Independence Day 2022

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 my attention turns to an easily-overlooked clause in the preamble:

“When in the Course of human events”

and to a consideration of history, myth, change, and the state of our democracy.

I’ve chosen the Car of History Clock found in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol to represent the course of human events. Carved in marble by Carlo Franzoni, it was made in 1819. The workings of the clock that form the chariot’s wheel are by the celebrated Boston clockmaker, Simon Willard. They were installed in 1837.

John Quincy Adams, who served eight terms in Congress after he had been President, was so moved by the sculpture that he wrote this sonnet:

Historic muse! Who from thy winged car
Pursuest thy rapid and unwearied flight;
Recording all that passes in thy sight,
And all thou hearest of the wordy war,

The wit, the wisdom, the conflicting jar
Of ranting, raving parties, day and night
Beneath the sunbeams or the taper light
The frantic reason of this wandering star.

Oh! Muse historic — in thy march sublime
Still urging onward on the wheels of time,
Canst thou not whisper to the chosen band,
But for one day to calm their senseless rage,
And let thy volume bear one blessed page
Of deeds devoted to their native land.

The Founding and the Present

American democracy began in history, in the course of human events, by overthrowing the established order of the world. The authors and signers of the Declaration Independence rejected, in particular, the belief in the divine right of kings and asserted that: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Having turned the world upside down, the founders then sought to re-establish order. They constructed a foundation for our government that gives legitimacy to our assertion of rights, the form of our government, the administration of laws, and the exercise of state power. And from the beginning they sought to justify what they had done by invoking the past. James Madison in particular conducted a thorough and learned investigation of this past in the year leading up to the Constitutional Convention, asking how can we best govern ourselves.

Since then, we have continued to rely on and enshrine the Founders and to elevate their time to a privileged place in our history. But as we approach a quarter millennium since the Declaration of Independence was published, we see threats everywhere to self-governance and our system of government.

If James Madison were rewriting his Vices of the Political System of the United States from April 1787 or if the Committee of Five in 1776 (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman) were back at work in Philadelphia, they might enumerate these complaints against our democracy.

To prove that our democracy is in danger, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• The right of the People to chuse their representatives has been attacked, restricted, and perverted.
• Remedies for Corruption and the Abuse of power have been hollowed out.
• The will of the People to pass Laws and change the form of our Constitution is frustrated.

For many of us, the dysfunction of our government leads us to question the foundations of our democracy. Like the Founders we see the present course of human events and look to history in search of a solid foundation and reaffirmation of the republic we have. So let’s look at our past.

Creation Dates

The United States had a very long gestation that included a failed settlement at Roanoke in 1587, the successful settlement of Jamestown in 1607, the first sale of enslaved people in 1619, the signing of the Mayflower Compact in 1620, and the establishment of the original thirteen colonies up through Oglethorpe’s founding of Georgia in 1733.

We celebrate the birth announcement of a new nation on July 4, 1776 but it wasn’t until September 28, 1781 that American and French forces won the final battle of the Revolutionary War at Yorktown. It took until September 3, 1783 when The Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the war, defining the new nation’s boundaries, and securing New England’s access to codfish on the Grand Banks.

The Constitution was signed by 41 out of 55 delegates on September 17, 1787 and ratified by a majority of states by June 21, 1788, including just 149 men who voted for it in South Carolina. Rhode Island finally accepted the Constitution on May 29, 1790, a month after President Washington began his first term. Abraham Lincoln announced “a new birth of freedom” on November 19, 1863, enacted by passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.

The creation of our country may have begun more than 20,000 years ago when the first humans came to this continent. Or it began on August 18, 1920 when the right of women to vote was made law. Or its true birth was delayed to July 2, 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. Since we all know that history begins when we begin, I am certain that the United States began on July 2nd, 1969 when the 8-year-old me disembarked from the Milwaukee Clipper on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Creation Myths

The blizzard of dates in the last section demonstrates that we cannot point at one spot on a timeline to situate the founding of our country. Similarly, the Founders’ beliefs about humanity and government work better as myth — stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world — than as history.

In his Second Treatise on Government (1689), John Locke writes: “To understand political power correctly and derive it from its proper source, we must consider what state all men are naturally in. In this state men are perfectly free to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and themselves, in any way they like, without asking anyone’s permission — subject only to limits set by the law of nature.”

