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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
Is it, though? Is it? Is it really?
It can easily be interpreted outside of religion (although of course religion codifies and guides these pre-existing beliefs) and it goes along with basically every major religion in the world, and likely most minor ones.
At the time the Declaration of Independence was written, all the world went by some kind of class system and thus people were ‘unequal’ at birth.
Basic humanity, that is, our experience with babies and children as well as our instincts to love and nurture, is universal. What we see is a ‘soul’, another beautiful being that is beyond its own physicality or personality. We know inherently, intrinsically, that we are all connected. This is embedded in our DNA and our cultures from 200,000 years of development.
I believe that the driver behind the idea of “all men are created equal” is this recognition, and thus all men should be treated equally under the laws of government.
In other words, since we have souls, since we are beings that exist beyond simply our station in life, and our personal merits and flaws, there’s no other way to make a government that’s humane (and therefore viable and enduring) without this basic standard.
It’s self-evident. We see it. It is almost impossible to mount a coherent argument against this idea. We don’t need a priest, preacher or book to see it. This ‘knowledge -if you will – predates and pre-exists organized religion.
People misinterpret the word ‘equal’ to mean “the same”.
Equality is a mathematical concept. It is a pure abstraction. Math reduces things (which are unique) into categories.
I have two trees and I add three trees and we have five trees. But we have five very different trees.
We may have three oak trees and two maple trees. Or, four tall trees and one short tree. Or one dead tree and four live trees, or three trees on one field and two trees on another.
While this is useful in dealing with abstractions, we can categorize endlessly and create more solutions based on the most useful refinements, it’s not relevant in the ‘real’ world.
Each person is a unique entity, and categorizing people reduces them to an abstraction and thus denies them humanity.
Categorization is always goal-oriented, and applying categories or labels to people is only useful to determine aspects of yet another layer of abstraction.
But no human being (or even a thing) is an abstract category or label himself. And this is where we go wrong thinking about “equality”. Even when we ‘know’ this concept, we usually default, at least somewhat, into using labels and categories since our modern world is so fixated and dependent on them.
The thing that is so “self-evident” is forgotten and lost in the rational world of compartments and categories.
A single principle tends to lead toward a single authority to enforce it everywhere, like Napoleon tearing down all the other principles (some of which go under the heading “medieval”) and replacing them with Napoleonic code in the countries he conquered. The problem is, just as with our deep state, Napoleon and his officials had their own personal self-interests, which tended to override any grand principles of human equality from that they had brought from the Revolution to spread all over Europe. His system wasn’t totalitarian, but it was a step or two of centralization in that direction.
And in tearing down the old class-based distinctions under which people had been oppressed and in replacing them with enduring principles of liberty, he didn’t really make them more free or less oppressed. Sometimes it was just the opposite.
If Prager really asserted that the only right is property, he should have reminded himself that we in this country have a historical example of how a single principle to rule them all can go bad. One reason slavery was so hard to eradicate in this country is because the principle of property rights took precedence over other principles. Slaves were considered property, and interfering with that right to own property was seen as a threat to property rights in general.
Prager would have been correct to note that if you don’t have strong private property rights, you aren’t going to have other human rights, either. But that’s not the same as reducing all rights to private property rights.
There are a lot of principles of rights and government that come into conflict. It may be aesthetically pleasing to reduce them all to one principle, but “aesthetically pleasing” is the stuff of totalitarianism when it comes to the designing of societies.
If you believe this statement is true please explain when those enduring principles of liberty yield less freedom or more oppression.
There’s some meat in there, but I think it’s more a departure from the obvious meaning than a return.
I was afraid nobody would ever ask! Maybe later today.
However you want to derive it, at least to Christians and I believe Jews, all men ( and women) are equal under the eyes of the God. Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who was also a radical political revolutionary who threatened the established order in the known world of his time, whether or not you believe him to be God, pushed this idea and over the centuries religious beliefs of his led to classical liberalism’s ideas that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” as written in the Declaration of Independence.
While the phrase was embedded in the Declaration of Independence, legal Slavery undermined that Constitutional principle of equal justice or equality , but the 14th amendment, after the Civil War included what is now referred to as the “Equal Protection Clause”, firmly clarified the point:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
From this clause, we are to be firmly equal under the law, no matter how those who claim that the Constitution is a “living, breathing document”, may claim otherwise.
He believes that the tax money is his. I believe that the taxpayers were simply taking their taxes somewhere else.
And what happens when those taxes are federal?
Yes, and this idea is the essence of democracy, which has spiritual underpinnings; our souls are all equal in the eyes of God, our Creator
Yeah, “fanciful” was a poor word choice.
But then so is “To me” and “to its author.”
If it’s true the way it’s meant, it’s true to all of us. If there’s anyone it’s not true to, then it’s not true to anyone. It’s true according to Mark Camp, the author, etc.
The point I so clearly failed to communicate clearly is that, as much as I believe that all men are created equal because I take the Torah seriously, there is no actual data that can prove that it is true.
Hence it is a prescription for how we should act, not a description for proven reality. It is an article of faith.
That much was all very clear. You just muddled it with your usual tendency to colorful overstatement. “No actual data” and “fanciful” are not the same thing.
This kind of rationalizing of morality pops up in the minds of children and grandchildren of religious folk, as they try to justify their rejection of their ancestors’ moral framework.
“See, we can be moral without the Big Guy in the Sky!”
I’ve yet to see evidence that it retains its obviousness in the third or fourth generation. Those seem to go straight to Hell.
As Nietzsche said,
There will still be echoes of Christianity for generations.
I’m not sure you understood what I am saying. In no way am I saying that religion isn’t useful and necessary. I’m just saying religion is caused by something that pre-exists it. (Our very souls?) It’s natural. It isn’t always right, but it’s a necessary mechanism.
The danger comes when people just default to the “moral framework” without understanding the underpinnings. Or in my view simply parrot pieties and dogma. I especially dislike moral judgementalism that often accompanies religion.
I agree that morality without a coherent framework probably dies out. But it is possible to be moral and not religious. It’s also possible to be religious and not particularly moral. We just witnessed Will Smith’s antics on display and he’s a religious man and he spoke so eloquently about ‘love’ and God at the Oscars. Umkay…
BTW my experience with the most radical anti-God and anti-Christian types are sons and daughters of preachers or very strongly religious parents. It’s uncanny. I’ve never met these particular parents, but they must have done something to make their kids hate religion so much. This is not to say that all religious parents have kids like that. It’s just that the vitriolic ones often have that background.