The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• The declaration they were writing was intended to herald a new type of nation, one in which our rights are based on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.
• It became the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand. 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.
• The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book, Leviathan, hypothesized that humans in primitive times lived in “a state of nature,” with no government. Lacking rules, this “anarchic war of all against all” meant that life for most people was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In order to emerge from this state of nature, people eventually came together and agreed to submit themselves to governing authorities.
• Hume developed a theory, later known as “Hume’s fork,” that there are two types of truths. One type is “synthetic” truths, which are statements whose truth is contingent on empirical evidence and observations. For example, “London is bigger than Philadelphia.” The other type is “analytic” truths, ones that are true by reason and definition. For example, “All bachelors are unmarried.” To confirm a synthetic truth, you have to observe real-world facts, such as calculating how many people live in London compared to Philadelphia. But that is not the case with analytic truths. To know that all bachelors are unmarried, you do not have to go around surveying bachelors to see if any of them have wives. “Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought,” Hume wrote. Their truth is self-evident.
• All men. A phrase that seems on the surface to be very inclusive was, in fact, very restrictive, and its eventual expansion, in fits and starts, is a key element in the narrative of America.
• Specifically, the Founders were rejecting the idea, fundamental in the British system, that there were certain hereditary social classes, beginning with the royalty and aristocracy, that had more rights than other classes.
• “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said, echoing an 1853 sermon by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. But it’s important to remember that the arc did not bend itself. It was, and remains, a constant American struggle to make the phrase “all men are created equal” truly inclusive.
• Deism was the creed of most thinkers of the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century Age of Reason that emphasized rationality, science, individualism, and natural rights. Its leaders included Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and, in America, Franklin and Jefferson.
• These truths became the creed that bound a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation. For a people with many different beliefs and backgrounds, it defined our common ground and aspirations. As we reach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, we are embroiled in increasingly polarized debates over policies ranging from healthcare and housing to immigration and the role of religion in our society. One way to restore stability to our politics is to look at issues through the two ideals that are at the heart of the Declaration’s key sentence: common ground and the pursuit of the American Dream.
• The concept common ground has always been part of humanity’s struggle to create a good society.
  • Pluribus
• Locke in his Second Treatise declared that humans can create private property by combining their labor with things they take from nature. But he included a famous limitation, known as the Lockean Proviso: only “where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”
• In colonial Boston, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote a book titled Essays to Do Good, in which he said that people could best serve God by creating institutions that benefited the common good.
• Franklin and Jefferson understood balance. They were part of an Enlightenment era that embraced the scientific method of testing and revising beliefs based on evidence. Both of them studied Isaac Newton, whose mechanics explained how contending forces could be brought into equilibrium. Their goal on contentious issues was not to triumph but to find the right balance, an art that has been lost today. Compromisers may not make great heroes, Franklin liked to say, but they do make great democracies.
• That phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, The Epic of America. “The American Dream,” he wrote, “is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
• The technology that promised to connect us found a better business model in dividing us.
• These policies also led to the rise of a meritocratic elite in America based on educational credentials. The economy and its rewards were geared to those who went to college; the 62 percent who never finished college ended up feeling resentful, or were made to feel it was their own fault that they were left behind.
• Jefferson would have understood the trend toward a meritocratic elite. He favored creating what he called a “natural aristocracy” to replace the hereditary aristocracy that existed in England. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he advocated a school system in which “the best geniuses [would be] selected, and continued six years, and the residue dismissed. By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed at the public expense.” The approach of raking an elite from the rubbish and dismissing the residue did not turn out well. The entrenchment of a meritocratic elite came at the expense of community and the American Dream.
• Franklin correctly saw the danger of creating a meritocratic aristocracy. His proposals for what became the University of Pennsylvania were designed not to filter a new elite but to provide opportunities and enrichment for all young people to succeed as best they could, whatever their level of talent. He aimed at what he called “true merit,” which he defined as “an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends and family, which… should indeed be the great aim and end of all learning.”
• What is the purpose of an economy? To increase wealth? Yes, that’s good. Growth? Yes, also good. But the purpose of an economy is also something deeper. Its purpose is also to create a good society. A good, stable society where individuals can be free and flourish and live together in harmony. That requires nurturing the sense that we share common rights, common grounds, common truths, and common aspirations. Democracy depends on this.
• Take any issue: healthcare, housing, schools, zoning, or whatever else is being debated around the dinner table or at City Hall or in Congress. What policies and attitudes can we adopt, what balances can we strike, that will strengthen our common ground and the American Dream?
• he helped lead the fundraising for a new hall that would provide a pulpit to visiting preachers of any belief, “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”
• A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.