Colin Tudge questions the wisdom of one of America’s seminal texts
How can we explain the rise and now the resurrection of Donald Trump – who didn’t simply seize power in some coup as so many autocrats have, but was actually chosen by the people in an apparently unrigged election?
The commonest explanation is that he appealed to all those disaffected citizens who feel that the American dream has passed them by, and especially those Middle Americans who feel looked down upon by the smug and affluent intellectuals of the West and East Coast. But many a graduate – yea; even from the Ivy League universities — voted for him too. Some said that they were better off under Trump than under Biden. Some said in TV vox pops that if we followed Trump’s lead we could all be millionaires. Others just felt it was time for a change. Others in dyspeptic vein suggest that Trump’s self-centredness and greed and bigotry are simply in tune with human nature – for we are all venal too, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. In other words, straight-talking Donald just tells it like it is. Neoliberal apologist intellectuals are wont to quote Adam Smith who suggested in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 that
“By pursuing his own interest [the trader] frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”
In other words, if everyone just does their own thing, pursues material gain, without bothering their heads too much about the wellbeing of others, then we would all benefit – or at least would be better off than we would be if do-gooders were in charge. Those same would-be disciples of Adam Smith rarely if ever quote his earlier book, of 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he said:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”
And:
“The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society.
Be all that as it may, I suggest that a great deal of what’s wrong with America, and goes a long way to explain the popularity and indeed the dominance of Trump, may be traced to one of its seminal texts: the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. For although the Declaration is mostly what the title suggests it is – explaining why the leaders of the original 13 intend to break away from what they saw as the unjust and tyrannical rule of Britain under George III – it is best remembered for just one paragraph: the second. For the second paragraph spells out what the authors feel are fundamental principles by which all humankind should live. And although the Declaration was penned by some serious intellectual heavyweights– led by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — and although the famous second paragraph is widely held up as a model of straight thinking and Christian morality, it is, I suggest, theologically suspect, self-righteous, and altogether pernicious, and has helped to give rise to much that is worst in American society, from Davy Crocket to Al Capone, and indeed to Donald Trump. And of course, since America is so influential, the thinking behind that baleful paragraph now pervades the whole world.
So what’s wrong?
For the second paragraph reads:
“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.”
Everything is wrong with this. To begin with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is no more than a duck-out: sleight of hand. It’s a portentous way of saying “In our opinion”. For what the authors take to be “self-evident” is in truth highly questionable. By taking those putative “truths” to be “self-evident”, they avoid the chore of questioning them, and discourage others from doing so.
“All men are created equal” is outrageous – given the historical context. It can and probably should be taken to mean “men and women” but it is sexist nonetheless, with all that that implies. Recognizably modern feminism was at least in the air in the late 18th century and the Declaration’s authors could have said “all human beings” or some such, if they had been more abreast of forward thinking.
Worse, I venture to suggest, is that at the time of the Declaration, the British and other European colonists were well embarked on what can properly be seen as the genocide of the long-established indigenous peoples, perfunctorily known as Indians, or (or, in the comics of my mid-20th century childhood, as “injuns”, or sometimes more inventively as “redskin varmints”). The elimination of indigenous cultures was accompanied by and seen to be the necessary precursor to one the greatest land-grabs of all times. The excuse for this had been provided by the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who peremptorily declared that land should belong to whoever is able to show that they can make best use of it – where “best” was at least tacitly taken to mean “most productive” or “most profitable”. Many modern Israelis have used the same argument to justify their own expropriation of Palestine. The eighteenth century American colonists took it to be obvious (self-evident indeed) that European-style arable farming and cattle ranching were far more productive and profitable than the hunting, gathering and market gardening of the established peoples – so the takeover represented progress, and was taken ipso facto to be good. Jonathan Swift summarised the general sentiment of the time in Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 when he had the King of Brobdingnag declare:
“… that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”
Then again, in the late 18th century one fifth of the people in America were slaves, mainly from West Africa; and although the first draft of the Declaration condemned slavery, the final, published version does not. This perhaps is not surprising since onc third of the Declaration’s 56 signatories were slave-owners.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then of course, although slavery by various names is still rife worldwide; and whether or not we were all created equal, the ultra-competitive, almost entirely materialistic economy that we now take to be the norm seems designed to exacerbate in-equality. Indeed the modern economy seems designed to create billionaires, or indeed multi-billionaires, including Trump himself and especially his new best chum, the South African Elon Musk, who has evidently usurped the court favourite role once apparently occupied by England’s own Nigel Farage. Equality is absolutely not what the Declaration’s authors acted upon — and now it seems that for the world at large, including our own newly appointed Labour government, it is off the agenda altogether.
