(This essay is the second in a series of reflections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in honor of its 250th anniversary. The series will run until July 4, 2026.)
I. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident…”
This may be the one phrase from a historical text that most Americans have memorized. That is strange, because it is so confusing. Do Americans know they have absorbed the greatest riddle of the Declaration? Or has it sunk so deeply into our collective mind because we know it is so great a riddle.
We must first see what the Declaration does not say. It does not say, “These truths are self-evident.” If it did, it wouldn’t be such a strange sentence. Then again, wouldn’t such a claim be redundant already?
Nor does the Declaration say only, “We hold these truths.” Then the sentence would be very easy to understand, if at the cost of relegating the truths held to the status of common agreement.
Instead, the Declaration serves the whole hog: We hold these Truths to be self-evident. “We”—the “one people” described in the first paragraph, the one American people. “Hold”—We share, and so in part are defined collectively in our sharing. One cause, among the many causes for the declaration of independence, is that the American people are now defined, as one people, as holding together something very important.
“These truths” are what’s so very important. The definition of America claims to be founded on shared truths, not mere conventions, customs, prejudices, opinions.
Now comes the great riddle. We don’t often use the term “self-evident” any longer, except when we recite this famous line. Most of us, if asked what it meant, would answer, “obvious.” But if it did mean that, then the full clause would have an ironically opposite meaning to “obvious.” “We hold these truths to be obvious” implies everybody else doesn’t find them obvious. So it is hardly obvious at all. Perhaps that is fitting. For as the “truths” which follow are listed, any reader who knows just a little about how the world goes will either chuckle or sigh.
There is another sense to “self-evident,” though. It may mean something which can only provide itself as its own evidence, what must be assumed as its own premise. A self-evident truth, in this sense, is an axiom. A triangle is self-evidently a three-sided shape. Its angles always add up to 180 degrees. Its definition is its proof.
Another meaning to “self-evident” truth is what must be taken on faith—or trust, if less religious minds prefer. And that is what this clause of the Declaration must mean. What follows is not a geometric axiom. (If it were, then again, the sentence should only state, ‘these truths are self-evident.) “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a declaration to the world—“the opinions of mankind”—that this one people’s character is founded on shared truths which must be taken in trust. The American people are first defined as a people of mutual belief.
In this respect, the proving of the truths and the proving of the people will have to be united. They depend upon each other. Only insofaras this people share in holding the truths will it have the form of “we.” And only as the truths make evidence of themselves, that is, actually unite the people do that show they are really are self-evident—and so reveal that the Declaration isn’t nonsense. The proof, in other words, doesn’t lie in the definition, like a geometric axiom. It lies in the collective action required to be and remain a people.
There is a perceived dichotomy between ideas and actions, words and works, what one thinks and what one does. American political theorists tend to apply this dichotomy to the question of America’s character. Back to that big question: do the ideas of the Declaration make America, or did the people of American heritage make the Declaration?
This clause of the Declaration proves that is a badly framed question. For Americans, there cannot be any split between works and words, ideas and action. Only a people formed in a certain kind of virtue could venture the claim, “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Here, the people is staking as much upon itself as upon an independent truth. But only a people convinced by these truths could dare to stake so much upon them. America is one people so long as it holds these truths to be self-evident, and it only holds these truths so self-evidently as long as America is one people.
So what are these truths?
II. “That all Men are created Equal…”
If readers wondered why I agitated so much over “obvious” and “self-evident,” now they know. Even though “men” meant in 18th century parlance “human beings” (not just males), it hardly seems obvious that all men are created equal.
Or perhaps it does. I once asked students if, had I known from childhood Michael Jordan’s diet and workout regimen, and if I’d followed his regimen to a T, I also would have won seven NBA titles. Some students said I would have. Children are told early and often they can be and do anything they want. Anyone can become President, the truism goes. And if anyone can become President, even more can become millionaires, billionaires, or great athletes. This is among the basic myths of American culture, and perhaps it goes back to the Declaration.
Yet children sooner or later discover these sayings are false. The young were lied to—not everyone is equal in their abilities—or would be given the same background. So we must press past the common opinion and must admit that not all are equal in the obvious sense. How, then, are all human beings equal?
Of the many possible answers, I will address two. The first is positive. We are all equal in our rationality, since human beings are by nature creatures of reason.
