As any American school child should know, the American Revolution began on July 4, 1776. It ended up being a thoroughly bloody revolution, but not nearly as bloody as that of the French or the Russians — nor as viciously vengeful. We chucked a monarch and we changed regimes, but we didn’t kill a monarch or attempt to change the social order.
Instead, the Declaration of Independence opened up far more radical territory than mere regicide or class warfare. It began with words expressing carefully thought out ideas — ideas that would be next to impossible to put forth, or rigorously defend, were people as smart as Thomas Jefferson to try to say them today.
The Declaration of Independence begins with an appeal to natural law — i.e., law outside of, or beyond, civil law. It asserts that there are “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which we Americans, in starting a revolution, were calling on to justify our actions. It goes on to assert that there are certain “self-evident” truths (natural law again) — namely, 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.”
Our revolution bound us together by principles adhered to by Enlightenment thinkers, most of whom were either atheists or, at most, pietists. Yet belief in natural law crumbled almost immediately afterward — hammered by the combined forces of 19th-century philosophy and science. Who among today’s intelligentsia, other than those within the Catholic Church, would dare to try to vigorously argue the case for natural law? True, there have been a couple of contemporary political philosophers, such as John Rawls, who have tried to resuscitate it, but very few of us, even those of us who read them, passionately commit ourselves to the idea of natural law. No one can revive the thrilling perspective of the Enlightenment, and natural law today has become terrain mostly controlled by crackpots who don’t want to pay taxes, or “feel” that their “personal philosophy” trumps civil law.
So here we are, more than 200 years after our revolution, a country firmly founded on natural law even though natural law would be extremely difficult to defend today.
Perhaps none of this matters. Like millions of others, I will hang the American flag outside my home today. My mother gave me this flag, which replaced the one that had once draped my uncle’s coffin when he was killed near the end of World War II. The original had disintegrated, made into a mess full of holes by moths and the passage of time.