The matter of “rights”
“Rights” is an essential concept to be sure. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Right of 1948, produced by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, was and is truly a milestone on the road to what civilization ought to be. “Progress” these days is taken to mean economic “growth” (or even “Growth, growth, growth”), or smarter and more powerful technologies (“more bang to the dollar”), but the UDHR was, and still is, a pillar of wisdom.
But Rights is not a simple concept. Nothing about it is “self-evident”. Dictionaries largely agree that “Rights” means “entitlements” – things we feel it is permissible to do, for which we ought not to be reprimanded. But who or what sanctions these entitlements? What indeed gives us the right to assume that we have any “rights” at all?
The authors of the Declaration simply “take it to be self-evident” that the rights they say we can legitimately claim were “endowed by [our] Creator”. By “Creator” they presumably mean God, who they see as the God of Abraham, generally known as Jahweh, Jehovah, or Allah. Apparently they didn’t say “God-given” because Ben Franklin warned that in those religiously hypersensitive days direct reference to God would stir a hornet’s nest, and detract from the business in hand.
But whatever circumlocution we employ, this bland assumption raises all kinds of issues. Most obviously, we might reasonably ask, does the God of Abraham actually exist? Is the God of Abraham – as opposed to all the other gods that have been worshipped here and there and from time to time — special? Does any concept of God have any validity? Is God in fact the supreme being that at least some passages in the Bible (both testaments) tell us is the case? Or did we ourselves invent the idea of the omnipotent, omniscient, irreproachably moral being whose Commandments we claim to be following just to support our own preconceptions and predilections? Did we begin with our own ideas of right and wrong, and entitlements and prohibitions, and arrive at the idea of God by reverse engineering? Perhaps — like the concept of rights – the idea of God should be seen as a heuristic: a hypothesis that may not itself be literally true but is a necessary, temporary postulate that leads us on to a more solid theory; a metaphorical stepping stone; or – a better metaphor – a scaffold that provides temporary support while work is in progress, but can then be dismantled?
Genesis 1: 26, tells us (in the King James translation):
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”.
But are we really made in God’s image, or is God made in “Man’s” image? For as Xenophanes observed in the 6th century BCE:
“If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods’ bodies the same shape as their own”.
If the God of Abraham does exist, does He really care about us as the Bible implies? And if He really is the ultimate arbiter of good and bad as the Bible tells us, how can we tell what it is He actually requires us to do? What and where exactly is God’s word? For as many a scholar has been pointing out for several centuries, and especially since the early 19th century, the Bible is full of what seem like contradictions – so which of its many edicts and parables should take priority? And given that the words of the Bible were recorded between about 1800 and 2500 years ago, and were written in different times by many different hands in languages that are no longer current, and have been re-translated and re-edited several times and copied many times before they got to us, they can be and are interpreted in many different ways. In practice, all the formal religions – including the Christian Protestant denominations that aspire to stick as closely as possible to the Biblical text (or whichever translation thereof they favour) – rely on various forms of elder or priest or imam or theologian to provide the required interpretation.
I am not here banging an atheist drum, Dawkins-style. Far from it. Religion in general I take to be of supreme importance, and indeed vital. At the very least all bona fide religions bring huge and fundamental metaphysical ideas to bear upon everyday life — and all the biggest ideas in the end are metaphysical in nature. All religions too, including Buddhism which is generally taken to be non-theistic, acknowledge the idea of transcendence: the notion that there is, or may be, more going on in the universe than can ever be adequately explained by science. Many hard-heads in atheistic, logical positivist vein simply reject such thinking out of hand – but to reject big ideas simply because they don’t fit your own worldview is properly called bigotry.
All in all, then, it seems perfunctory in the extreme to reject the insights of religion out of hand. But as thinking beings we are surely right to question the ideas and premises of any particular religion. Certainly we should not simply declare that huge and contentious propositions that affect all our assumptions and attitudes are “self-evident” – especially since human beings are so influential that our assumptions about the world, and our attitudes, affect all life on Earth.
Of course the Declaration had to be edited for length, and exhaustive analysis of all its premises would take forever. But even so: “We take these truths to be self-evident” is stretching a point. The authors could have said: “For the purposes of discussion we would like to propose that”. A little humility would not have gone amiss. Humility after all is seen in all the great religions to be an essential virtue. Its opposite is hubris, which the Old Greeks saw as the greatest folly and sin of all. In the modern world hubris is writ large at every turn and the modern world is in a terrible mess. The United States certainly does not have a monopoly on hubris but it is a prime exponent.
Rights or privileges?
