It is the Fourth of July, so it is time for a Law and Liberty tradition: a “Declaration and Us” essay. Begun in 2014, these essays attempt to extract nuggets of political wisdom from the founding document of the United States and apply them to today’s political disputations. The two operations are premised on the belief that the Declaration contains perennial wisdom—wisdom that can not only guide but also judge us Americans today. A bold claim, it echoes the bold claim to revolutionary independence on the basis of permanent principles made in the document itself. 

If the reader will pardon a brief reminder, the early essays were more on the Declaration than us, because its actual teachings had to be brought back to life, while more recent ones have more directly taken on contemporary disputes. One can do that when the broad lines of the document’s teaching are known. The last two entries have pursued the question, what does the Declaration have to teach us about how to resist a form of progressive ideology that is the antithesis of the Declaration’s view of human and political equality, of individual and collective self-government? As it turns out, there is a lot of resistance guidance to be mined. The Declaration can show us how to organize resistance and it can remind us that government in America is always under judgment, as well as provide criteria of judgment for us to apply to government today. 

This year’s effort, although it continues the theme of resistance, is somewhat of a throwback, because I plan to talk about a topic I have not talked about before: the civic anthropology of the Declaration. (What I mean by the phrase will become clear in due course.) This choice of topic is prompted by what I think is one of the basic issues that our current circumstances force us to think about: what is human nature? This, of course, is a major topic of dispute today; one only needs to write the word “transgender.” In keeping with the Declaration’s political focus and emphasis, I will not say anything about the Declaration on human sexuality other than to note that it includes the “Sexes” (along with “Ages” and “Conditions”) in a list of items that should be treated in a discriminating way in civilized warfare.

What I have in mind is the issue of civic anthropology that was raised in dramatic fashion the past few years by the draconian “Covid-justified” measures—lock-downs, required vaccinations, vaccine passports, masks, social distancing, etc.—imposed on the public. Clearly these measures presupposed a distinctive view of the members of democratic society. They were viewed in the aggregate, not as individuals, and as threatened (and threatening) bodies, not souls (public worship was not deemed an “essential service”). Many were shamed, frightened, and coerced into submitting to their putative scientific betters and political superiors. What we could call old-fashioned democratic dignity involving the rights of conscience and a panoply of civil and constitutional rights was deliberately and cruelly denied. If we are to avoid a replay of this authoritarian scenario, we need to unmask the perpetrators’ ideology, power centers, and networks, and revive the sources of democratic dignity. Thinkers like Giorgio Agamben and Aaron Kheriaty have contributed importantly to the first task with their analyses of “the biosecurity state.” As for the second task, we can take today’s celebration as an opportunity to reconsider the civic self-understanding of our forebears who successfully resisted encroaching despotism. Fundamental to it was a distinctive understanding—a normative understanding—of what it is to be a human being. 

When it comes to the Declaration’s notion of human nature, most will turn instinctively to its second section, what I have previously called its “principles of politics.” There we find the most famous lines of the document: “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.” These lines are indeed a good starting point for what the Declaration has to say about man, but, following an old interpretive principle, they need to be read in the light of the nature and purpose of the document as a whole. This allows us to see new dimensions of meaning in the familiar words, dimensions of which we are in particular need today.

The tendency is to read them as a detached “theoretical” affirmation. Now, I would be the last to deny that reading them in this way has yielded insights (as well as generated scholarly controversy). However, the Declaration is not a theoretical document, it is very much a practical document, and it employs the phrases cited above in an account of its deliberation and decision to act a certain way. The lines, therefore, need to be taken contextually in a more practical, or active, manner, and not simply as a statement of fact or belief. The Declaration looks at “all men,” or human nature, in the light of its own (and others’) purposive activity and activity’s norms. Looking at them in a practical light and out of a practical concern, it perforce discovers a correlative object: human beings as agents. This is subtly conveyed in a word twice repeated in the passage: “created/Creator.” The act that creates “all men”—“creation” itself—is an act, a supreme act, and its object here, “all men,” partakes in that dynamism. In and by their creation, men are equipped with powers of action and norms of action. 

It is important today to highlight this practical aspect of the Declaration’s teaching about man because of our situation and the challenges we face. It is important to emphasize our capacity for agency, our nature as agents, because our world is so complex and the challenges we face—including powerful malevolent agents—so daunting, that many run the risk of retreating or capitulating before the complexities and the challenges. To go forward as free citizens we need a sense, nay the conviction, of our nature and capacities as agents. For example, in the face of an educational system that divides citizens into victims and victimizers, we need an education not just in human and civic equality but in agency and its proper use. This is what the Declaration itself does and provides.

Thus, after laying this principled foundation, it brings it to bear on a determinate set of agents, the king and his allies in parliament and the “good People of these Colonies” and their eminent “Representatives.” The Declaration is both a narrative and a denouement of a grand contest between particular lovers of liberty and those who would deny it to them. Its focus on their dramatic back-and-forth in subsequent parts of the document should not, however, cause us to lose sight of the anthropological universals being applied to the dueling particulars. The latter embody and are judged in their light. And as we have begun to see, these universals are both ontological and moral.

