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The Value of Enduring Principles
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
There are principles that underpin any great civilization, ideas and ideals that represent timeless value. Some might call them Eternal Truths, even, though they are more aspirational than grounded in hard data. “All men are created equal” is found in the foundation of American Exceptionalism – though it also is clearly fanciful. By any measurement we can make, no two people are precisely equal, let alone all people. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is fancy talk for “we cannot defend it: we hold it as a matter of faith.”
Yet the principle that each person is created equal is at the heart of America, just as it is at the heart of the founding document of Western Civilization, the Torah: G-d made man in His image, and endowed him with G-d’s own spirit – that is what made man “equal,” even though we cannot prove it happened.
Other famous examples of such foundational principles include, for example, the “rights to life, liberty, and property.” (That is the George Mason version before Thomas Jefferson, in a squishy “woke” spirit, rewrote “property” as, “the pursuit of happiness) All these are foundational concepts, found in Judaism and Christianity alike – Life and Property would be agreed to by Jews and Christians thousands of years ago. On the other hand, the concept of Liberty – the idea that each person should be free to make their own choices free from coercion from others – was not truly found in any ancient society even if is found in the texts. Liberty as we know it was born in the Scottish Enlightenment.
I’d like to suggest that core principles, perhaps contained within symbolism, can span the entirety of conscious human existence with no adjustments for language, culture, or modernity. But the implementation of those principles may vary quite considerably. The problem is when we whittle away at the implementation and lose sight of the underlying principle.
Liberals have done their very best to confuse these distinctions. They used to claim that the Constitution is a “living document,” and now they ignore it almost entirely (aided by RINOs and the Deep State). And to a point they are right: the Constitution is created by mankind and can – and should – be adjusted. But there must be a line, and I think that line is where those underlying principles are violated. The principles are timeless, as essential for a holy society now as they were in 1776 or in the ancient world. Either a society respects each person, their freedom, their life, and their property – or it is not a good society.
A society that really believes in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property would consider homicide, restraint of free speech, and property theft or damage to be violations of our fundamental rights, the underpinnings of America. As we have seen with BLM riots, Covid restrictions, abortion, and euthanasia, we are now deep into an assault on everything we hold dear.
Published in General
To you it is clearly fanciful.
To me and to many other Americans then and now, including its author, it is clearly true.
I’ve always believed the founders meant “created equal” before the law. :-)
Good post!
I probably have a better epistemology than you. (Of course.)
But I’m also too tired to think about it. And I probably agree enthusiastically on all the not-epistemology bits.
If it were the foundation of American Exceptionalism, it would have read, “All Americans”.
To me, to think Jefferson and the other Founders had a prior belief in Americans being exceptional among all men, and that this was the foundation of the Declaration of our right to overthrow a hereditary despotic aristocracy, is to miss the point of America.
“Created equal” is not a matter of law. It’s a matter of fundamental worth and respect accorded to each person for his (or her) humanity. The law should merely reflects this.
There are procedures for that. It is hard to do. It should be.
I think this is close but that there could possibly be a better way to express the meaning of what we are trying to convey like “without prejudice”, for example. We know all are not going to turn out equal but at the beginning the inequalities are not known to us.
Edited to add: I also consider this concept to be what causes the exceptional label to be applied to the American founding principle of equality for all. It has never applied in any society before.
The assertion is impossible to prove. By any metric you can name, no two people are entirely “equal.” Thus it is an article of faith.
I believe it, because I have that faith.
We should be equal in the eyes of the law. But that is not how most of humanity has viewed themselves since the dawn of time.
Somehow I wrote my post so poorly that I failed to communicate clearly.
Of COURSE that is not what they were doing! The IDEALS of America are what make it exceptional! And those ideas include the above quote.
It it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
P. J. O’Rourke said that the U. S. was exceptional because through the Declaration and Constitution it was dedicated to protecting the rights of everyday, non-too-deserving specimens of humanity, along with the elites. I believe he said that at the founding, the U. S. was unique in that regard.