The ancient philosophers who gave this definition were not oblivious to the fact that people have varying levels of intelligence, nor to the fact that some human beings are born with hardly any rational capacity at all. Then again, these ancients did not tend to believe that the exceptional cases count as human, nor did they tend to believe in equality among the rest of us anyway. It is only thanks to a certain religious grace that later thinkers adopted this definition and extended its dignity to all human beings. Once that religious grace was removed, experience demanded that either the pretension to universal reason or to universal equality had to go. I believe we are living in the aftermath of that great change.
The second attempt to define human equality is negative. If all human beings are not equal in their reason, then perhaps they are at least equal in their violence. That is Thomas Hobbes’ answer. We are all equal in that we all have the capacities needed to kill anyone else: “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.”
This definition of equality seems wiser only for its cruelty. Its greatest cruelty is not that it is harsh but that it is a lie. We know that not all violence can be met with revenge, that the weak cannot always, or even often, outsmart the strong. We must then call Hobbes’ definition a lie that justifies the strong for having won their share.
Maybe I haven’t convinced the reader that these two definitions are so faulty. I hope I have. For everyone is different, having various advantages and disadvantages thanks to inheritances that may be biological, cultural, financial, perhaps even fatal. We’ve already seen the Declaration put much weight upon necessity. It would be strange if it did not also have the clear-eyed (sometimes even pessimistic) sense that some are born with flaws through no fault of their own, while others were charmed with gifts, also with no merit to show for them.
This “realism” is a good thing. With the recognition of difference comes the recognition of individual dignity. Since we are all different, we are all absolutely special, unique. And this truth points to the real meaning of equality. The text does not say, all men are born equal, or all men are equal. It says that “all men are created equal.” Creation is more than birth or mere fact. All humans, better, each human, has been created, each has been intended—brought into being by care and not chance—just as they are, with their particular attributes and abilities, quirks and capacities, even inadequacies.
I am getting at another theological claim. The Creator is the root significance of the created. Even if we denied that each human being is unique, our denial would do nothing to change the fact that that person was created by that Creator. And the relation between that human creature and that mysterious Creator is for them alone. The Creator-creature relationship is absolutely individual. And therefore, each human being is absolutely individual. This is what makes each human being equal to any other. “All men are created equal” is really a tautology: all men are equally created. To be equal is to have been created as an individual rather than a mere representative of a general type.
Many readers will struggle with this theological interpretation of a document that is supposed to united Americans. I cannot prove why that reader should change his mind because this is not the kind of claim that can be demonstrated. But I can briefly describe what it is to be created, so the idea will at least seem more intuitive.
To be created is to be intended. The character of our lives, if not every fortune or pitfall thereof, does not owe to chance but to design. And this design is not arbitrary or fatal. It was done by a Creator.
This Creator intended the design for each individual human person. Since each individual consists, not just of physical attributes but also family origin, community, nation, even social relation to non-human surroundings from pets to trees to childhood hurricanes, then the Creator—equally responsible for each and every human being’s unique place—would have to be incredibly powerful and everywhere present, just to be able to fulfill that intention of creation. Such a Creator likely does not intend harm or indifference, but only what we could rightly call “Love.” The combination of design and diversity is desired.
That “all men are created equal” not only indicates a Creator, but implies that this Creator is intentional, powerful, present, and loving. Not fate, not chance, but sovereignty and love are to owe for our great diversity, our sense of individuality, our having been thrown into our lives without our say, our feeling of responsibility to this mysterious fact of our existence. And in this fact, having been created by a Creator, we are all equal.
Perhaps the reader remains unconvinced by that intuition. I admit, it does leave many questions still unanswered, and many others not yet even asked. I won’t argue. Instead, I can only continue treating this truth as its own premise. I warn that the reader refrains from doing so at his own peril. Trying to understand “all men are created equal” in ways which ignore theology have failed.
III. “…and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
Because persons are creatures, they have intimate relationships each with his Creator. As far as the Declaration goes, the chief part of this intimacy is a certain endowment. An endowment is a personal gift and trust. It bespeaks both grace and responsibility. The Creator, however mysterious and vaguely defined, cares to grant each individual an equal endowment. And this is one of “certain unalienable Rights.” “Certain,” because these are both specific and firm. “Unalienable,” because these never can be taken away, separated from, any human being, so long as he is who he is—a creature, given such status on account of the Creator and not of himself.
