“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.” ~The Declaration of Independence, 1776
On the Sunday proceeding July 4 each year, the Rector of my church reads the Declaration of Independence. In truth, usually I find it boring, laborious, and sometimes a conflicting hybrid of church and state. This year I felt something unfamiliar–sadness.
As the priest read the words that founded this strange thing called democracy, which has been our American experiment these last 236 years, I began to see how far off the course we have come. All nations comes to that point–where the mechanisms that made them great in terms of equality, strength, intellect, ingenuity, bravery, and righteousness begin to falter under the weight of their human bearers.
This is just the first year I felt distinctly part of a period in history which represents a painful faltering.
There is no perfect system–religious, political, sociological–because they are all made of people. People who, even when we have aspirations to be better, more Godly, and decent human beings wespend our existence fighting an element of our human nature which calls us to something far more momentary and survivalist.
I Am
Recently I was watching a movie titled “I Am?” which is a documentary discussing the nature of humanity–in its goodness and in its peril. It is based on the statement of G.K. Chesterton when asked by a local newspaper to provide commentary on what was wrong with the world (the question which needs to be asked on some level of everygeneration of humanity).
To which his reply was, “I am.”
The movie, besides grappling with this basic human question also discusses the work of (among others) Charles Darwin, stating that his great opus On The Origin of the Species which is quoted most for his discussion of “survival of the fittest” is also a work in which he uses the word “love” over 100 times. Additionally, he uses the phrase “survival of the fittest” less than 10 times.
What was extracted from Darwin’s work was that which qualified a survivalist human experience, but the legacy he seemed to intendwas much more ofcomplex, hopeful,and inclusive, particularly later in life. It is written in this article in The American Thinker that in the 6th and final edition of Darwin’s opus he referenced the “Creator” nine times and “God” twice. Written 13 years after his original work, it seems that Darwin found it difficult to embrace the nature of existence without some understanding of something greater than himself.
It is anature of us as humanstoevolve andwith the wisdom of age Charles Darwin was able to see an experience of life that included both evolution and creation–and it is no small thing that his philosophical evolution left room for both. It is also an irony of sorts that as fallable historical creatures andas seekers of marketing tools for the injustices of history we, collectively, look to the shelves for the most base and immature version of our humannity to justify our actions.
From the meat of all that Darwin left in terms of both biology andphilosophy, what we extracted and carried throuogh time was the idea of “survival of the fittest”. Let the most powerful person/country/team/culture win. It is practically the motto of Western civilization.
Who Are We?
I was reading another article recently by Pam Hogeweide, a great female commentary voice in the Christian community. In her article Pamdiscussed an interview she had with Shane Claiborne, another voice of the young Christian generation. Shane’s voice is, as Pamreports in the first half of her article, a voice of the not-so-marginalized bringing to light marginalized causes in what his contingent of contemporary Christianity has called “a new monasticism.”
Pam noted her initial impression of him, before meeting, was that he was an over-privileged person who was unaware of the great distance between his place of privilege and the underprivileged lives of those he chose to live amongst and spoke on the behalf of, often.
Pam stated that her impression of him changed in his response to her on this singular question, “Who do you think are the Pharisees of this age?”
To which he replied, “I am.”
It seemed that in fighting for the marginalized Shane had not lost sight of his privileges and the place of privilege from which he spoke. This capacity for personal transparency is not an easy one to garner; even harder, usually, for someone in the 30-something and under cohort. Not by fault, just by the busyness of this first third of life, spent establishing identity and accumulating “stuff”.
In truth, however, to be personally transparent at any age is a difficult quality to come by. It is hard for us (self included) to disengage with the things we use to identify “us”–status, titles, money, professions, objects–long enough to see from a distance the truth of who we are and what our part is in the lives we lead and in the course of this historical experience of humanity.
Self-Conscious or Self-Conscience?
I think my greatest sadness this year, in hearing the declaration of independence this past Sunday, and in watching the acclaimed HBO special “John Adams” this 4th of July, and in reviewing our place in history in the 234th year of this democratic experiment is our collective and national lack of awareness of our complicity in the state of our being, both as individuals and as a national community.
We are not standing in this place in history, collectively, and answering the question to what is wrong with this country, this globe, this human experience in the year 2012, with the statement that is truer than true, “I am.”