But then, to respond to a question raised earlier: by what right do we assume that we have any rights at all? I much prefer the idea expressed not least by Martin Luther in the early 16th century, that all good things come to us by the grace of God. In the same vein devout Muslims constantly give thanks to Allah. But in modern, more secular circles is seems more or less to be taken for granted that we human beings have earned our privileged position in the global ecosystem by virtue of our superior intelligence (which may or may not be God-given) and (especially in the Protestant tradition) by hard work; and it is taken to be self-evident (with help from Locke) that the harder we work the more we deserve. And of course it is taken to be self-evident that the reward for our efforts should take material form: money, goods, land, and the influence that goes with them. But if instead in the spirit of Luther (and of many other Christian and non-Christian thinkers too) we adopt the idea that the good things of life are not a “right” but are a privilege, a gift for which we owe undying gratitude, then the whole picture changes.
What of the content of the Declaration? On the face of things, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” seem very reasonable aspirations, and have certainly been accepted by a great many people since. But there are huge flaws in this nonetheless – flaws which, I suggest, given the influence of the US, account in large part for the desperate plight of the modern world.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”
To begin with, there two huge sins of omission in the famous second paragraph of the Declaration. For although the Declaration speaks of our rights, it makes no mention of our commensurate obligations. The tone is entirely solipsistic and anthropocentric. Way back in the Middle Ages, classical and Christian thinking combined to produce the chivalric principle of noblesse oblige: that those who have power and wealth should use at least part of their influence for the general good. But the Declaration does not mention our responsibilities. Or at least, it details the responsibilities of government, but not of the citizens. It does not speak of our responsibility or indeed our need to create what the Austrian priest and philosopher Ivan Illich called convivial societies: societies based on goodwill and kindness that are good to live in. In practice, many of the neighbourhoods in the US are among the most generous and supportive in the whole world (as I have experienced) – but the society as a whole decidedly is not; and has often been observed, the friendly neighbourhoods are all too often ring-fenced; agreeable if you are white and comfortably off and support the President but far from agreeable if you are not. Suggestions that society as a whole should be geared in large part to the wellbeing of society as a whole is written off as “socialism”, which is taken to mean “commie”, and thus is irredeemably bad. According to Trump, even Kamala Harris is a communist.
Neither, of course, does the Declaration make any mention of the natural world.
Taken all in all then, whatever else it may be, the Declaration is not of our time. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet (Heaven forfend!) but I far prefer my own suggestion — that we, humanity, need to create
“Convivial Societies that enable and encourage Personal Fulfilment within a flourishing biosphere”.
But then again, the things the Declaration does propose as prime requirements – “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” – though they look good at first sight, are all highly questionable. But when they are approached uncritically, these apparently unimpeachable moral desiderata become the code of the gangster. Or indeed of Donald Trump. Thus:
The right to Life
How can anyone question our right to Life? What can be more important – in all conceivable ways? On the grand, metaphysical/cosmological front Life may properly be seen as the apotheosis of the universe: the denouement; indeed the purpose of the whole thing. I have also suggested in my ever-modest way that we need to root everything we do and all our big ideas (including the practicalities of governance, economics, and the law) in the “bedrock principles of morality and ecology” – and both in turn are rooted in the perceived and actual need to keep Lifein good heart (a theme I hope to develop on this website with, I hope, many contributions from others).
But again, the ostensible devotion to Life takes various forms, not all of which are entirely what the world needs. However the matter is expressed, attitudes towards the natural world and to the wellbeing of individual creatures range from the entirely anthropocentric, which in the modern, materialist world is the norm; to the biocentric, or ecocentric, which is most unusual in official circles but is what we really need.
The anthropocentric view is that human beings are the only creatures that really matter. All the rest is for our express benefit: a cornucopia which we are free to draw upon at will. Indeed, mining for gold and diamonds and coal, drilling for oil, intensive agriculture, urbanization, with evermore imposing civil engineering and more and more extravagant architecture, have been and still are equated with “progress”. Wildlife is taken more seriously now than in the recent past but is marginalized nonetheless, and the rate of decline is horrendous. The conventional use of the word “environment” reflects this anthropocentricity. “Environment” just means “surroundings” or “real estate”. A house with a nice view tends to attract a premium. In the minds of most governments, conservation is an add-on, a luxury to be indulged when we have attended to more immediate issues, whatever they may be. “Environmental” policy like everything else is ultimately decided by the Treasury, taking the advice of economists, or at least of those economists who say what the government and the other centres of power want to hear.
Instead, we and our fellow creatures need us to adopt the term “biosphere” meaning “living world” or to speak of “the natural world”. We need, indeed to cultivate and promulgate the concept of “oneness”, which sees us, as the cliché has it, as a part of nature; and nature very much as part of us.