Like other Enlightenment philosophers, such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, Locke was arguing against the belief that rulers inherited their right to rule. In his First Treatise on Government, Locke took up the myth that God had endowed Adam with special status as the first man in history and that all legitimate rulers held their power as a direct inheritance from Adam. Locke substituted this creation story with a new creation myth. This new story, informed by the early stages of the scientific revolution, proposed that humans once existed in a state of nature, all alone and all equal, and then chose to trade total individual liberty for the benefits of society, law, and government by entering voluntarily into a social contract.

The authors of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were profoundly influenced by these philosophers and the concepts of a state of nature, natural law, and the social contract. There is a direct line from Locke’s Second Treatise to the ringing words of the Declaration: “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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”

In our time, we have turned this philosophical thought experiment into a myth about the founding of our country. We have deified the Founders as all-wise and eternally right and enshrined the Founding Era as though it were the creation of the world. Constitutional scholarship is riddled with the belief that we emerged from an actual state of nature and that there are unchanging natural laws upon which our government is founded. This view permeates both how we are taught about our country and how our highest court makes rulings about present-day cases.

We should not confuse a model of the past with historical truth. Neither the state of nature nor a historical moment when a social contract was drawn up are found in the evolution of humans as species, or in the formation of human society, or in the development of the individual.

The Problem of Change

There is value in seeking eternal truths and in telling stories about our origins and destiny. We desire a solid foundation for our personal identity, culture, society, government, and nation. Much of the Western philosophical tradition, including ethics — which asks “what is the good life?” — and the applied ethics of political theory — “what is good government?” — is framed in terms of discovering eternal truths.

When the Founders looked to the past for the form and scope of government, they saw a world that had not changed in most ways over the prior 2500 years. The people of Periclean Athens and the people of Colonial Philadelphia had a great deal more in common with each other than either has with us. Those two cities — the largest in their respective countries and times — had nearly equal populations of about 40,000. The major occupations were the same with about 90% of the population growing crops and tending animals. The means and speed of travel had not changed significantly, and neither had medicine, life expectancy, or the respective roles of women and men.

A quarter millennium ago when the Declaration of Independence was published, there were hints of dramatic changes that have transformed our world since, especially in encounters between different cultures. An 18th century visitor from Maryland to Pennsylvania remarked on their odd speech and rude behavior. Virginians found the people of Massachusetts to be unsociable and preachy. Southerners were obsessed with social status. New Yorkers had the odd habit of walking too fast. And everyone thought Rhode Islanders were appalling crass merchants.

New technologies were also emerging. The steam engine was slowly becoming a useful tool for pumping out mines but had not yet been used for trains or ships. Electricity was mostly a parlor trick but Franklin had invented the lightning rod. Global trade using faster and larger sailing ships brought tea to America.

Three differences between Athens and Philadelphia stand out: the printing press, guns, and Christianity, each of which found a prominent place in the Bill of Rights. But for the most part, the founders lived in a social, technological, economic, and political context that had been relatively static for millennia. The problems that they were trying to solve in separating from Britain and forming a new government were largely the same as those of past societies. They made a best effort to design a government that addressed their needs. Few expected that form of government to last long before it would have to change again, if it even survived more than a decade or two.

Our lived experience, however, is all about change and impermanence. Not only do we sense change across our lives, but we feel that change is accelerating. What was once certain is disrupted and like Prospero in Act IV of The Tempest, we fear:

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

Population growth and the vast changes in science and technology since the 19th century are well documented. The population of our country grew from 2.5 million in the 1770s to 330 million today, a 130-fold increase. The entire population of the 13 colonies is less than one-third the number of people living now in the Dallas Metroplex. We now measure the growth of knowledge in terms of the number of months for it to double.

What may be less understood is the scale of change and how increasing scale is both driven by and drives demographic and technological change. Change in scale is about the increase in the number of interactions among people, things, and ideas. The increasing velocity of new information, presenting new opportunities and threats, requires not only more decisions but different kinds of decisions than we have ever had to make. Greater numbers of more diverse people make our national conversation both more complicated and a whole lot louder. The solutions that worked in the smaller, more stable, more contained society of the founding era simply do not translate to today.

Beneath this ferment of change, we want to preserve what is good, what we value. Liberal democracy asserts that people have equal rights and equal value, that we follow the rule of law, not men, and that government exists to serve and not to command. How we express and apply these values has to contend with and adapt to the expansion of knowledge, the consequences of new technologies, the increasing scale and complexity of human society, and our evolving norms of individual identity and social relations.