At the end of the film “I am?” a second part to this question was asked. Not one asked to G.K. Chesterton, but one that is a natural follow-up to the first. What is good about this world? In response to this question the film maker Tom Shaydac (also director of such morality tales as “Liar, Liar”, “Bruce Almighty” and “Evan Almighty) replies, without the appearance of ego, “I am.”
So the answer to these great questions of this great “I Am” is the following…
Q: What is wrong with this world?
A: I am.
Q: What is right with this world?
A: I am.
The ultimate representation of the human experience is not only that we are the former, but just as truly we are the latter. We must own both and be accountable and responsible for both.
Is the world a horrible, painful, and devastating place?
Yes.
Is the world a beautiful, hopeful, and graceful place?
Yes.
We must live in the contradiction, embody the contradiction self-consciously, find the “self-conscience” to live between these two poles, and try to make a difference in the process.
The original beginning of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, speaks to a faithful and graceful truth for all people in all times:
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
All people ARE created equal and this IS a sacred and undeniable truth. But we deny it every day.
We act from our version of a Darwinian ideal to survive.
We act from greed to gain more.
We act from “I want” rather than “I am”.
Our Human Accountability + Our Part In History
The responsibility of this human “I am” is our accountability not just to the immediate issues of our life, but all people, and actively living from the understanding the sacredness in this fact: all people are created equal.
The “Great I Am” is God. Our great call to listen to the small piece of the God-in-us and stand up. We are called to own and be accountable to the “I am” which is both “me as what is wrong with this world” AND that which is the “me as the hope-bearer, the grace-enabler, and the world made beautiful”.
In the same breath we are all three version of the “I am”–a triad of divinity and the two parts of the human dichotomy, all found in one body, and in one soul.
Can we be accountable to all three parts of ourselves (Godliness, human decency, and human degradation)?
Can we, too, be accountable to the intention found in the draft document of a birthing nation which exclaimed in it’s first paragraph the inherent human requirement that, as a society, we must treat “all people” as if they are “created equal” and identified this as “a sacred and undeniable truth”?
The answer to these questions, I believe, is the answer to the capacity for sacredness, quality and decency in our future.
John Adams, Founding Father, brilliant jurist, and a man aged to the point of wisdom, wrote the following less than a month before he died:
My best wishes, in the joys, and festivities, and the solemn services of that day on which will be completed the fiftieth year from its birth, of the independence of the United States: a memorable epoch in the annals of the human race, destined in future history to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political institutions by which they shall, in time to come, be shaped by the human mind. (Hakim, Joy. The New Nation. Oxford University Press, 2003).
Approximately a month after writing this prophetic reminder to all of how human nature shapes human history, John Adams died on the same day as his co-founding Father, Thomas Jefferson. They passed away within hours of each other on the 50th anniversary of the independence they bore 50 years earlier, on July 4th, 1826.
John Adams saw in the very last moments of his life, that we as people and as a nation would promote good or evil based on not necessarily the brilliance of a series of documents or policies on which this American idea was created but, rather, by the inherent nature of humans and how that would play out in history.
This is a truth that is both sacred (as the draft document of The Declaration of Independence states) and self-evident (as the amended final version said, in its place) and eternally human.
The simple fact of our being is so hard to remember in our doing.
When we remember, we get renewed feelings of the dichotomy, the paradox, the conundrum
of existing. For what we call Truth are but some established facts from perspectives in the vast
existence of what we don’t know we don’t know but are constantly unveiling to ourselves (and all of us).
Our transparency is so obscured by the marketing designs of human on human interactions that relationship is the hardest to come into fruition. For even the good and the evil shift constantly and we are a judging species. Our appreciation is short lived. We keep having to be reminded. I think President Obama has been brave to say things publicly. We are changed by what is brought to our consciousness.
