else does the document state who “we” are, and in fact there has been no other agreed-upon statement of our identity since 1776. This new People, Americans, are that “we” who hold that set of “self-evident” truths. In other words, America defined itself not by physical, cultural, or other characteristics, but by our holding of what is, formally, a creed.
To be clear, it is in this declaration that “we hold” these truths that America created itself. It is commonplace to cite the Constitution. But that essential document set our edifice of state – the nation’s second state, after the Articles of Confederation – on the national foundation of the Declaration’s creed. Where the creed names our founding belief – in the equal and inherent endowment of people with rights, and that governments exist to secure those rights – the Constitution echoes those tenets in its preamble. It speaks in the voice of the People of the United States, an existing Union needing a “more perfect” form, to perform a number of duties to “secure the blessings of liberty” – the purpose assigned to governments by the Declaration’s creed. On Constitution Day, September 17, we mark the signing of the Constitution, the promulgation of the nation’s second state in 1787. But our big celebration occurs on July 4, fittingly as the creation of the nation itself.
The Declaration’s creed is abstract – it is an idea, and ideas do not really “exist” in the tangible world. So, yes, many of the Declaration’s signers owned slaves, in contradiction of equal creation and endowment of rights in all humans. Women and Native Americans were also not represented and did not – and still do not fully – enjoy equal respect for their rights. But the Declaration’s creed, like any creed, tells us what we aspire to, the direction in which we must develop to be our true national self. And its tenets apply to all, regardless of the status some may not hold in the reality of any given time. Frederick Douglass, speaking in 1852, called the Declaration’s tenets “saving principles,” exhorting Americans “be true to them, on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” The slave had those rights in truth if not in the facts of the day, and the nation’s creed said so.
For most of history, the idea of rights was as privilege and property, conferred by higher authority on selected recipients. Now, in this nation, on paper, rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are deemed inherent to all persons regardless of worldly authorities, and equally endowed in all. Governments and any power they hold are only legitimate by consent of the governed. In these principles people are the agents of their own lives, not “subjects” of others. The creed defines America to carry the human hope that comes with this agency.
To be sure, real life varies from abstract creed, egregiously in a number of instances. Real life’s shortfalls reflect the shortcomings of free persons as they treat each other, and they reflect the difficulties imposed by circumstances. The Creed’s acknowledgement of government points to both of these problems. My rights need safeguarding by something bigger than my personal strength and cunning – so ancient persons lived in tribes and clans and submitted to hereditary rulers and hierarchical authorities. The question is whether America can keep pushing rulers, governments, and social norms to spread rights and broaden their scope. As a nation-state we should seek to protect the observance of rights where it exists, to nurture its spread and expansion in scope, to enable those who seek to enjoy theirs, and to encourage others in these efforts, not least by embodying our creed’s ethos in our own practice.
Circumstances, and the comfort of old ways of life, do not always favor this logic or our creed. The idea of a people defined by an idea remains odd. So does the idea that free people will combine to form a just government – that this social contract will move each to cede some degree of license to ensure the rights of all. Rule from above kept order for most of human history; our nation of principle is, against this norm of the ages, an experiment. There is always the chance that “human nature” or “the real world” will overwhelm a free country. To invoke Lincoln, there will always be tests, of whether a nation conceived in liberty can long endure.
When you live in an experiment, its endurance is only assured by your own ongoing efforts, and our efforts depend on common commitment to this nation’s endurance. Today America’s public discourse undermines commonality of any sort. Political factions actively work to divide us. Personal or partisan pathologies override social contract in case after case – of mass shootings, political intransigence, legal obstructionism, road rage, and basic incivility. Talking about public issues, we start with our arguments, and only then invoke old documents to claim to be “right.” The arguments are over means to our national ends – to keep a nation of rights thriving. But we treat those who differ with us as implacable enemies over those means, where really we are fellow Americans, just with different ideas how to secure our national survival. We will not survive without basic comity, and comity will not come unless each of us treats it as more important than our arguments. This is the only way for a nation to mount the common efforts that survival demands.
We should recall that we do have moral bedrock that we all share, a source of comity that overarches our differences. It is expressed in our founding creed. Its principles are for freedom, and what we, each and all of us, might make of it. We can – and should, as free individuals – have our differences. We need not ‘set them aside,” as the saying goes. But if we see them in the framework of this creed, we need not be divided by them. If we thus manage them – master them in a way – we take our national future into our own hands. Charting the national course will not be easy or automatically harmonious. Means can matter, and we all have to wrestle the exigencies of tangible need and the aspirations of belief into workable lives. But in this new attitude we change, from selfish beasts disoriented by today’s uncertainty to compatriots in a shared effort, for a noble experiment, driven by a common creed of liberation.
That’s what our creed does for us, as the core of our national self-conception. All we have to do is embrace it, and mean it. This is worth the fireworks and parades.
Common Conviction 