In his response to Casey Spinks, John Fea objects to a “textualist” approach to the Declaration of Independence. Fea wants something “more nuanced: an approach that takes the document’s original purpose seriously while also recognizing how its significance has evolved.” For Fea, “the Declaration’s enduring significance lies not in its ability to transcend history, but in its capacity to be reinterpreted within it. It is a product of its time. It is also a resource for ours.”
My purpose here is not to adjudicate that dispute, though as a philosopher I am probably bound to feel friendlier toward Spink’s textualism than a historian like Fea does. Instead I want to press the question whether and in what way this product of its time really can be a resource for ours, as Spinks and Fea agree.
It seems to me that our time has a certain uncomfortable resonance with the circumstances that led – by “necessity,” as Spinks has it – to the Declaration. If a separation was necessary then, what kind of separations might be necessary now? How willing should we be to contemplate such possibilities? Especially since Spinks’ explicit hope is that the text of the Declaration can reduce our growing divides?
The word “necessity” does a lot of work in Finding the Founding. If I understand Spinks correctly, the term designates an historical fact that generates a moral obligation. In this case, the historical fact is the emergence of something called “the American people.” At a certain point in time it simply becomes true that the American people are a people, separate from “their British Brethren,” and that Americans now have not only rights as individuals but shared duties as members of that people. The Declaration declares the fact, and by declaring it fulfills that obligation.
“People” is another word that does a lot of work. Spinks thinks the emergence of distinct “peoples” or nations is itself necessary. This means that nations do not will themselves into existence on their own terms, as in Hobbes. Rather they arrive as unpredictable gifts of circumstance. Our choice is to accept what is given, not to make new ones for ourselves.
By accepting that accomplished fact, we make our people our own. According to Spinks’ interpretation of the Declaration, we have a duty to do this. Thus his claim that the Founders’ effort to “hold on” to what held them together makes the American Revolution a conservative one. Though for Spinks it was “at the same time a radical [revolution],” since the Founders were held together by principles that “stand over and against [the status quo], holding it to account, even calling, when necessary, for revolution against it.”
But when is it necessary, precisely? How do we know when that line has been crossed, and those who were formerly British colonists, part of the one people, become Americans, part of another “separate and equal” people? Is it even possible to pose the question that way – “how do we know” – since the “we” does not yet exist? Perhaps it would be better to ask how I know, or how one knows.
But Spinks must reject that formulation: his whole point is that the existence of the “we” does not depend on whether an individual agrees that it does. Otherwise, the individual could escape his obligations simply by refusing to agree that the “we” exists. That would be easy enough, since it is hard to demonstrate the existence of anything like a “people.”
Peoples have fuzzy boundaries in time and space. We talk about “Americans” and “British” and “Chinese” and so forth, but any freshman logician can poke holes in definitions. And of course it is not just a logic game. Or, more precisely: what seem to be logic games have social consequences. After all, we all used to know what a woman is.
Another name for the freshman logician is “sophist,” and I am not trying to play that role. Of course distinct peoples exist. So do women. But it is interesting to observe that our time is rife with precisely this sort of sophistry, by which literally any category can be shown to be socially constructed (not given by “Necessity”), and can therefore be deconstructed and reconstructed until it more closely resembles what we would choose in a world freed from the illusion that anything at all is Necessary.
Spinks wants the Declaration to speak to a moment marked by deep division over what it means to be an American; he offers the Declaration’s principles as a source of unity, of “re-membering.” But our divisions seem deeper – more metaphysical – than disagreements about who’s in and who’s out. They seem more like disagreements about whether anyone can ever be “in” a category that he does not get to construct for himself, or whether all such given categories are unjust impositions on one’s “rights.”