We are bombarded now by our technology into thinking what is real is what pundits say is important. This may not be true, right, good or wise. The wisdom of civil debate and communication is fragile. We are easily persuaded; fast elated; soon disappointed. We never stop searching for a soulful peacefulness. But those (leaders) who have faith in humanity, process and respect for something bigger, wiser, smarter, etc. than we are, keep the effort for mankind’s improvement alive. We can be tricked, but hopefully, we will be on the look out for what strikes a chord in our heart and soul as being
right and good. We could do unimaginable things, when we imagine them. We have a hard time cooperating. We need to be more skilled in acting in functional groups. We need to teach our children what it feels like to be part of cooperative efforts for the good. We should not be afraid of talking about concepts that are hard to swallow or whose shifting content is still worth pursuing. We should not fear our own strengths or think that our weakness is failures are the end. There is no end to the process within us until we die and even then what we leave behind (our legacy) can serve to energize. See how the WORDS keep multiplying and the interpretation often gets jumbled, distorted or lost in the analysis. There is something inside each of us, who are born equal, that knows. And we know when we know. Sometimes we tend to ignore our own self: our real self. Whatever that is that is worth preserving in our quest for freedom, justice and all the great sounding words that mean something good to us. Is it safe and effective? Is it the greatest good? Are there any real boundaries between us? Is it a tax or a penalty? What do we need to know to do better? And the quest goes on. Until our species no longer exists. This thing inside us is precious. We often flick it out of our minds (and hearts) in our busyness. We are blinded by our sights. ISO insight. I wish us luck. We have such magnificent hard drives.
June: I love how you said “we should not think our weakness or failures are the end…” What a true statement that is. Failure, most often, is only true beginning–it takes us to a place of enough humility to see God, ourselves, and the world more clearly and gives us the opportunity for transformation. Failure is our excrutiatingly beautiful rebirth–if we let it be.
Thank you for your words–we are such magnificent hard drives :).
Yes, to your reflections; they are very resonant for me with real insight into the responsibility and transcendent schievemnt of a democracy, or deomcratic republic, as we used to be.
If we examine Aristotle’s concerns about democracy, his biggest caution to her citizens, is that unless we stay vigilent and virtuous we lose democracy to its tendency to degrade into plutocracy. We now ARE a plutocracy.
We need to replenish our republic by regaining our virtue as individuals and a nation.
Godless, malignantly narcisissistic, addiciton addled, opportunistic utilitarianism just doesn’t lend itself to a nation in which the pursuit of happiness, the dignity and joy of a human life lived mindfully, generously and virtuously, and adaptive, creative liberty rather than enforced mediocrity and materialistic, objectified conformity are possible for the exploited bottom three quarters of our socio-economic strata.
The move musical 1776 was on TCM on the Fourth; it captures so beautifully and with such delightful quirkiness the authentic tenor of the times and protagonists of the original nation-building of our beautiful United States of America, that i look forward to it every year.
If only we could and would develop , share and recognize the breathtaking talent and outrageous giftedness of the working class among us, and realize the interdependent, vital construct of a nation in which character and intelligence are not measured with bias and hostility by a ruling class of morally and chemically anaesthetized piggishly rich people, but by a socially and aesthetically diverse group of committed and capable, truly representative and variously humanely developed ardent patriots.
If we do not come together top fight the extreme corruption and appeasement of criminality in our country that is devouring our young people at an alarming rate, we will lose our last vestiges of Democracy. That will be a horror show which will degenerate into dangerously unreclaimable pockets of global oligarchy, and brutal totalitariansm, desperate enslavery, and socially darwinistic anarchy. If the spread of toxic addictions to vice in its most egregious forms, continues unabated and thwarts the pursuit of classic virtue and its attendent natural highs…then we are totally screwed a as a nation and a world.
IMO we are on the fast track to hell, for the majority of world citizens.Ironically the methods of the self-righteous who wish to legislate and dictate from their world view alone, ensures our demise; while the ,messiness of true democracy, and the essentiality of honest, practical idealism in place of cynicism and manufactured and marketed brainwashing and propaganda by the politically corrrect, are the only reliable antidotes.
Aminah,
Thank you so much for sharing. I agree (as was the original Jesus theology) that the beauty of humanity, civilization, and grace are found at “the bottom” in the poor, the working class, and those devastated most by the unhumanity of those found at “the top”.
I think, too, we have a lot to learn and become accountable for to change the current trajectory of a society on the brink of becoming or unbecoming (double meaning in that). Although, as reflected in my reply to June’s wonderful sharing, sometimes when we fall the hardest do we rise with wisdom. It is as true of individual as it is for collective humanity.
I hope we are on the precipice of rising from the ashes. My prayers are for that consciousness and conscience to be unleashed in response to the pain and suffering that exists in a system built on human ideals and (like every society that rises and finds power and ego) torn down by human ego.
Thank you again for your thoughtful words.
