Published By: American Enterprise Institute
Available from:
The American Revolution: Democratic Politics and Popular Education
Affiliation: Professor of psychology at City College of the City University of New York
Venue: Little Red Schoolhouse, St. Charles, MN
Excerpt:
Nearly two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson stated the moral basis for the establishment of an independent United States of America: “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.” This assertion of the equality of man was not in itself new. It had its religious roots in the Judaeo-Christian attempts to control the more primitive impulses of man by identifying religion with man’s responsibility for his fellow man.
The principle probably had its most systematic philosophical roots in the seventeenth-century rationalism of John Locke, which laid the foundation for political democracy upon the premise that every human being entered this world as a blank slate ( tabula rosa) and that all were therefore equal. Locke’s insistence that whatever differences were found among groups of human beings had to be explained by postnatal experiential and environmental differences may be viewed as the rationale for the democratic demands and revolutions that have dominated the world since his time. The idea of the inherent equality among human beings marked the end of the doctrine of the divine rights of kings and a significant stage in the disintegration of the feudal world.
When man began to believe that all human beings were potentially equal and that differences in status were neither ordained by God nor biologically determined, then man could look to remedy existing inequalities and injustices by controlling and manipulating the environment. This is probably one of the
most revolutionary ideas ever to take hold in the human mind.
Not only Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, not only the architects of the French Revolution, but also Marx and Engels, even perhaps Lenin, and more recently Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other fighters for racial and economic justice in America and throughout the world-all have been influenced by the seventeenth-century egalitarian philosophy of John Locke.
It is ironic that even as Thomas Jefferson expressed this democratic premise as the basis for the founding of this new nation, his own predicament as a slaveholder and as an apologist for the continuation of slavery in the United States was a symptom of the schizophrenia which continues to afflict the American social and political system. The fact remains, however, that in spite of its many contradictions, the United States was the first nation which asserted its right to independence in moral and ethical rather than economic or military terms. In spite of many violations of its democratic ideals in day-to-day practical politics, the value of America’s insistence upon its democratic ideals must not be underestimated.
These democratic ideals have provided a motive power for the ongoing and necessary struggle for justice and equality. They continue to provide the foundation for the expansion of democratic public education in the United States. And they have provided critical support for the general civil rights movement which started with the earliest abolitionists, continued through the Emancipation Proclamation, and was intensified in the persistent twentieth-century struggles to eliminate the last vestiges of state-controlled racial inequities.
Probably the earliest problem in reconciling the egalitarian ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence with the existence of human slavery in the New World came to the surface with the controversy about whether the African slaves and their children should be converted to Christianity and be taught to read and to write. This controversy combined both religious and educational issues. Those who opposed the conversion and education of the African slaves tended to support their argument with the assertion that the African slaves were not quite human. Ironically, this unprecedented need to deny full humanity to the African slaves seems to have stemmed from the fact that the white European slaveholders were themselves Christian. The view that the African slaves were not quite human could be used to exempt white Christians from any sense of guilt over the inevitable cruelties and dehumanization inherent in human slavery, a sense of guilt that would otherwise be commanded by the Christian requirement to love and protect one’s fellow human beings. Indeed, books written by clergymen in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century sought to justify slavery by alluding to that part of the Bible wherein God gave man dominion over the beasts of the field. These men of the cloth unashamedly asserted that the beasts of the field included African slaves.