Today is the day that John Adams, in 1776, predicted would be from then on celebrated with fireworks and the such, the glorious 2nd of July, when the presumptuous aristocrats who met as the Continental Congress voted themselves independent of Britain. You see, even then they were excluding Canada, Quebec, Mexico and the native inhabitants from counting as North America.
But my text this morning is the one I mentioned a few days back, the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence they based their vote of the 2nd on and which they would formalize two days later.
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.
Those words are certainly among the most familiar to Americans out of any of the civic documents of our history, the ones who the later figure who should count as a founder of modern America, Abraham Lincoln explicitly adopted as the basis of his political philosophy, the ones that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. based the demand for political equality on in the next century. The reason that both men asserted those words were that the author and the adopters of them in 1776 immediately proved they had no intention of allowing them to govern their conduct in their personal life or, certainly, not of the government they would form after the war. The author of them, Jefferson, certainly did his best to hollow them out with his slave holding which became more exacting as he
applied his rational analysis of the value of their labor to enrich him, not them, developed.
The other day I pointed out that, against the entire grain of today's intellectual elite, when Jefferson and his fellow heroes of The Enlightenment* sought to explain where their rights to be listed below and which they accused the King and the British Parliament of violating came from, those great minds could think of nothing else than to claim them as a gift of God.
I am certain they rehearsed different arguments of how to turn rights and the moral obligation to respect them into some kind of political geometry in terms of pure reason without recourse to the already intellectually unfashionable divine. Only they found that couldn't be done and it still can't. They must be held to be self-evident but can only be self-evident with that origin already held. Much as I delight in breaking the taboo against dissing those secular gods, I doubt anyone is likely to outstrip them in their ability to do that. There has been no attempted scientific location of the origins of rights and moral obligation to respect rights which hasn't reduced them from an absolute reality into a shifting, appearing and disappearing mirage which no one can rationally demand be respected in any durable manner.
Every atheistic explanation of rights can, with the greatest of ease, be alienated from any individual or member of any identity group by the merest of whim. I have had the great pleasure of being able to point out to the people who promote those cheap imitations of rights and obligations, that in any society which deemed that atheists had no rights would have, truly and irrefutably demolished any rights that atheists asserted or could ever assert while being faithful to that popular atheist exposition of rights and morals. In such a society, atheists making claims to rights would, by their own holdings, have made their claims to rights a delusion. And I have used them as an example only because, these days, it is atheists who make those claims of being able to produce rights without them being an equal endowment of God, if anyone else tries that, their own identity works as perfectly to impeach their attempt in every case. It especially works when people try to link rights with intelligence** because that argument makes everyone the inferior in rights to everyone who is more intelligent than they are. Making such a silly argument so vulnerable to that answer doesn't do anything to support the intellectual status of the one making it.
This is no small point in their political geometry, it is stated in the second sentence because it is the basis on which their entire argument for the violations of their rights is made, which, in turn, they use to argue for their independence from Britain and, especially, the British king. It was the same holding necessary to argue for the rights of those held in slavery, women, workers, poor people, etc. They had to make rights inalienable and enduring or they would have, as well, been deluded that they possessed such rights and there is no way to do that without asserting that rights and the obligation to respect rights are nothing less than gifts from God. Rights among people, in society originate in moral obligations. We, today, have not made any more progress in locating rights and the equally important moral obligations on which the exercise of rights rests in any other place than as an inalienable gift equally bestowed on all people by God. There is no philosophical explanation of those, no pseudo-scientific attempt to create them with natural selection or an assertion of physical law which isn't vulnerable to exactly the same practices that led those gods of the Enlightenment, the "Founders" to hollow out those words into a dying echo, the vastly corrupt antebellum period, requiring another bloody war and bloody struggle which made the sacrifices of the Revolution seem like a minor thing. If we ignore that, first moral obligations will be pushed aside, as they already are, with those go the freedom to enjoy rights, the life that those ensure and, eventually, there will be another conflict as the conditions those lead to become unendurable. I would expect the next one might make the Civil War look like a dress rehearsal, the products of the Enlightenment by way of arms and lack of inhibitions to use them being what those are now. Look at the results of the Russian and Chinese revolutions for a clue as to what will come.
* I've been thinking of expanding the series I did in February on the documents proving the religious origins of abolitionism, contrasting those with statements by the heroes of anti-religious propaganda both asserting the natural inferiority of non-whites and the rightness of holding them in slavery or, at least, in an inferior condition to white poeple. Virtually all of the heroes of the enlightenment said something to that effect, Voltaire, Hume, Jefferson, Kant... In every case I can think of, in that period, the ones who held the equality of people regardless of race were religious. And that line of thinking goes back to the early Christian period. It could hardly have avoided it as the mainstream of religious thought held to a single origin of all people instead of the frequently asserted "rationalist" separate origination and scriptures which held in respect converts from Africa and which aspired to bring the Gospel to all people.
** The question of such rights as self-determination by the profoundly retarded is one of the more troubling of those. Clearly, as with young children, people who have very little intellectual capacity, still have rights, one of those is the right to be protected from those who would take advantage of their condition but, also, from their own inability to protect themselves from other dangers. Rights don't exist as disembodied, abstract entities but as aspects of the person in their very being, different rights becoming more relevantly asserted in different conditions. The right to free speech is certainly not the most important one to someone hiding from someone who is trying to attack or kill them, the right to go where you want to is certainly not the one to assert for a person incapable of avoiding the raging river near them.
