Independence Day 2020
Each year on the 4th of July, I reread the Declaration of Independence and find in it something that speaks to our times. This year I’ve chosen the large subject of truth, as in:
We hold these truths to be self-evident
Thomas Jefferson and the other authors of the Declaration of Independence make claims about the universal rights of mankind as the predicate for becoming a separate nation and continue “To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” Printed on July 4th, 1776, this declaration was sent by horseback to the thirteen colonies and read aloud to a people who were starting to become Americans.
Jefferson was a lawyer arguing the case for Independence. He was an early adopter of new technologies like the pantograph to spread his ideas. He was also a quintessential figure of the Enlightenment, whose interests, conversations, and influence spanned fields from political theory and diplomacy to agriculture, archaeology, and Biblical studies.
Jefferson was certain that all “candid” readers, that is, all who are “free from bias or malice, who are fair, impartial, and just” will accept these facts as truth. In 2020 I’m one of many who fears how facts and the truth are under attack. The Russian Internet Research Agency flooded Facebook and Twitter with manufactured stories, twisting facts and sowing confusion. Deepfake technology makes it impossible to know if the person we see in a video actually spoke those words. We have a government official declaring, “You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.” In other words, the opposite of truth is not falsehood, but some other truth.
The exploitation of new media for propaganda is hardly a new phenomenon. Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation used a new invention to spread his views across Europe. It was the printing press. In the 1930s, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and Roosevelt mastered radio to reach and sway a mass audience. Each generation learns to use new media and new tools to present their truths but also to distort the truth and multiply lies.
Faced with an onslaught of facts and alternative facts, many of us give up trying to know what’s true. I remain more hopeful. As John Adams said “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”. We have the capacity, individually and collectively, to distill the facts and separate what is true from what is not. We can become smarter, more critical and more demanding consumers of information. We must expect more of our leaders, of the media, and of how technology is deployed.
The truths we hold are challenged by more than the assaults of propaganda. The formation of new knowledge is accelerating, as is its dissemination. In just one week, 4000 papers about the novel coronavirus were released, mainly on preprint servers. Where scientific discovery was once the province of a closed community of experts, now the latest finding is seized by journalists, politicians, and wide swaths of the public who are desperate for answers. No one can keep up with the pace and path of discovery. Some exploit the confusion to create fear and foster cynicism about the ability of science to speak the truth.
When not tracking the spread of the pandemic this year, I’ve also been able to listen to the deliberation of constitutional scholars, visit Iron Age towns, tour the insides of cells, send my name to Mars, and see black holes, all from the comfort of my browser. Previously scientific discovery happened in a closed community of experts and now the Open Access movement is slowly making scientific and scholarly material more broadly available. While the Federal government has regressed in the last few years, there are now laws requiring greater transparency. As individuals and citizens, more of us know that the facts exist and expect that all the data will be accessible.
A final challenge is to truths out of our past. In declaring that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” Jefferson was challenging and supplanting a belief in the Divine Right of Kings.
Received wisdom has a long tail and too often we are reluctant to give it up. Nostalgia is a powerful force. We fear the destruction of cherished symbols and rituals that gave us meaning and identity. Too many of the institutions of government, business, religion and the academy are losing legitimacy when we need them to be the stewards of our culture. We may not believe in the Divine Right of Kings today yet absolutism dies hard as people trade away their rights and their autonomy for feelings of security. While we may not hear prophets and oracles, we still make idols of the past. The Federalist Society, for one, makes a fetish of originalism, and privileges the political opinions of a few of the Framers as though they were laws of nature.
If you are feeling that sense of dislocation, know that it is also nothing new. Consider these verses from two troubled years.
From 1848:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away
All that is solid melts into air,
And man is at last compelled to face
With sober senses,
His real conditions of life,
And his relations with his kind.
From 1919:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
So it appears that every word of this short phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is under scrutiny. The “We” who hold these truths is no longer a narrow elite who share a foundation of education, values, and social and political status. “These truths” are hard to grasp in the dizzying whirl of information, half-formed ideas, and manufactured falsehoods, all spread around the world in an instant. And the “self-evidence” of what we thought we knew about our identity, our past, our institutions, and our heroes is both rightly and wrongly being called into question.
Letting every voice be heard — creating a democracy of the truth — and making sense of all that is a really hard step forward. I hope you’ll take encouragement from another enlightened lawyer who became President.
Abraham Lincoln was enough of a realist to have said something like “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” He also affirmed the truth that “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us […] that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Have a Happy Independence Day!
1. Giovanni Lanfranco, Allegory of Truth, (1600–1625) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Lanfranco_Die_Tugenden_ubs_G_0785_III_Veritas.jpg
2. John Isaac Hawkins patented the “polygraph” on May 17, 1803. It is a duplicating device that produces a copy of a piece of writing simultaneously with the creation of the original, using pens and ink and is more commonly known as a pantograph. Jefferson bought one in 1804. https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/polygraph
3. Stephen Lucas, “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence” (1990) https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/stylistic-artistry-of-the-declaration
The definition of “candid” is taken from the following:
“In ordinary usage “fact” had by 1776 taken on its current meaning of something that had actually occurred, a truth known by observation, reality rather than supposition or speculation.18 By characterizing the colonists’ grievances against George III as “facts,” the Declaration implies that they are unmediated representations of empirical reality rather than interpretations of reality. They are the objective constraints that make the Revolution “necessary.” This is reinforced by the passive voice in “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” Who is submitting the facts? No one. They have not been gathered, structured, rendered, or in any way contaminated by human agents — least of all by the Continental Congress. They are just being “submitted,” direct from experience without the corrupting intervention of any observer or interpreter.
But “fact” had yet another connotation in the eighteenth century. The word derived from the Latin facere, to do. Its earliest meaning in English was “a thing done or performed” — an action or deed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was used most frequently to denote an evil deed or a crime, a usage still in evidence at the time of the Revolution. In 1769, for example, Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, noted that “accessories after the fact” were “allowed the benefit of clergy in all cases.” The Annual Register for 1772 wrote of a thief who was committed to prison for the “fact” of horse stealing. There is no way to know whether Jefferson and the Congress had this sense of “fact” in mind when they adopted the Declaration. Yet regardless of their intentions, for some eighteenth-century readers “facts” many have had a powerful double-edged meaning when applied to George III’s actions toward America.”
4. Kellyanne Conway quoted from a Meet the Press interview. (January 22, 2017)
5. John Adams “Argument for the Defense” (3–4 December 1770). The quote is from his defense in the Wemms trial after the Boston Massacre. William Wemms, James Hartegan, William McCauley, Hugh White, Matthew Killroy, William Warren, John Carrol, and Hugh Montgomery, soldiers in the English 29th regiment of foot, were accused of murdering Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Patrick Carr. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016#LJA03d031n1
6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Communist Manifesto“(1848)
I’ve turned their prose into verse. The original reads “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
7. William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming” (1919)
8. Thomas Schwartz, “Lincoln Never Said That” (2003) http://abrahamlincolnassociation.org/you-can-fool-all-of-the-people-lincoln-never-said-that/
9. Abraham Lincoln “Gettysburg Address” (November 19, 1863)