And now, “Rights.” What are rights? Generally, rights have been considered in two ways. In ancient times, “right” was thought in the sense of what is right, what ought to be—justice. This sense of justice was both broad and narrow. Justice needed no criterion beyond itself, it comprehended pretty much every other category. Right, in this ancient sense, came to cover whatever it is best to be.
In modern times, however, “rights” came to be thought in a different way. Instead of being what is right on its own account, they turned into what people have, or what individuals can claim for themselves, or what human beings are owed by others. Whereas the ancients thought justice to be something one was obliged to reach, the modern considers just what you can oblige others to respect and give to you—or what you can take for yourself. Hobbes argued there is no right (in the ancient sense) in nature. There, everyone is in a war of each against all.
How will the Declaration define “Rights”? We’ll need to finish the sentence to find out. But it seems already that its definition will fit uneasily between the ancient and the modern. For Right, in its ancient sense, is hardly equal. Being as it is whatever is best, it is by definition not equally created for all human beings.
And while the modern sense of rights seems to fit better with the Declaration’s usage, don’t think it fits exactly. For the Rights of the Declaration do not truly belong to individuals. They are, rather, endowed, granted. It is as if the Justice which the ancients thought existed high in the heavens had descended to reside in each human heart. Aristotle might have thought such an event profane, while Hobbes would have called it mythical gobbledygook. I described it in a religious image on purpose. Images are often better at defining than concepts, and I think this image is a good start. Further explanation of the image will come as the Declaration explains itself.
IV. “…that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”
As the Declaration begins to help us understand what Rights are, it makes usure to admit that it is not comprehensive in so doing. “That among these…” means there are more rights to be listed than those it mentions. Here the Declaration nods to necessary ambiguity.
To some this will sound unsatisfying. I think it prudent. Whatever rights are, they must be limited. If infinite, then either they would be infinitely owed to us from others—and then we would each be perpetually unsatisfied tyrants—or they would be infinitely high standards over us, which we could never reach—and then we would all resemble that accursed titan rolling his rock uphill each day. Or maybe both (as rights-talk makes me feel these days). In neither case would these rights be unalienable.
Though rights must be defined, however, they cannot be cut to such a small size that we could grasp them entirely. In that case, we could throw them away, as humans always do with anything they have total control over. Rights are not such things. They aren’t even things. They are unalienable, inseparable from us, and thus, like us, both finite and more mysterious than we can comprehend. We can’t grasp ourselves, even as we see our limits. So too our rights.
With that ambiguity addressed, we can now move to the firm sense that the Declaration gives of these “certain unalienable Rights”: that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Life, it should go without saying, is given to each of us. Despite recent pretensions of technologists and old pretensions of overbearing parents, life is not given by humans. Although mothers and fathers partake in creation, they know well—ask them—that they aren’t in charge of the process. A child is conceived, grows in the womb, and is born. The father only knows (in the ancient sense), and the mother only bears.
So who gives Life? The Declaration answers, the Creator. This Life is my Right because it was infused to me upon my creation, such that it can never be alienated from me in a way that I would any longer be my (living) self. And yet it is my Right. That is, it is not really mine—something I have and can do with as I please—but what I ought to be. I have no Right to death. Why? Because my life is not my own. My life precedes my self and its powers and possibilities to act for myself. I was created, born, and continue to exist, involuntarily, and all the work I must do to live—eat, drink, etc.—is an obligation that I owe to my Life. And what I owe to my Life, its Right, is what I owe to the Creator who gave me the unalienable Right to Life.
Such a claim probably sounds strange to contemporary ears, since we tend to identify our life with our choice. But it is a very good thing that our Life, and our Right to Life, goes before our choice. First, for the simple reason that our choice is not always reliable. Second, because this means you, whoever you are, wherever you are, no matter what, have a Right to be here, now. To be created just as you are, is to be affirmed absolutely to exist, apart from any other justification or reason-giving. God wants you to be. And therefore, no one, and no government or mob, has any Right to take your Life. Fundamentally, only the Creator, Nature’s God, has any ‘right’ to take your breath away.