And the Founders understood that, as we well know, the greatest threat to this feature is societal constructs that typically originate at local levels. Funny how they took a good shot at keeping most government at the state and local level which, if it had stayed that way, would mean that when such constructs began to interfere they could be easily changed or the people could move on to better environments. We can see how this works today when the federal government is involved in inappropriate details of the people’s lives and in cases where some states have gone to such lengths to destroy the subject principle that the people do indeed move on to better places. What it means to be politically conservative is to keep the things that work well for the people.
The guy that Rush used to call St. Mario the Pius once commented that generating revenue and income distribution must be done at the Federal level because if the power is mainly with the states, one state can effectively under-bid another. His example was that if New York decided to raise taxes on businesses to fund its priorities, Florida or another state could persuade those businesses to move there by offering business incentives such as low tax rates, and thus deprive New York of tax revenue. He may have been a jerk, but he wasn’t stupid.
I have badly miscommunicated my assertion. I can’t name any metric. Only the creator of man and the universe can. And according to his judgment, which is not subject to repeal by any of those who are merely his creations, any two people are entirely equal.
But you are right given your assumption. Suppose that some social engineer declared by his own authority such a metric as you speak of, by specifying a repeatable material experiment on humans that allows him to assign a numerical value to any human being, in according to his own subjective materialistic values (values which are different from every one of his competitors for the title of Supreme Being).
You are correct that he would not be able to prove that any two people are equal. If one or more repetitions of the experiment gave confirmatory evidence, and someone were to repeat the experiment, any repeat run might give falsifying experimental results, that countered all the earlier confirmatory evidence.
States underbidding each other is a feature, not a bug.
I agree, but I think it’s important to understand the view of someone such as Cuomo who is on the other side of the issue. Or at least the side opposite mine, and I guess, opposite yours.
“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”
― Calvin Coolidge
I think complaints from California, going way back in time, created by that state’s early entry into generous financial benefits for its residents moved attention and effort to Washington and helped get us where we are. The tax impact on the productive part of the population is felt when the generosity of the people begins to suffer unbearable abuse. Then they react.
I see what you meant now. Okay. :-)
Calvin Coolidge would agree with you.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Before Coolidge, Lincoln praised the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution even more so he emphasized the principles behind them. In a similar fashion, I’ve been talking about American judicial traditions in another post but the judicial traditions are only important if they secure the equality and the inalienable rights of the people.
It’s like someone was deliberately misreading your post. I think readers here should attempt to read posts in good faith without giving them the least likely interpretation. After all, you’re not writing a treatise in the subject of foundational American principles, but a short post that muses about how far from them our country seems to have strayed.
It’s interesting to me that fools such as Elie Mystal say the Constitution is “trash” because it’s inherently racist. I think he has said the same thing about the Declaration. If that were the case, wouldn’t the author of the Declaration, which to my ears always sounded like the philosophical justification for the ideas in the Constitution, have said “all white Men are created equal”?
Sometimes there is more liberty without this principle than with it. I’ve recently been reading of examples in European and Latin American history.
You have revised this in later comments to mean that to God alone all men are created equal, and you will venture no opinion on the matter. After all, if we have no metric (I am not even asking for one), then we have no measurement. I assume you would not eff the ineffable.
I like this post, @iwe. Reminds me of Dennis Prager’s assertion from ten or fifteen years ago that really, the only crime is theft, and the only right is property. This is a slick way of looking at things — you have a property in your life, in your country, in your family, in your freedom, and so forth, in addition to the more mundane properties.
This is important because when Bush and the Gang of Eight, or Biden and the whole Federal government flood the country with illegal immigrants, we are materially deprived of a property. The value of citizenship is degraded for each of us, and certainly the value of our vote is reduced. These are properties, and in being wrongfully deprived of our properties, we are robbed.
Some of the corners are a little harder to sand, but in general, it’s a magnificent distillation of everything into a single principle.
It was probably a misreading, but not deliberate. It was an accidental agreement, in fact!
I think Mark C. just read “American Exceptionalism” as having a particular definition that iWe wasn’t using.
Sounds vaguely totalitarian.
How so?
Your mother’s copy of The Republic is vaguely totalitarian.