Declaration of Independence Part 2: Inequity is Humanity

Welcome to my series on the Declaration of Independence. I will now insert my foot into my mouth.

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We hold these truths to be self-evident,

Here we go, into the soaring idealistic part of the document. This is the part that is quoted ad nauseam by anyone even remotely involved with politics, and the part of this entry that’s going to get me into a lot of trouble somewhere down the line.

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.

Let’s separate this out further.

that all men are created equal

This is the very phrase that sparked the idea for this project, as my experience shows this premise—the bedrock of most Enlightenment philosophy—to be false; maybe not in the eyes of the law or of God, but in reality. First of all, this is very much a descendant of the Scottish Enlightenment, with several phrases copied directly from John Locke. This was an age before genetics was conceivable, before evolution (outside of some proto-Lamarckian theories, one of which was put forward by none other than Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles) was known, before even the concept of an “old Earth” (one over 6000 years old) was widely accepted.

Knowing all of this, the idea that all men (putting aside the Founders’ rather limited definition of “men”) could be created equal (forget the question of “creation”, that is for another place and time) is naïve at best, and leading to dark and dangerous places at worst.

Even at the moment of conception, one embryo is unequal with any* other. It might have certain defects that cause it to get flushed out in the next menstrual cycle, or others that cause it to never make it to birth. It might have other genetic defects that lead to mental disorders (such as autism), physical disorders (various types of cancer, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, and a host of others), or put the future person at a higher risk of many other problems (other cancers, depression, alcoholism, and others). The product of two people with nobody in their families over 5’5” is not going to be a professional athlete (apologies to Señor Altuve and Mr Bogues).

In the womb, there are environmental factors that come into play to make each* unborn child even more unequal. Anything that the mother contacts during gestation will somehow affect the fetus. Epigenetic factors—essentially the idea that environment can trigger certain inherited traits—is likely a major cause of homosexuality, obesity, heart disease, and even changes in lifespan. Caffeine use has been linked to ADHD, frequent alcohol use can lead to numerous issues for the child, the mother’s stress can increase the chance for many different problems down the road, and others that I don’t have the time or space to list here.

*Identical twins (or more), of course, are the exception here.

Now, I mentioned “dark and dangerous places”, because it only takes a quick twist of logic to change “created equal” into “must be made equal”. This was first seen in the French Revolution, driven by Rousseau and other post-Locke thinkers into an egalitarian frenzy. Marx played with this idea, and concluded that the classless society was inevitable, coming about regardless of any action on the part of any one person or elite group. Lenin and Stalin tried to enforce this idea from the top, but only succeeded in creating a single ruling class above a massive, poverty-stricken working class. Eugenics became a favored idea to bring this about by sterilizing criminals and the mentally ill, and was taken to its logical extreme by the Nazi regime (which discredited the concept to the point where most who had supported it before the war denied that they ever had). Vonnegut covers the most extreme egalitarian society imaginable in “Harrison Bergeron”, where anyone with the slightest advantage is forced to hide it or wear a handicap to negate it. Certain elements of the feminist movement refuse to concede that women are different—forget better or worse, but different at all—from men, despite the obvious impossibility of this argument.

After birth, of course, the inequality between people (even identical twins) continues to increase, and this is the very definition of humanity: we are all different, all unique, better or worse at some things than others, imperfect and imperfectible.

Declaration of Independence Part 1: Intro and Preamble

Well, I’ve been threatening to write this for months now…

A while ago, I was listening to Mark Levin’s radio show, and he was starting to hype his dad’s book about the Battle of Trenton. That got me to thinking about the Declaration of Independence, since he doesn’t shut up about the Founders. Like I do (alright, want to start doing), I decided to go through the Declaration point-by-point to see if it’s still relevant (or even accurate) today. The timing is almost coincidental, coming during and slightly after the week of July 4, 2013.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, 

Let’s start right there. “One people” refers to the colonists, and “another” refers to Britain, of course. There was and always will be debate over whether it was actually necessary to break from the Crown (I feel that Parliament did make a massive power grab that was virtually unenforceable, due to distance if nothing else). However, some people today believe that we need to dissolve the current system, believing that it has become too much like the old aristocracies of Europe. This is a compelling argument, especially considering the problems that candidates have with getting ballot access, and the sheer amount of biased money in the system from corporate and union donors.

and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

This established the idea that the United Colonies could be an equal force to Britain, and that the American citizen should be treated the same as the British subject. This second part was a main point of the response to the so-called “Intolerable Acts” (which attempted to make colonists pay their actions against the Crown (especially the Boston Tea Party), which was itself a response to Parliament’s attempt to make the colonies pay for their own defense (which necessarily cost more per capita than that of the Home Islands)). That response also demanded equal voting representation in Parliament (which, as anyone with a fourth-grade understanding of the subject knows, didn’t exist for the colonies, and wasn’t granted). 

In the United States, the national myth is that each citizen is on an equal station with each other, and that our ideals (beginning with this document) place this nation above all of the others. The question is: are the various American citizens even on an equal footing with each other, in any way? Also, should we be above any other nation?