It is incredible that a political document—meaning a piece that is bounding up in the business of war and policing and killing—stakes its claim on the “self-evident” truth that each human being ought not to be killed, that because each human being has been given Life. The Declaration claims that before there is the nastiness of politics, there is Life, and therefore there is Peace. We will dwell on this more later. But we cannot go on before recognizing what a radical claim this is: the Right of Life means Life is much higher, and much deeper, much more foundational, than the power and violence we exert over each other and ourselves. Our natural state is Life, not Death. And this idea is only the start of a most radical restriction of politics in a purportedly political piece of paper.
Liberty is the second unalienable Right listed. It is the second because it cannot be the first. But it is the second. All human beings have an unalienable Right to Liberty. But what is liberty? It cannot be the right to do whatever you want, if only because, in light of the past paragraphs, the Declaration has already shown you can’t kill yourself or others. But it is already limited by the belief that Liberty is endowed to the individual by the Creator. Because Liberty, like Life, is given, it transcends our usual ideas of unrestricted choice. Liberty means that we must make our own decisions. We cannot help but choose.
This paradox reveals that we are creatures of will. We desire, and are compelled by desire, and deliberate over our desires. We have been created conscious, and no government, no law or ruler or society, will ever be able to alienate us from our consciousness, without thereby making us cease to be ourselves. None ought even to try. And that is why each human being has the unalienable Right to Liberty. The Creator has desired a creature with the inevitable ability to choose, so the Creator has endowed the human with will, consciousness—and in its moral sense, conscience.
All men are equally endowed by their Creator with the unalienable Right of the Pursuit of Happiness. This Right may be the most entrancing of all three. Almost needless to say, we do not have the right to happiness but only to its pursuit. As creatures of Liberty, we are creatures of distance: given our consciousness, there is distance between what we are and what we want. Our lives are spent in the span between our hearts and the objects of our affections. And we can choose to direct our hearts differently, sometimes rightly or wrongly. But each of us has been given the desire, not just for anything, but for (whatever we think is) our own good. We can’t help but do so. And so we are given the pursuit of happiness, but not happiness itself.
Why is this pursuit a Right? Some might think it’s closer to a tragedy. We’re always chasing our desires and never attaining them, like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill. But the “we,” who “hold these truths to be self-evident,” do not think this way. For they hold that the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness has been endowed in each person by their Creator, Who has also gifted each of them with Life and Liberty, both of which are necessary to pursue happiness. They believe the Creator has given all human beings the needed tools, all for an ultimate purpose, an ultimate fulfillment. This may not be a guarantee, but it is a promise to our nature: we were each created to search for our final end, and we may well find it, since were endowed by a Creator, not blind chance or cruel fate, to find it. So our pursuit of happiness must be right. And it is an unalienable Right, for if I ever lose this desire to reach my ultimate fulfillment, then I would cease to be myself. I would no longer be that creature of distance and desire. I would have neither life nor liberty.
There is a lot packed into this phrase—“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” As I hope should be implicit by now, these three rights interlock with, depend upon, each other. While they are in a certain order, not one of them can remain without the other. Each of them is “unalienable.” They cannot be separated from any individual. Insulted, attacked, but not removed. Only total destruction of the individual can really remove them, but then there’s no person left to be separated from his rights.
Now the question arises, as I’m sure it’s been lurking in readers’ minds: Is all this true? We see everywhere, and in all times, these rights forsaken, both by oppressive governments and even by the individuals who hold them. Some days, it seems every aspect of life is working toward the goal of alienation. All this is sadly true—on the political level.
The Declaration, therefore, is not making political claims. These Rights are not political Rights, like voting or being represented in legislative assemblies. They are essential, meaning they reflect who we are, whatever political situation in which we find ourselves. Our sense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is so basic that we can understand them as essentials of human nature. Everyone has these (yes, including the most exceptional cases of human disease and disability).
Why? How? Not just by virtue of being born, but because each of us was equally created and endowed by our Creator with these Rights. This means that these rights speak not only to who we essentially are, but who we essentially are in relation to our Creator. Our Creator desired that each of us has Life. Simple enough. Our Creator has desired that each of us has Liberty. Why? So we may freely relate to our Creator. Our Creator has desired that each of us Pursue our Happiness. Why? So we may reach our ultimate end in our Creator. The Creator, in creating each human being, manifests the Right of what can only be summed up in one word: Love. Love is the free relation of living beings, pursuing their ultimate happiness in each other. And since the Creator is responsible for causing all this, it stands to reason to call this a Loving Creator.
