The Master holds up a staff. He says to his students:
“If you call this a staff, you deny its eternal life. If you do not call this a staff, you deny its present fact. What then, do you propose to call it?”
-Zen Buddhist koan
One of the difficulties of Online Argumentation is that you are forever flinging words into the void. Words are signifiers, not realities, but on Teh Interwebz, they are brick and mortar. Programming language is the architecture. This is all built (quite literally) on sand.
We have built here a collection of tribes and tribal signifiers and we have such fun doing so that we rarely reflect on the unreality of it all. Even the existence of meatspace has been memed into a vague need to Touch Grass. We pick fights over things for their own sake, irrespective of whether it changes a single thing about reality. This is one of the reasons I stopped writing about politics for a long time. Following the daily noise, picking up and amplifying memes that more popular bloggers had already beaten me to, this was a recipe for failure. It was unsatisfying on a deep level.
I once convinced myself that Mitt Romney was going to be the President of the United States, because he seemed smart on television, and people whose opinion I respected told me so. I no longer read those people, not because of Romney, but because I gradually came to the conclusion that there was something else going on. Something outside of the libertarian-right bubble I had consigned myself to. No matter how clear the arguments, no matter how many Owns collected, the system remained what it was. Nothing I said actually mattered.
The arguments of libertarians are not wrong, necessarily. They follow from premise to conclusion quite rigorously. But syllogisms can be perfectly logical, and still incomplete.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happines, That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This is of course, the Founding Document of the American Republic, which is, to the praise of many, founded on a set of Philosophical ideas, declared to be self-evident. This means, of course, that it is not necessary to prove these ideas; they prove themselves. These assertions are thus put on an equal footing with the Three Laws of Logic:
The Law of Identity: A thing is the same as itself. A=A.
The Law of Noncontradiction: A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. A=/= -A.
The Law of the Exluded Middle. A statement is either true or false. A=/= .5A.
Needless to say, Thomas Jefferson’s assertions are not nearly as axiomatic as these. To wit:
All men are created equal. Absurd. As John C. Calhoun put it, “Men are not created, men are born. And each man is born into different circumstances.” Equality does not exist in wealth, intelligence, physicality, or talent. It never has; it never will. “Equality before the law” is at best an ideal, at worst a complete fiction. The history of the American Republic, as of elsewhere, indicates that there is one law for the rich and connected, and one law for everyone else.1 Instead of formal aristocracy, we have informal oligarchy. Nothing to see here, move along.
Men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. What does this mean? If my “right” is “inalienable”, then it cannot be taken away from me. Yet the government will indeed seize my property2, my liberty, and my life if I violate the law sufficiently. Indeed, they will argue, with a rich store of precedent, that my crimes abrogate my rights in this respect. Thomas Jefferson was not an anarchist; he understood this to be true. So what does this statement mean? That the state may not take things from me unless I really really have it coming?
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. This is but Social Contract theory in action, the inversion of Divinely-Sanctioned Authority. But what does “the consent of the governed” mean? How do the people “un-consent”? How many people have to do so before the government loses its “just powers”? Who is the judge of these things?
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government… This is the point of the document, the Justification of Revolution as the Redress of Tyranny. A tyrannical government merits no obedience. It needs be pointed out that this was hardly a new idea. Ancient tradition as well as the Bible indicate that the tyrant destroys his authority, and may be legitimately disposed of. The entire concept of the Mandate of Heaven rests on the notion that Bad Government Must Be Destroyed, and replaced with another. The extent to which the “people” are the drivers of such replacement, or are brought to it by natural community leaders, is not something Thomas Jefferson, who belonged to the latter group, dwells on.
You can take this deconstruction very far, and argue, as some have, that the whole concept of Rights is imaginary, a fig-leaf by which the Enlightenment Bourgeoisie justified their claim to power against the traditional aristocracy, that it was never anything but that. But this is to fall victim to the same trap. One may bat around the Lockean concept of rights like a beach ball, without necessarily embracing the antipodal view of Thomas Hobbes: that Leviathan possesses all Authority in the name of Order. As stated above, no one likes tyranny. No one wants to see a state cruelly deriving people of what they ought to have. Jefferson’s claims can be fanciful, even risible, without being altogether wrong.
People tend to find this difficult to accept. The Law of the Excluded Middle seems to suggest that an idea is either Absolutely True in All Respects, or An Evil Lie of Satan, thus requiring your Total Affirmation or Absolute Denial. Reality is never so simple as that. Reality is larger than our ability to describe it. This is the point of the Zen Koan at the beginning: no matter what you call the staff, you are leaving something out. Language exists to signify reality, not to legislate it.
In the end, the American Revolution amounts to a lesson that a government which provokes its people, and overestimates its ability to cow them, will be humiliated. It did not really create a new kind of state or a new kind of civilization, and the belief otherwise is causing the Republic to ignore lessons of history in order to drive to extreme an ideal that a Virginian plantation-owner3 used to sell the struggle of colonies to maintain the freedoms they had historically possessed. London was an ocean away, it had no real say in what went on in America. The Revolution was simply the demonstration of this fact. The words that Jefferson used to discuss it could easily have been otherwise, without the facts being altered.
Deconstructionists are those most apt to forget this lesson. Far from being free of language, the Po-Mos crawl most resolutely inside it, filling reams of nonsense saying that nothing can be said. They are the most adamant players of Word Games, convincing themselves of everything and nothing. They live in bubbles, reacting to contrary data like Pennsylvania settlers seeing Shawnee on the horizon.
And they are not alone. We all do it. We all wrap ourselves in ideological cocoons that help us navigate reality. They provide First Principles and Guidelines to individual and social action. They are useful. But they are not complete. Reality exists outside of them, contravening them.
Yes, on some level, all humans are human, subject to human impulses and human limitations. We have a rough ontological equality, that in no way abrogates the existence of class hierarchies or ethnic differentiation. Yes, governments should protect people’s lives and properties, and not violate natural liberty without immediate need. But calling these things “inalienable” grossly overstates their power. The suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, occurred regardless of whether anyone thought they were legal or just. Rights melt away when the state is in crisis.
The plain fact of politics is all things within the political realm are negotiable, and all sacred things will be compromised over time, regardless of what we say about them. We should therefore be careful in confusing our ideals with our observations. What is, and What Ought to Be, do not coincide enough.
And a third law for undesirables.
“Property” was the third of John Locke’s rights, which Jefferson changed to “The Pursuit of Happiness” in one of the first instances of Mission Statement Language. As the Declaration of Independence bears some resemblance to a Mission Statement, this should not be wondered at.
People have been dunking on Thomas Jefferson for proclaiming freedom while owning slaves since the minute he wrote the Declaration. British newspapers and Dr. Samuel Johnson filled the air with hoots at his expense. Jefferson himself was fully aware of the contradiction between his ideals and his station, and made some attempts to limit the Peculiar Institution during his political career. Get a New Line.
Impressive!
Research, knowledge and smarts! great concepts