In this vein, I draw the reader’s attention to another word in the passage: “unalienable.” It contains a most important implication. It implies that a being—in this case, a human being—has a definite structure and composition. Taking one element out of it (in this case, rights) entails the destruction of the being. “Unalienable” means that without the feature, the thing as a distinct kind does not exist, conceptually or really. By it, the Declaration signals its belief in a fixed human nature. To be sure, this is a matter of implication, of brief indication. Nonetheless, with certain “unalienable” items ascribed to “all men” as part of their native “endowment,” we are encouraged to pursue a certain line of reflection. What else is unalienable in human nature?

Reason comes immediately to mind. To see it in its Declaration richness, however, its normative richness, another characteristic of the document must be taken into account: its performative enactment of its view of human nature. What the Declaration has to say about human nature’s faculty of reason is displayed in deed, rather than “theorized” in it. The great act of reason, which is the Declaration itself, combines in a focused synthesis a number of distinctly rational categories and operations: the grasp of “principles,” a survey of “Facts” that connects effects to causes and means to ends, self-reflection and moral judgment (on self and other), the determinations of “Prudence”, and more. The Declaration affirms reason’s amplitude precisely by exercising its range. 

This full panoply of reason is still available to American citizens, and no doubt is required to consider the recent “Covid-justified” authoritarianism. Many dots need to be connected, both at home and abroad, to have an understanding of the networks of causes, triggers, and beneficiaries of a worldwide pandemic, responded to in draconian anti-democratic ways that were planned, prepared, and even “war-gamed” by powerful individuals and groups, as Kheriaty details in his book in a 14-page section entitled “War-Gaming Pandemics.” After laying out a series of “simulation exercises” undertaken by “intelligence and other government agencies in the United States” beginning in 1999, he writes that “this series of pandemic war games culminated in an astonishing simulation exercise, which preceded the first publicly reported case of covid by only a few weeks.” The beginning of his discussion deserves citing, in part because of the cast of characters it introduces:

In October 2019 the renamed Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation organized a tabletop pandemic simulation scenario with epidemiologists and other experts called “Event 201: A Global Pandemic Exercise.”

Participants included high-ranking individuals from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese government, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company (Johnson & Johnson), the CDC, a former NSA/CIA director, and Avril Haynes, later tapped by [President] Biden to be the director of national intelligence—the highest-level intelligence official in the United States. Several of the participants in this simulation quickly moved into key positions to run our real covid pandemic response only a few months later.

Kheriaty begins his report of “highlights from the scripted scenario and tabletop discussion” by giving Bill Gates, who “instructed participants to roleplay as members of an international “Pandemic Control Council,” the word. The “scenario” he laid out for the gathered potentates began: “A new coronavirus (yes, you read that right [interjects Kheriaty]) begins in pigs and spreads to humans.” In a masterpiece of understatement, Kheriaty concludes: “Considering that Event 201 was staged a few weeks before anyone had heard of covid, but while Wuhan was simultaneously seeing its first unreported cases of the novel pathogen, we must admit that this was quite a remarkable script.” Remarkable indeed.

Kheriaty’s 262-page book is chock-full of such public-domain facts. The Declaration can provide the rational categories and operations required to come to grips with them, as well as those the reader may collect on his own.

It also cautions that the time to do so is not indefinite or infinite, that at some point defending our liberties against those who wish liberal democracy ill will confront the conjoined imperatives of “Necessity,” “Right,” and “Duty.” Then the stark alternatives before freedom will be immediately present. In a countervailing way, however, it also reminds those more advanced than their fellow citizens in this investigation of the need for patience with them, given the long-suffering character of the populace before political evils, as well as the unprecedented character of our situation, where most established points of orientation have proven grossly inadequate. Prudence alone can dictate how to navigate these realities. At least one thing is sure: “Facts” must be constantly sought out and marshaled and their despotic “Design” repeatedly laid out in public and private. I would venture that this is the first task of those who today would fulfill the role of “Representatives” as the Declaration presents the type.

Of course, human nature is more than reason and the Declaration’s civic-minded anthropology is more than reason detecting and denouncing advancing tyranny. In the Declaration’s own terminology, it is also an expression of “manly Firmness,” as well as of various cardinal virtues. (We invoked prudence above.) These moral categories are another indication that the Declaration presupposes a fixed view of human nature: only on such a basis can it discern, name, praise, and blame positive and negative developments of that nature. In the Declaration’s judging eyes, while all human beings are created equal, not all human conduct, not all moral characters, are created equal. There are villains and heroes in the Declaration’s narrative of the contest over liberty and self-government and these are starkly contrasted in both moral (“Justice and Magnanimity”; “Cruelty”; “Perfidy”) and political terms (“free People”; “Tyrant”). Progressives and others who only take from the Declaration the thought that human beings are equal and free, and go on to claim that it thereby provides license for radically egalitarian self-definition, fail to see the created rational substance that undergirds human equality and freedom and turn a blind eye to the moral categories rooted in it that the Declaration freely employs. 

Among these qualities, two stand out as ones we arguably are most in need of today: manliness and trust in God, or as the Declaration phrases them: “manly Firmness” and “firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence.” Like our forebears, our efforts at “humble” “petitions” for “Redress” have been ignored or scorned by unrepentant would-be Masters; sterner virtues are therefore needed to steel those who wish to defend their civil and political liberties and, more deeply, their God-given natural rights. But because the task is so daunting, powers beyond our own, as well as those of our powerful enemies, need to be found. The Declaration itself, which begins with the affirmation of Creator-endowed natural rights and ends with a firm reliance on divine Providence, instructs us where to look.