The Declaration, therefore, when it lists these three Rights, describes a theological anthropology, an understanding of what humanity essentially is in relation to God. Here the Declaration makes its stand on theology before it even cares to talk about politics.
But we must ask: is this theology part of the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” or is it only a declaration of the “one people,” the “we” who “hold these truths”?
If what was just declared were to be read as the laws of nature, then this section would act as a short treatise of its own. Just a dash of ‘Enlightenment Providential Deism,’ as scholars now like to call it. The philosophical reader could treat this clause as a claim of metaphysics—or more accurately, a claim of physics, as if the idea that all men are created equal aspires to as much universal validity as Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics.
But if we tried to judge “these truths” as a modern scientist would examine a ‘law of nature,’ then it probably wouldn’t survive. Some analytic philosopher, somewhere, has already come up with a ‘possible world’ as a counterexample to the rights listed above. And whether or not he’s right, the fact that he could muster suspicion already proves these claims are not ‘self-evident’ in the indubitable sense.
Instead, these “self-evident” truths are so for the American people, who—united—hold them. And remember, this whole paragraph is written as a cause for the “separation” of this one people from another. We hold these truths, while they do not.
But is it nothing more than that? If it’s all just high language laid as cause for separation, then the “we” should be isolated to the delegates who got the authority, well-earned or otherwise, to sign the Declaration. And the “truths” would be just the opinions held by these delegates at that time and place.
And yet the Declaration speaks of a people, not just the signatories or those who selected them. The relation between the people and these truths is reciprocal: “we hold these truths…” The people is made one people by the fact that these human beings, in these circumstances, have come to hold, and do hold, these truths as “self-evident” premises of their common life. If they ever stopped holding them together, then the whole claim that they are one people (and therewith their cause of separation) would come undone. The truths would remain, but only on the theoretical level. They would be sentences to contemplate and analyze, but not foundations of a polity.
This reciprocity between people and truth resembles a tenet of faith. It is ‘subjective’ insofar as the practical effect of the truth depends on the people’s holding the self-evident truths as authoritative. But it is ‘objective’ insofar as ‘subjective’ adherence to these truths does not create but relies upon these truths as its basis.
So, the answer to this question—whether these are self-evident truths or only declarations of what these Americans hold as self-evident—must be both. This statement expresses (what the American people believe are) the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God. In that respect, it is a compact work of metaphysics. But this statement, as a testament of what the American people hold to be true, at once also expresses the nature of the people who are doing the holding.
The people is one people as it holds these truths and treats them as self-evident, i.e., treats them as its foundation.
The claim of this section of the Declaration, is that that there is one people constituted by a shared belief in who human beings are by nature: creatures, each equally endowed by his or her Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that it is right for human beings to be treated as such, and so it is each human being’s right to be allowed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—all of which is to say: to relate as creatures to their Creator. As noted earlier, this is hardly a political claim! It speaks about the character of the people, and it grounds that character, not in ethnicity or commercial or martial ideals, but in theology—before the Declaration ever gets to defining the state.
The Declaration, then, puts theology and culture above politics and statecraft. Such ordering might be hard to understand today, given the common prejudice that everything is political, which more often means, everything is partisan. But let us read on to see the Declaration only just begin to speak of politics:
V. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Rights need securing. While they cannot be alienated, they can be, and very frequently are attacked. Rights preceded government and politics. But it is the nature of government “to secure these rights,” to safeguard them. That is why “governments are instituted among men.”
Notice the passive voice—“are instituted among…” The Declaration does not say, “individuals gather together to draw up a contract of government,” nor “great men create governments,” nor even, “God ordains governments.” I think that is because the Declaration knows that governments arise in a great variety of ways, and rarely through means that are reducible to a single, typical action, let alone one active voice. Some arise by kings, others perhaps by contract, others still through collective Declaration. More often than not, necessity and circumstance, not willful action, theory, or agreement, determine their origins. But however they arise, the Declaration clarifies, governments’ legitimacy is grounded upon whether they serve their purpose: to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is the duty of government to protect “these rights.” So governments derive their legitimacy, their “just powers,” from the consent of those who have those rights. Since the rights bind the government, we must interpret the “governed” here as individual persons: each human being, with his or her rights, under the government. While I have emphasized the communal aspects of the Declaration at times, I cannot do that here. At this point, the Declaration knows of no right of a people, a nation, a corporation—only individual rights.
