Recently, there’s been a lot of furor over the NPR criticism of the Declaration of Independence as “a document with flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies.” This popular opinion is repeated as if these “flaws” and “hypocrisies,” if they indeed exist, somehow invalidate or give the lie to the argument itself.
But I challenge anyone at NPR, or anyone in academia or politics, to point out any inconsistency or flaw in its argument. There is no flaw in this document when we see it for what it is: a DECLARATION of a “new truth” constructed according to the principles of scientific reasoning. Its purpose is not to change society immediately but to create the conditions of change by asserting a “more true” description of the Natural World, and this knowledge, like all scientific knowledge, is what will change the world as human beings enact that truth across the spectrum of society. The Modern World has been created, and liberty and human rights have been furthered, as other social systems competed with the “new truth” of equality declared here, and progress and change have been steadily enacted across the human landscape since that time. Arguing that the Declaration is false because the people who wrote it, or the society that created it, are hypocrites is like asserting that because some doctors are incompetent or greedy means that medical science is a fraud. Let’s discern the difference between truth, and the ability of human beings to live up to the truth.
