Thomas Jefferson wrote, "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." This is the kind of thinking I would like to recommend. We don't know the nature of Jefferson's religious beliefs, or doubts, or disbeliefs. He seems to have been as original in this respect as in many others. But we do know he had recourse to the language and assumptions of Judeo-Christianity to articulate a vision of human nature. Each person is divinely created and given rights as a gift from God. And since these rights are given to him by God, he can never be deprived of them without defying divine intent. Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say our dignity, in the reality outside the world of circumstance. It is no doubt true that he was using language that would have been familiar and authoritative in that time and place. And maybe political calculation led him to an assertion that was greater and richer than he could have made in the absence of calculation. But it seems fair to assume that if he could have articulated the ideas as or more effectively in other terms, he would have done so.
What would a secular paraphrase of that sentence look like? In what nonreligious terms is human equality self evident? As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was entirely in a position to know. What would be the nonreligious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case? Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way out of ignoring or denying the most minimal of claims to justice in any form that deserves the name. The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand. One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state. Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion. Jeffereson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization.
My point is that lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said. Jefferson's words acknowledge an essential mystery in human nature and circumstance. He does this by evoking the old faith that God knows us in ways we cannot know ourselves, and that he values us in ways we cannot value ourselves or one another because our intuition of the sacred is so radically limited. It is not surprising that the leader of a revolution taking place on the edge of a little-known continent, a an clearly intent on helping to create a new order of things would attempt an anthropology that would not preclude any good course history might take. Jefferson says that we are endowed with "certain" rights, and that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are "among these." He does not claim to offer an exhaustive list. Indeed he draws attention to the possibility that other "unalienable" rights might be added to it. And he gives us tht potent phrase "the pursuit of happiness." We are to seek our well-being as we define our well-being and determine for ourselves the means by which it might be achieved.
That epochal sentence is a profound acknowledgment of the fact that we don't know what we are. If Jefferson could see our world, he would surely feel confirmed in the intuition that led him to couch his anthropology in such open language. Granting the evils of our time, we must also grant the evils of his and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision. Yet, brilliantly, he factors that sense of historical and human limitation into a compressed, essential statement of human circumstance, making a strength and a principle of liberation of his and our radically imperfect understanding.
Marilynne Robinson: The Human Spirit And The Good Society
That was so well and beautifully said that I didn't want to break into it to comment.
So many places to start, perhaps first to point out to "the evils of his [Jefferson's times] and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision." His not only holding Black People in slavery but, also, raping and fathering children with a teenaged girl he held in slavery, his increasing both the number of those People he held in slavery and the intensity of scientific increase in their production, all of it dependent on and practiced through violence and the threat of violence. All slavery is a product of violence and the absolute opposite of the acknowledgement of the self-evident truths that the young Thomas Jefferson wrote as the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It could have been that that document is the best thing about Jefferson, that year the best one he lived. And there were certainly other issues.
His articulation of the ideas he set out couldn't have been more impressive, especially under the analysis that Marilynne Robinson subjected it to and expanded in her recommendation of it. I have never read any better such articulation of the meaning of Jefferson's words, the only possible source of those ideas and their expansive potential that is, as well, dependent on his attribution of those human gifts to God.
As Marilynne Robinson asks, what would a secular, a scientific, a materialistic assertion of that idea look like? I am entirely certain that there could be no such secular, scientific, materialistic, atheistic articulation of that idea that wouldn't collapse into a rubble of internal contradiction. I am entirely certain that what she said is absolutely if not exactly self-evidently true, "lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said."
And I think that her point that, "every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way out of ignoring or denying the most minimal of claims to justice in any form that deserves the name," and, though she didn't state it, Thomas Jefferson's own biography proves that he certainly ignored his own claims, even if he didn't formally deny them, proves that anything short of a framing in which those truths are holdable to be "self-evident" even axiomatic will be a frame too weak to hold them up in practice. I absolutely have come to the conclusion that nothing short of a holding of divine will supporting them will work in any human society, under any humanly administered government.
I do think that the extent to which Americans, those who are devoted or casual secluarists or those who pretend to believe in Judeo-Christianity ignore or deny the moral obligation to respect those rights as a co-equal, concurrent endowment of God to all people will be the extent to which they give in to those tendencies. Jefferson doing so, with his words out there for all the world to see and to judge his actions by, proves that without that, even someone as able to articulate those claims as Jefferson was will give in to the temptation to ignore them.
I think that the ebb and flow of religious activity of the type that increases or decreases the explicitly religious foundation necessary for that truth to become not only self-evident but effecttively potent in real life can explain a lot about our national devotion to making those rights and their equal endowment real. The post-WWII period in the United States saw a sharp increase in religious activity among the liberal Protestant churches and there was, as well, a liberalizing movement in the Catholic religion that, I have come to believe, accounts for the liberalism of the 1960s. I believe our present day anti-democratic malaise is a product of that being made to be considered gauche among elites and that attitude trickling down the way to those who don't want to seem so. That de-religionizing has happened at the same time when the Mammonism of the TV hallelujah peddlers and radio ranters replaced (or were replaced in) mainline Protestantism and the neo-integralist backlash against Vatican II took hold of the Catholic Church in the John Paul II, Benedict XVI decades. That so many of the overt fascists on the courts are the product of that reactionary Catholic movement certainly accounts for their attacks on racial, gender and economic equality, even as those two arch-conservative popes issued encyclicals calling for the very things they attacked.
I am even prepared to think that the Supreme Court, ACLU driven campaign to de-religionize the public sphere has had more than a little to do with it. On top of that was their campaign to permit the media to tell any lie they chose to with impunity, and to bear false witness against those who were inconvenient or unprofitable to them, including the proponents of equality and equal justice and, especially, economic justice. Such liberals as supported that may well count as the biggest suckers in the history of the United States because under that regime of secular deregulated media things have gone to hell. It certainly wasn't the Gospel or The Law or the Prophets who brought us here, it wasn't Jefferson's greatest sentence of all of those he wrote which is entirely dependent on God to justify American democracy.
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