When the American Founders separated from political control of Britain, they might have simply said: we are done with your annoying colonialism. Instead, Thomas Jefferson set out to write a manifesto that struck at the very heart of all political systems, laying out a theory that would change all of human history. His words still echo today and serve as the benchmark for what is considered liberty, justice, and the good society.
His statement is so astonishing and sweeping, especially for the time, that it’s almost hard to believe it made it into print.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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. / That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, / That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, 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 line about the pursuit of happiness is Jefferson’s own. It is glorious. It is not happiness that is guaranteed but only the freedom to pursue it in one’s own way. And the notion that all men are created equal is also incredibly great. Note the word created: implicit theism there. All men means of course all people, and you can see from this one phrase why so many slaves and slave traders at the time considered him to be a secret abolitionist. He was in fact exactly that.
Indeed, the Declaration became of course the basis of the abolitionist movement, and the driving force behind the terribly tragic war of 1861. The slaves were indeed emancipated but at terrible cost. Looking back, one would have hoped for a more peaceful solution such as we saw in Britain later. Conjectural history aside, there is no question that Jefferson’s words were behind the birth of a new form of freedom for all.
Also the phrase strikes at the heart of the divine right of kings, which surely sent shivers down the spines of every royalist the world over. Further, to the deployment of the idea of equality, Jefferson did not mean that God made everyone the same. That would be absurd. Equally absurd would be the notion that laws and governments should seek to make everyone the same. The point is that everyone is born in equal dignity and deserving of equal freedom to pursue happiness.
It was a radical and wonderful statement, and still resonates today. It remains a revolutionary text. It’s stunning to think how a piece of parchment could have changed the world so fundamentally and beautifully. Even today, the idea of human rights is the core of what all main political systems in the world advertise as realizing or seeking to realize. Nothing better has replaced it. And this is precisely why the idea is so subject to wild distortions and has been for a very long time.
One reason Jefferson kept his miniature and sweeping statement on human rights and government so short was to be precise, in hopes of not introducing confusions over meaning. But the human mind can be quite creative to the point of being completely unhinged. It’s one thing to be emancipated from actual colonialism and slavery, but it is something else entirely to seize on the idea of liberation and apply it to every tradition, settled cultural norm, moral postulate, and belief system.
Jefferson called for liberation from an oppressive foreign government. He was not calling for liberation from reality itself.
Here we saw the birth of transcendentalism, plus every sort of mesmerism, which was a kind of liberation from traditional religion, along with a millenarian expansion of the idea of women’s rights that carried forward the Suffragette movement and later Prohibition itself (since to be liberated from demon rum also seemed like the right thing to do).
If you think that novels from those times are boring, think again. This book is daring, insightful, revealing, and downright wicked in its devastating critique of high society. The book tells the story of Basil Ransom, an old-money conservative from Mississippi and his confrontation with his cousin, the Boston feminist Olive Chancellor who is unmarried. She is tutor and mentor to one Verena Tarrant, whose age is never mentioned but seems to be about 16 years old or so.
It appears that the high society women had chosen Verena to be their prophetess, seer, and spokesperson, and trotted her around to preach their new theories of the heaven on earth that would be unleashed if women were given perfect equality. In other words, she was a young woman used by elders for their political agenda in a deeply exploitative and manipulated way.
Nothing new under the sun, right?
Verena’s doctrine was not just about granting legal rights of women to own and transact in real property claims, something no one really disputed with any serious passion, and a change that would have come about anyway. The issue of women’s admissions to universities was being resolved nevertheless.
The promise of this gang of activists was far more grand: that women would occupy equal social and professional standing in every way with men to the point that they would rule and dominate not just in the home or private life but in politics, business, industry, and everything else. Basil Ransom finds all this to be poppycock and predicts that should this happen, women will in fact give up all their real, authentic, and fully earned powers to newly inhabit a realm of deep unhappiness, loneliness, and misery.
Not to give any spoilers here but you can guess the ending. Ransom calls out Verena as a fake who is only trying to please her elders, proposes to her, and they elope in defiance of her benefactress and the whole of Boston high society. It’s truly a bitter and shocking ending in some ways, and oddly satisfying. I cannot even imagine what kind of reception that book had at the time.
Having watched the movie, and read large portions of the long book, I now have new respect for Henry James as a writer and social critic. This is a massively valuable social history of the time. It was a strange era with the birth of all forms of new and often dangerous ideologies. It’s good to understand them and see what’s wrong with them.
The book can only cover so much history, and James himself could not have foreseen the Suffragette movement, much less how it mutated to become the Prohibitionists only a few years later. But he did see how the paradigm of liberation can be transmogrified into its opposite.
This is not the fault of Thomas Jefferson. All words and ideas are subject to distortion. It is the fault of the sheer arrogance and craziness of the human mind.
All of which speaks to every sort of false liberation we see in operation today, whether it is the dream to emancipate us from infectious disease by even more treaties and controls or the transhumanist movement’s goal of liberating us from biology itself. These are all misapplications of the greatest idea in history. Somehow we need to find our way back to the plain and clear words of Thomas Jefferson himself.