Our values may be the same but the way our government enacts those values in it structure and function must account for change. We cannot return to the past, we cannot remain in the past, and we cannot be stuck with a government that is incapable of envisioning, planning for, and responding to change. The alternative is stasis, a word that means both a lack of change and, in the Classical Greek context, violent civil strife. We are mid-stream in the course of history and cannot stand still.

Clio and the Car of History

Let’s look at Clio again, more carefully this time. She rides in a winged car with a prominent clock serving as one wheel. The front of the car features the head of an important person and an angel, perhaps Gabriel, blowing a trumpet. The car of history is perched on a globe marked with signs of the Zodiac. Clio is fully clothed and her hair is carefully styled. Her gaze is directed outward and there is a calm and serious expression on her face. Using her fingers, she records what she sees in the middle of a large bound volume of pages.

What can we discern about the course of human events and about history herself?

Like the Car of History, time flies. It travels clock-wise, moving forward continuously but measured and understood in reference to numbered intervals. Time follows a course that is unknown and aimed at no certain destination. No one time is privileged over another. The course of events is neither a circle of history repeated, nor does it follow a predestined path, nor is it a random walk, nor is it directed to a given end point. It just goes on.

The history that Clio records is before her but not included in the sculpture. We observe History at work but do not know what she is observing. The more we conduct our own observation of the past, the less certain it appears.

• History is older than we think. Each year the “firsts” in history are found to have happened earlier. A few years ago the oldest record of tool-making was from 2.3 million years ago but then we found 3 million year old stone tools. Evidence of symbolic thinking and expression go back at least 50,000 years and the earliest writing is found nearly 5500 years ago.
• History is also newer than we believe. The truths that appear eternal to us are just as likely to be recent phenomena that barely precede our individual consciousness.
• The past happens at different times in different places. Older patterns of culture and society linger, exerting both recognized and unknown influence on our thought and behavior. What’s new can now flash around the world in seconds or days but take centuries to take effect everywhere.
• History is incredibly sparse. The first two times we know about early tool-making by hominins are separated by a gap of 700,000 years. That is more than double the entire lifespan of our Homo sapiens species. Even in recent times, there is no trace at all of the lives of most people and the documentary record of the past is thin. Most of our lives are spent doing things that are never recorded.
• The historical record is selective and biased to a small fraction of human activity. Children, women, enslaved people, the poor, the illiterate, religious minorities, and foreigners were given no say in their time and are mostly omitted from history. Whole civilizations have been erased. The way we record, recall, and recount stories of the past bears little relationship to what the participants in that history knew and how they acted.

As for Clio and the record of history, Clio is no Argus, she does not see all things around her at all times. She records what she can see from her elevated vantage point as she is carried forward by time. She looks out at the present as it becomes the past. The record she makes is drawn with human fingers, an adaptable tool but hardly a precision instrument. Clio is subject to no censor or editor. The blank pages of her volume will accept anything and everything she writes. At the same time, Clio puts her best face on History.

Clio also reminds us that what happens in time happens in this world. Events are constrained by unknown influences: not the planetary influences of astrology but a combination of our physical reality and the collection of genetic predispositions, individual abilities, proclivities, impulses, and preferences we call human nature. Humans, some more so than others, are featured actors in the passage of time. And if we choose to listen to Gabriel’s horn, we may sometimes hear history announce her coming.

Three Prescriptions

So what should we make of the course of human events? How can it help us heal and restore our tattered democracy? Let me finish with three brief prescriptions.

We need our whole history, the glorious and the gory parts, the stories of the past that assure us and those that disturb. We need to be honest about the past, what it is and what it is not. In particular we must recognize that the past is not fixed: it changes as we learn more about it and as our own needs, perspectives, and understanding change.

Invoking again the mythical figure of Clio, we also need our myths. We need them to unify us, to give us a common understanding of who we are and how we govern ourselves, and to stake out our aspirations for the future. Our myths, the story we tell about ourselves, cannot be the same story that assured a select few Founders they were on the right course. Like our history, our myths have to be for all of us.

Unlike our Muse, we are not just riding along passively, observing and recording what is around us. Rather, like Jefferson and those who wrote, debated, and published the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, we are called by the course of human events to take action and to declare the causes which impel us to change.

Happy Independence Day!