This is a radical claim. Governments do not derive from God, nor from clan, but from individual consent. Have the Founders “unchained this earth from its sun,” as Nietzsche suggested? To some, perhaps—if they stay in the dark about the nature of rights and individuals.
The Declaration has already enlightened the reader of what it thinks about persons and rights. Each person is created by God, with equal endowment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such language captures the nature of the intimate relation between Creator and each human creature. Each person was made to search for, and Lord willing, to find and love God. Nobody can ever take that away, though so many try. It is the government’s duty and purpose to protect its people from those people, corporate bodies, and evil circumstances which do attack this most fundamental purpose. To secure the right of creatures to freely relate to their Creator—that is the source of government’s “just powers.” That is how the Declaration first defines what political justice is.
Such theological institution is not for the sake of puffing up the government with the pride of divine right. Instead, the theological argument is for the purpose of humbling the government. The ordering of the Declaration is key: there are individuals, there are peoples, and then there are governments. Persons and peoples precede government. It is not the government’s role to establish the person, for that role belongs to the Creator. It is not the role of government to establish the people, for that role belongs to happenstance. It is the role of persons already in communities to institute governments. And it is the role of governments to secure the rights of the persons who established them.
A question, or a possible contradiction, seems to have just arisen. Only three paragraphs ago, I claimed that rights properly belong to individuals, so the government is accountable to individuals and not corporate bodies. But just now I admitted that peoples—communities, corporate bodies—precede governments, so governments would somehow be accountable to them. Which one is it? As if the Declaration has anticipated this very question, it gives the answer in the next sentence.
VI. “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and it institute new Government…”
A people has one right. Not to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness (in the ultimate sense), for those belong to individual creatures, but to alter, abolish, and institute—to change government. This right is not unconditional, though it might be unalienable. (It’s hard to imagine a people that has given up its right to change its rule, as such would seem no longer to be a people but a herd, a crowd, of slaves.) Its one condition: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends.”
“Form of Government…” may be read in two ways, both correct. “Form” may refer to whatever part of a government that has become destructive. The people may cut it off and graft on a new branch.
“Form” may also mean the whole of any government—monarchy, republic, democracy, aristocracy, etc. Any of these forms can become destructive. If we think we can solve our worst crises by becoming as democratic as we could be, or by trusting rule to experts, we are fools. The criterion of government is not its specific shape but whether it has become destructive of “these ends…”
Now, what are these ends? They cannot be the unalienable rights described earlier. For these rights cannot be destroyed or taken away from their holders. But their holders can be destroyed. That is why they band together to form governments, and in so doing secure their rights (and themselves) from attack. It is this end—of securing these rights—to which the Declaration just now referred.
But that is not the only end. The Declaration defined the “one people” of America as “we” who “hold these truths to be self-evident.” The unity of the people depends, not only on the security of individual rights, but also on the shared holding of these truths. It is, therefore, the government’s duty not to become destructive of this shared basis of unity. By attacking these rights, or failing to secure them, or by trying to conceive its role in any way different from the one prescribed to it by this section of the Declaration, a government would become destructive of the collective identity and culture of the American people. It would endanger the people which, after all, instituted it.
This is not just a matter of high-stakes Enlightenment political science, where Whigs in wigs decided to add guns and cannon to their abstract principles. The Declaration knows that the American identity and unity, the people itself, are in the balance.
Now we can make sense of the “Right of the People” to abolish any form of government that has become “destructive of these ends.” This is a right in both the modern and ancient senses mentioned earlier, meaning both a capacity and a duty. It is foremost a duty, because the people has the responsibility of self-preservation.. Yet it is also a freedom, a capacity, because persons and peoples precede governments. What a people has instituted, however actively or passively, the people may change and even abolish, with the one condition that it do so in order to maintain the integrity of its persons and the stature of its people—not for what the Declaration will later call “light and transient causes”.
So the tension between persons and communities is to be solved by their mutual protection from the destructive tendencies of government. Many observers have puzzled over the highly communal and yet highly individual character of Americans. And commentators for a long time have argued the tension has fatally loosened in one direction or the other.