Spinks rightly rebukes advocates of the concept of “Heritage Americans” for imagining that one is “born, but not made” an American, if I may twist Beauvoir’s famous dictum about women. On the contrary, says Spinks: one is both born and made an American; made by the struggle to “settle,” to accept what is given and make it one’s own. This speaks eloquently to some contemporary debates. Spinks suggests that “Heritage Americans” obsessed with lineage and contemptuous of the struggle to reconcile with the actually existing America, find their mirror image in cosmopolitan liberals who praise “struggle” in the abstract but understand that struggle as an effort of “otherwise unconnected individuals” to free themselves from what is given (or rather from what people call “given”), “and in the process treating the people and places around them only as means to private ends.” A pox on both your houses.
But the Declaration, if we read it as Spinks does, is not a document that brings together the divided house, so much as it is a document that takes a side in the fight. Spinks’ Declaration declares for one party in the American culture war. I hope Finding the Founding finds the ideologically broad readership that Spinks wants. But I find it more useful as an exercise in sharpening than in ameliorating the differences such an audience would contain.
To read the Declaration as Spinks wants us to, to read it as seriously as Spinks wants us to, may be to throw it down like a gauntlet at every American who believes that nothing is even real if it is not the product of his own will. Can such radical voluntarists be part of the same project of “settlement”? Or must we separate from our brethren who disagree with the Declaration on fundamental questions about theology and anthropology?
Perhaps a heightening of the contradictions is what is now necessary – or even Necessary. If so, then the Declaration is a “resource for our time.” But I’m not sure that’s what Spinks had in mind.
“Necessity,” as I’ve said, is for Spinks a historical fact that generates a moral obligation. The historical fact in the Declaration’s case is the emergence of a distinct American people. But what generated that historical fact? According to Spinks’ Declaration, it was “the Crown’s choice to become an empire ruling over many separate peoples and colonies, rather than remaining the national representative of one people.” In other words, it was the failure of the British to fulfill their own moral obligation to the historical fact of their own peoplehood. This is an interesting way to explain what’s wrong with empires. Imperialism on this account is rooted in the same refusal to accept what is given as legitimate, or even as real, that we now associate with the postmodern left. When Karl Rove said “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” was he not playing the same logic game as Judith Butler?
Yet America was an empire long before Rove declared it so. Spinks makes much of the Declaration’s suggestion that an independent America will demonstrate the fact of its independence – the reality that it is now a distinct people – by holding other nations “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” Spinks finds here a theory of nationalism: “one people, corresponding to its one state, existing as a friend to all the other peoples of the earth.” This is the “American spirit of nationhood,” and America can afford such “magnanimity” because “because, as the American people come to hold the truths which bind them as self-evident, their experience provides evidence through example of the reality” that all Men are created equal, etc. Setting this example for the world “required then, and requires now, no adventures, no manifest destiny. Only practice.”
Perhaps. But the international adventures started right away, did they not? I do not want to make too much of this, partly because I know that Spinks addresses it in the larger Finding the Founding project, where he rightly refuses to downplay all uncomfortable questions about westward expansion and the fate of the Native tribes, not to mention slavery. And I have already said that I am happy to go along with Spinks’ decision to bracket historical context in pursuit of “the text itself.” Perhaps the text has always been and still can be a standard by which to condemn our various “adventures.” My point here is not that we are hypocrites, but that Spinks’ own terms suggest that things are more complicated than “nation good, empire bad.”
The problem is that empires do create their own realities. They rearrange the social world in profound and lasting ways. Some peoples die out, new peoples are forged. New historical facts are given. Our obligation, if we follow Spinks’ logic of Necessity, is to freely accept what is given to us. But this seems to leave us with no standard by which to condemn imperialism, and thus no justification for separating from an empire on the grounds that it is an empire, ruling us imperially rather than representatively.
What Spinks needs, then, is a way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate historical facts. And he finds it in the distinction between action that is responsive to one’s obligations to the political community one has been given (America’s choice to declare independence), and action that flouts those obligations (Britain’s “choice to become an empire,” to declare America’s dependence). But I am wondering if this is a distinction that makes any difference on the stage of history, even if it is logically coherent.