On the personal scale, the anthropocentric worldview leads some human beings at least – especially the richest and most influential ones – to suppose that we, individual human beings, should strive to live as long as possible – a proposition that is both distasteful and absurd on many counts (and indeed is most anti-social). Among much else there are fat-cats the world over having themselves deep-frozen in the hope and expectation that future medics will be able to bring them back to life. Walt Disney is the most famous example. And it’s all, apparently, they feel, in line with the recommendation of the Declaration.
The right to liberty
Liberty too, to the extent that it means “freedom”, is surely essential too. Theologians have commonly agreed that God gave human beings free will because He intended “Man” to be His finest and ultimate creation – made “in His image” indeed. After all, a creature with free will is surely superior to one that simply does what it does, like an ant (apparently), or a mushroom.
But as Genesis makes clear, the freedom conferred on us by what the Declaration calls our Creator does have limits. The world’s first human beings were banned from Eden because they overstepped the mark. In other words, freedom does not mean carte blanche. It implies the freedom to make moral choices – with the understanding that some moral choices are better than others. But the “right” to liberty, without conditional clauses, does indeed imply carte blanche. Donald Trump or indeed Al Capone could reasonably claim that their ambitions and antics are perfectly in line with the recommendations of the Declaration. For all their excesses, Trump and his followers claim, and feel, that he is a “true” American.
The rights to happiness
Again, at first sight, this proposition seems eminently reasonable. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Indeed, the idea that we should strive to be happy informs the whole philosophy of utilitarian ethics, which the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham summarised as
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number”
And this, he tells us,
“is the basis of right and wrong”
Bentham seems to have coined this expression in a slim volume called A Fragment of Government, published in 1776 (a big year, 1776: the Declaration; Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations; and Bentham’s boost to utilitarian ethics). And although clerics may tell us that good and bad are what God says they are, utilitarian ethics has become the predominant moral principle in the modern, secular world.
Again, though, the idea that we should pursue happiness must be handled with care and can be and is interpreted in most unfortunate ways. First, we should ask what it is that makes people happy. Nazis, after all, are made happy by the destruction of whomever or whatever is inconvenient. Is this what should be pursued? More generally, happiness is all too easily equated with sensual pleasure, so the pursuit of happiness becomes an exercise in hedonism. In the modern materialistic world too, despite a huge literature including many a folk-tale that warn otherwise, happiness is equated with material gain: a bigger car, a few more square kilometres to add to the estate. Thus by easy stages the moral injunction that is now the prime basis of moral thinking becomes an exhortation to get rich. This all seemed, and seems, terribly rational and Jeremy Bentham was a child of the Enlightenment which stressed above all the virtue of rational thinking.
Overall, then, we could draw a straight line from the American Declaration of Independence through the cogitations of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman that gave rise to neoliberalism, to this description of the modern mindset by Rabbi Michael Lerner in Revolutionary Love (2017):
“To be rational is to maximize self-interest, regardless of how that impacts others [and that] “Looking out for number one becomes the guiding principle and appears for many to be the only rational way to live”“
Which seems to capture Donald Trump and his followers to a tee.
My own modest suggestion is that we should abandon the word “happiness” at least in its unqualified form, and substitute the term “fulfilment”. After all, the most fulfilling pursuits in life are not necessarily pleasurable in the short term, and sometimes are anything but. It really isn’t fun, or so I’m told, to help a ewe give birth on some freezing northern hillside in the middle of the night and yet I have been privileged to know quite a few shepherds who wouldn’t dream of being anything else. The same goes for doctors and carers and teachers – or indeed for people in every kind of job that requires hard work and really is worthwhile and satisfying.
Postcript: the Declaration in Perspective
To be fair to Jefferson and Franklin et al, the Declaration was written, edited, published and acted upon when the colonists in the first 13 states were already one year into the American War of Independence, which began in 1775 and ended in 1783. So it seems to have been written in a hurry. All but the second of the 30-something paragraphs are concerned not with moral or political principles but with particular grievances against what they saw as the unjust and tyrannical rule of Britain, under the monarchy of George III. The last paragraph tells us that in the light of those grievances
“… these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved”
And on July 4 1776, the Second Continental Congress established the United States of America.
As a political statement the Declaration is indeed exemplary. But the second paragraph, which is the one that is mostly remembered, and is commonly seen to espouse a moral principle of huge and ever-lasting importance, is most unfortunate. What is commonly taken as an unimproveable summary of moral principle may in practice be taken to justify the worst excesses of criminals and would-be despots, which indeed is how it has been taken. In short, I humbly suggest, that the famous second paragraph should, as the great if fictional American lawyer Perry Mason used to say, be struck from the records.
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