If the Declaration has any answer to these commentators’ concerns, it is that America is, and must be, a place where persons and people are united, with the government their servant and not their master. If government ever should rise to lord over the persons and the people, then our individuality and our common culture shall be in jeopardy. By the logic of the Declaration, altering or even abolishing such a government would be called for.
VII. “…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 clause is a fine example of the Declaration’s combined rigor and latitude. The people are not free to be arbitrary. They cannot change government to their fancy, or to the worse. The Declaration is firm in requiring people to lay “foundations,” and upon “principles.”. It has already named these principles: the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “these truths” held “to be self-evident.” Any government formed anew by a people would be accountable, like the abolished government before it, to these principles.
And yet the Declaration knows that people—not principles or treatises resulting therefrom—are the ones who form governments. And people inhabit different times and places and circumstances. Above all, people are fallible.
So government is neither spontaneous nor eternal. People must lay the foundations of government, organize its powers into a form, and they must judge what shall seem most likely to succeed at living up good principles and self-evident truths. None of this work will be perfect,. It will have to work with times, face unforeseen risks, and pursue specific goals: safety and happiness.
These two words refer to the safety and happiness of the people as a community. Happiness is not promised to individuals, only its pursuit. If it was, their liberty would be destroyed—they would be unfree to be unhappy. Likewise, life cannot be taken from a person. (I know this sounds strange; our common way of talking about it is inaccurate. Whether you are an atheist or a believer, you cannot think a person can be separated from his life: either a person dies and there is no more person to have had his life taken from him, or the person dies, and his life is in his eternal self, and he is, however long, separated from his body, not from his life.)
Safety, on the other hand, can be taken. And communities in which persons are unsafe, are unsafe communities. So the government, by securing the rights of individuals, attains what seems “most likely to effect” the common safety and happiness of the people. This might be called “the common good.” (I hesitate, because the Declaration does not use this language.) This common good is indeed aspirational, and thus always provisional, subject to judgment and negotiation. But because it involves only the secure pursuit of individual happiness, not guarantee of its attainment, it is not so far out of our grasp that it becomes “utopian”.
VII. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”
The judgment that applies universals to particulars is called “prudence.” Prudence dictates restraint before action. Power and stability, low virtues though they are often make for more safety and happiness than higher aspirations can manage. An imperfect but functional government is preferable a more theoretically coherent but practically dysfunctional union between government and ideals.
And in any case, human beings are “more disposed” to suffer wrongs than to set try to set things right. Is this a moral judgment or just an observation?
To some extent, the Declaration is noting that a “conservative” tendency seems more natural than a revolutionary one. Prudence shows that this tendency is often the better course. The Declaration is not like The Communist Manifesto, calling for continual revolution all around the world.
At the same time, the Declaration refuses to give up on its principles. To admit there are times when “Evils are sufferable” is not to deny or justify evil. Prudence recognizes the necessity for these times of suffering, but refuses to sugarcoat them as if they were good in themselves.
Even if it is not good in itself, though, suffering can be a means to good ends. In suffering wrongs, we can come to know our rights. The Declaration suggests that Americans have come to understand their rights, and thus who they are, in the experience of oppression. In that sense, prudence reveals that suffering evils has been a valuable lesson even though it should not and must not continue forever.
VIII. “But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism…”
A rejoinder to Prudence’s dictates lay hidden in the last sentence and now rises to the fore: but this is no longer one of those times when it is better to endure. This is a time now tending toward “absolute Despotism.” And not accidentally. Truly bad government “evinces a Design”. As with creation, a design implies a designer. Thus, there must be someone responsible for “pursuing invariably” just this “Object.”
What distinguishes intentional despotism from mere incompetence? Despotism is 1) the destruction of the people, and 2) the attack upon individual rights. The two criteria are intertwined. Despotism is defined, not just by its cruelty or aggression, but by its intention to transcend the “consent of the governed.” By violating this fundamental right, the despot aims to destroy the safety and happiness of the people. And once the whims of the despot control, and thereby destroy, the conditions of the people, the rights of the individual are soon to come under attack.