Think again about those Native tribes and slaves. In keeping with his hope that the Declaration’s text (whatever its original intent) could serve as a common standard, and thus as a source of commonality in a deeply divided polity, Spinks surely hopes that the victims of American hypocrisy, or rather their descendants, can find themselves in the founding, and thus in the American nation as it now exists. He hopes, in other words, that the victims can consider the perpetrators, or rather their descendents, to be “brethren.” But if this is his hope (and it is my hope too), then what he hopes is that imperialism will have been a cause not only for the separation of one people into two, but for the unification of several peoples into one. What is this if not creating a new reality?
That is what I mean when I say that imperialism might be more morally complicated than Spinks’ Declaration allows. Yet there is still something very valuable in the idea that imperialism may be a cause for separation precisely because imperialism, as an attempt to make of reality nothing but what we will, rejects the attitude of obligation. Just because an imperial project can (eventually) produce consequences which a proper attitude toward Necessity can turn to the good does not mean that the project should not be opposed, or that it should be joined when proposed. Spinks is on firm ground here.
But once again I am not sure it is the firm ground he has in mind, because it may be further grounds for separation. If Spinks’ Declaration takes a side in the culture war, by answering the fundamentally theological and anthropological questions at its heart, it also seems to take a side in the growing conflict over foreign policy, which may be just as fundamental (and just as ideologically unpredictable: it’s now as easy to find a right-wing opponent of the Iran War as a left-wing opponent). What are we going to do with the American empire? What are we going to do with what we have been given as China rises, Russia bristles, and Europe falters; as populations collapse and technologies accelerate and economies generate extraordinary wealth and extraordinary inequality?
There are, perhaps, two competing instincts. There is the instinct to pull back, to recover some semblance of a republic from the clutches of a (dying?) empire, to “decolonize” ourselves. And there is the instinct to expand, to manifest our destiny both internally and externally, to lean in, move fast, break things, and see what new and better realities we can create in the ruins. Spinks, I think, clearly feels the first instinct, and Spinks’ Declaration commends it as the better path. But I don’t think that’s the instinct that will win out. And it may be that there will be future occasions for separation, for conscientious withdrawal from new imperial projects both at home and abroad.
Or not; who knows? The point is not really about the future and what it might bring. It’s about how Spinks’ Declaration would have us, as Americans, relate to an American government that is arguably already less of a “national representative of one people” than ir is an “empire ruling over many separate peoples and colonies” both within and beyond the borders of the state. The same question arises: when, exactly, is separation necessary?
Of course, there have always been plenty of weirdos willing to take things to their logical conclusion and set up would-be free states, communes, and colonies of malcontents. There are the long-standing independence efforts in actual states like Vermont and Texas. And, though I have been trying not to mention it, there was a certain War Between the States, which some were pleased to compare to the original war for independence. Here I cannot help but bring some of Fea’s historical context to bear, and recall Jefferson Davis’ Inaugural Address:
The declared purpose of the compact of Union from which we have withdrawn was “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity;” and when, in the judgment of the sovereign States now composing this Confederacy, it had been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and had ceased to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot-box declared that so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined to be inalienable; of the time and occasion for its exercise, they, as sovereigns, were the final judges, each for itself. The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct, and He who knows the hearts of men will judge of the sincerity with which we labored to preserve the Government of our fathers in its spirit.
I will say it again: “imperialism” is complicated.
Is the Declaration a resource for our time? I think it is, but in more ways than one. None of the questions I raise here should be taken to suggest that we should not look for a “usable past” in the Founding, and in the Declaration in particular. But perhaps we should not be surprised if what we find is just as useful to projects of separation as to unification.
Nor should my questions be taken to suggest that such projects are to be discouraged. I despise “the culture war” when it is nothing but a shouting match on social media. But I also think the questions at the bottom of that conflict cannot be avoided. As Wendell Berry puts it, “ it is easy . . . to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” Perhaps these two groups will eventually become two peoples, as entitled to independence of each other as the Americans once were.
Imperialism is complicated, but all my instincts are against it. Yet I can easily imagine a future – or a present – where the interests of our government and our interests as Americans cross a line of divergence that forces some hard choices. Perhaps in those moments the Declaration will only become more “usable” than it is today. But we might wish that it were not so relevant to our situation.
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