The Fourth of July
On this anniversary weekend of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth taking a moment to consider the implications and responsibilities of such an act.
To start with, I must object to the notion that the Fourth of July is the nation’s birthday. As Abraham Lincoln said, the Fourth was a date on which this nation was “conceived in liberty.” Conception is the easy part, much more enjoyable than the long process of incubating and then delivering the resultant product. When Col. Blake receives news that his wife has given birth while he is still in Korea, Radar points out that at least the colonel was present for the important bit, but our founders did have the grace to stick around to work through what they came up with. The actual date of birth is the 21st of June 1788 when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, thereby bringing that document into legal force, there having been a prior period of false labor pains under the Articles of Confederation.
This date is, of course, not as well known, and to a certain frame of mind, declaring a revolution is a far more pleasant thing to celebrate than the establishment of a system of laws. Rabbi Harold Kushner makes this point in one of his books by observing that Passover is a popular holiday, while the giving of the Ten Commandments does not get such enthusiastic commemoration. Ronald Reagan quipped that to Republicans, every day is the Fourth of July, while to Democrats, it is the fifteenth of April.
And yet, without laws—and yes, without taxes—a society is in continual risk of being nothing but chaos. What constitutions and the laws that they support permit ideally is sustainable liberty. I say ideally deliberately here, since such frameworks are only as good as the people who operate with and within them.
This gets me to my main point. Many countries celebrate their revolutions or attempts at the same. Bastille Day, the Fourth of July, Guy Fawkes Night: Blowing things up and cutting heads off have their appeal. But for a successful outcome—by successful here I mean a new society in which people generally do not go around killing each other and in which everyone has a decent chance to live a life of financial security and whatever achievements appeal to each of us—there must be that ground condition of stable, just, and functional laws. France, among the examples I gave, and many another nation failed at revolution by allowing a strong man or a group of petty tyrants to rule by whim. The peace and prosperity, more or less, of the United Kingdom and the United States are the result of having chosen a set of laws that were flexible enough to adapt as needed, but also firm enough to resist the wild impulses of the many or the few.
Until recently, anyway. And this leads on to the second necessary condition: a society that guarantees for each member that financial security and opportunity for achievement. I am most familiar with the United States with regard to these matters, so I will focus on our failings, but the news—global news, not what many American viewers restrict themselves to—reports regularly on similar deficiencies in many developed nations, so I make no claims to American uniqueness here.
The reality is that for our system of government to work, we need a large majority of people who meet certain prerequisites.
A word, though, about that system of government. The right wing insists that we are a republic, while the left talks about democracy. What we are is a constitutional democratic republic. We have a written document as basic law. We choose the direction our nation will go through the vote—in our case, through representatives in the form of legislators and executive officers. And we are a nation founded out of the power of the whole citizenry, rather than from a monarch or some kind of an aristocracy.
All right, but again, for that to work, what do we need as general characteristics of the people?
It will come as no surprise to those who know my professional history that I see education as an essential element here. When I discuss subjects such as climate change, Civil War history, the age and shape of the Earth, and a host of similar matters, I despair for my country. Someone could, for example, make a political argument that carbon emissions are something that we ought to learn to live with, given the people whose lives are enriched by burning fossil fuels, and while I would disagree, I could still respect the person’s intellectual honesty if said person did not reject the facts about what such emissions do to global average temperatures. But academic disciplines are difficult—that is why they are called disciplines—and some have discovered a political advantage in justifying ignorance, rather than elevating our national comprehension. It is easier to tell an audience that their confusion, say, over the relationship of carbon dioxide to infrared radiation is nothing but an appropriate reaction to elitists trying to defraud them than to ask them to learn some physics.
But as climate change, the global COVID pandemic, the many conflicts between nations around the world, or the rates of violence in the United States illustrate, the facts will not accommodate themselves to anyone’s political opinions. And the decades-long Republican war on education—a war fought to win that party short-term gains in elections—has had the predictable result of making the American citizenry less and less capable of dealing with the crises we face.
I am a supporter of gun rights in part because of the opportunity that gun ownership provides, namely the acquisition of a practical skill and of an attitude of responsibility that are characteristics of a good armed person. In the same way, I see general education—and a guarantee of higher, specialized education—as something that no democratic republic can function without.
If we are to maintain the independence that was declared in 1776 and that we remember now, we have to make ourselves capable of using it. A raw recruit into any role is dangerous with a gun, with a match, or with a ballot until said person takes the time to learn what to do with such things and what the moral consequences of acting with them are.
The more we promote ignorance, the less likely we are to keep the republic—democratic, constitutional, and a thing of the people—that Ben Franklin reported as our gift to ourselves.