It is not just that individual rights are mediated by the community, though of course individuals who have rights are always in communities. The true danger to individual rights comes by virtue of the despot pretending to break into the relation shared by the individual and the Creator. Having subjected the people to its will, despotism pretends to hold the power of the Creator. After all, it was Providence that brought the course of human events to create the people. Now that the despot has (so he thinks) corralled the people into his own power, who’s to say he isn’t worthy mediate individual rights as well? “Absolute Despotism,” then, is the attempt to take the place of the Creator.
This is a typical definition of despotism. It holds for every case, and whether the subjects or the tyrant know it, the attempt to usurp God lies always at the basis of tyranny. But the American context adds a further application of the definition. Suppose a ruler would not dare to attack the integrity of the community as whole but only the rights of particular, disfavored individuals. In America, such an attack would nonetheless tend toward destruction of the American people. For the American people has its foundation in the common holding of the self-evident truths of unalienable rights. Violation of the rights of one justifies violations of the rights of all.
The “train of Abuses” committed by the Crown was not so cruel or harsh, judged by historical standards. Some readers might find them to have been worthy of prudential suffering instead of resistance. But a higher prudence saw that this was just the danger. By force of habit and the tendency of people to adapt to their circumstances, abuses would become “normal”, and “normality” would overrule the shared truths that the American people had grown accustomed to holding.
For the Americans, then, this moment in time truly was a crisis. It was the time when the American people would decide whether they would be one people, or allow the mastery of others to undo their nationhood, gradually or suddenly. This understanding also explains why it was necessary to declare the rights specifically rather than merely demanding the restoration of previous forms of laws and government. Without a clear statement of principle, customs and traditions could always be threatened in the future.
IX. “…it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”
Put by necessity into a crisis where both individual rights are under attack and the nature of the people is in mortal danger, it is the Right and Duty of the people to defend themselves. And not only to defend. A government that proven its designs for despotism, has proven unworthy to govern ever again. The people must not just reform but “throw off such Government” entirely. Because the people cannot leave themselves under anarchy, they must then “provide new Guards for this further Security.”
This clause concludes the section on the self-evident truths held in common by the American people. And while it might seem only a logical deduction of what came before, this clause does contribute something new, an answer to one lingering question: What is a Right? Is it what we owe to others, as the ancients believed? Or is it what is owed to us, as moderns insist?
Here the Declaration answers, both. A people has both a Right and a Duty to throw off the despotic government. It is their Right because, as this people exists, so it ought to exist. It is owed its existence because Providence, in directing the “course of human events,” has deemed it should exist. And so peoples, like individuals, have are owed and therefore have the liberty to pursue self-preservation.
But why is it a Duty as well? Why should the People throw off the despot? After all, they could survive under much crueler circumstances than any the Declaration goes on to list.
The answer goes beyond mere self-preservation. The people, again, were formed by historical circumstance—Providence. They do not owe their existence to themselves but to God. Yet despotism intends to take the place of the Providential Creator. In other words, it attempts to destroy the people physically or to change their character in such a way that they are no longer themselves. The word despotism now sounds old-fashioned, but the underlying ideas remains legible. In the 20th century, we came to speak of “totalitarianism” as the overwhelming, technologically-assisted ambition to destroy or transform reality itself.
With this understanding in mind, we see why revolution can be a duty as well as a right in the modern sense. The despot is both idolatrous and an idol. By acceding to despotism, the people would not only lose themselves, but would commit idolatry in so doing. And that, no one should do. All must throw off idolatry, because all owe themselves to God. This holds true in the spiritual life of individual rights, and it holds true in the political life of communal rights.
So the people must throw off despotism, not just moderate it. But the people cannot leave it at that. They must “provide new Guards for their future Security.” Anarchy is not allowed. If it were, then it would prove the preservation of an existing people is not the genuine goal of revolt.
It is curious, however, that the Declaration states, “new Guards,” not “new Government” here. Perhaps the American people did not yet know how they would govern. Perhaps they envisioned such limited means as to be called only guards and not government. Or perhaps some envisioned a government much like the rule that was being thrown off, except it would have the consent of the governed.
This ambiguity is proper to the argument, however. The Declaration is not a constitution, let alone a blueprint for every constitution. The form of government instituted by each people does not matter so much as its purpose, and whether it serves that purpose well. And that purpose is not to found or establish, not to transcend or rule, but only to guard and secure—really, to serve—the rights of the people and the rights of the persons within the people.
All that is the self-evident truth, at least to those Americans who hold it.
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