A democracy is beautiful in theory, but as you state from Aristotle and as John Adams stated with his wisdom of time–it can be torn assunder by our falliable human nature.
There are two observations I would share regarding this important and thought provoking article. The first is that no concept of “god” has to be resorted to in thinking about the greatness of the founding of the United States. Jefferson’s bible and the Rev. Roger Williams’s (fundamentalist founder of Rhode Island) plea to establish and maintain a wall between religion and state speaks eloquently to the need to not confuse the notion that a god established, and therefore dutiful obedience to that god’s “rules” maintains the value of the United States. Morality did not come from, nor does it now come from, religion. Just look at the especially fundamentalist’s (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) pronouncements about sex, contraception, abortion, marriage, etc., to see the fallacy that Jefferson and Williams saw of bringing religion into the notion of an essential thread woven into the American flag without which it would utterly unravel.
The second thought stimulated by the article was the realization that Darwin’s notion was the “survival of the FIT” not the “fittest.” As conditions change, it is the species that can adapt, that is fit to the new circumstances, that survives. If “fittest,” and circumstances change, that is the end of that organism/species! It is the ability to adapt that leads to survival. The quality of that survival may be informed by many factors, including one’s values which for some are derived from religious belief and for others derived from an inherent evolutionary characteristic of the human. That characteristic was formed when small groups depended upon one another for support, food, sex, and survival. Trust and truth had high premium value in such a setting among one’s tribe.
The problem addressed with sadness in this article is that the world of an individual is no longer a close knit bond of 130 people optimally. With size came power and with power came corruption of values (religionists at times leading in corruption). Darwin mentions “love” often. There are ultimately only two modes of relating: love play (not meaning erotic) and power play. The former is rare and the later is increasing. That is what leads to the sadness of what has happened to our country. (Power corrupts and absolute power……..).
It is very instructive to realize that when Moses asks his God for God’s name, the voice from the burning bush replies IN THE FUTURE TENSE “I shall be what I shall be.” Another interpretation which I particularly like is “I will be what tomorrow demands! Tomorrow is today and what is demanded is a clear headed willingness to embrace uncertainty and ambivalence. That means allowing the many voices that express meaning and value to be allowed even when differing from out own. It means trying to increase “love play” by which I mean demanding and only tolerating mutual respect, not absolute agreement. Chief Justice Roberts may have actually made such an attempt in his deciding vote. That act may have been the single most important decision to come out of the “Obamacare” discussions.
Thank you Sheldon for your words.
I like your exposition on the dichotomy you call “love play” versus “power play” in society. It is definitely an aspiration to be in the former and we fall so often into the latter. I think what you stated is the hardest part of government because it is the hardest part of human experience–to respectfully listen to “the other” and to allow for their voice to be heard because it is how the system was created to function and not fall into the “I am right by my standard, so I must win,” mindset.
What a complex and advanced human quality do we require from people who are often uncapable of getting there. What a difficult and large idea the democratic experience is–we must work against our baser natures to make it work…which is why it is so hard to keep it fair and balanced and functioning healthfully.
Thank you for your insights from a political and logistical standpoint. What a great reflection on the concepts. And thank you for sharing the intention, in more detail, of Darwins “survival of the fittest”!
I am encouraged byT B Pasquale’s response to add the observation that to change from what certainly we know we know (the child’s bedrock of predictability) to risking what we don’t know (and lose a way of predicting tomorrow) threatens our fundamentalist certainty (we are the “fittest!”) and threatens us with having to risk giving up certainty and predicability for the unknown (maybe the other guy does have a bit of a good thought I may not totally agree with but do not have any good reason to out of hand deny) and take a chance on the seemingly new perception, thought, discovery. (The world is not the center of the universe led one to a long home confinement without the niceties of electronic anklets). This moves us from the child’s certainty (operative in most adults – just look at the front pages of papers) to adults’ capacity to tolerate ambivalence and thereby open ourselves to newer, fitter, ways of survival and growth. Tolerance come from the Latin “tolerantia,” which means the capacity to endure our own pain and adversity in ourselves when we give up the simplistic and ubiquitous dumping that pain on others and then retreating from not only that person or institution BUT retreating from a painful fundamental part of selves. Think of the sentence without a period but with a comma: “War is Hell(,) but who knows what the alternative will bring!! There is the child running amok in the adult’s body and equipment making headlines.
Very interesting entry, would more of these 🙂