The Fourth of July, and Ideals worth Celebrating

As the New York Times’ Ezra Klein put it recently, there has been in our time ”a severing of American history into two visions: one that can only see glory and one that can only see suffering and sin.” The MAGA vision—seeing only glory—is by far the more dangerous, as it seeks quite literally to outlaw the teaching of anything negative about America’s past, no matter how true. But the understandable tendency of those on the left to see in American history nothing more than a betrayal of American ideals, is also unfortunate. That America and Americans have as often as not failed to live up to lofty ideals is fundamentally important. But so are the ideals themselves.

It’s become easier to lose sight of that fundamental truth as the study of intellectual history has lost ground over the past couple of generations.* Yet ideas remain of fundamental importance not only to historical developments, but also to how we live today. Ideas matter, regardless of how flawed the human beings who have advanced those ideas may have been. Notoriously, the man who wrote “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” was an enslaver. But Thomas Jefferson’s personal hypocrisy does not detract from the importance of the ideas he put forward.

For whatever reason, Americans have very often been at the forefront when it comes to the putting forward of new ideas that become ideals—that are held up around the world as principles that we should strive to live up to.

That’s not to say that all Americans have espoused these ideals, of course. In some cases, the ideals have grown from ideas that were long regarded by most Americans as extreme, impractical, or flat-out wacky. Such was certainly the case with the notion that women should be regarded as equal to men (an idea advanced by Judith Sargent Murray in America years before Mary Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman). It’s still the case with the notion promulgated by William Alcott’s in the 1830s, that we humans should not be cruel to other creatures—meaning, specifically, that we should not kill them and eat them, or take babies away from their mothers so that we can drink the mothers’ milk.

To laud America as a font of ideas and ideals in no way implies approval of how America has acted as a nation over its first 250 years. Nor does it require us to adopt a celebratory attitude towards the revolution that Jefferson’s “these truths are self-evident” declaration set in motion. (As historian David A. Wilson argues in today’s Globe and Mail, the American Revolution made things worse for America’s Indigenous peoples and for America’s enslaved peoples, and entailed a civil war that killed tens of thousands, arguably quite unnecessarily.) It is simply to acknowledge that, far more than most parts of the planet, America has been the cradle of great ideals—ideals that continue to inspire humans throughout the world.

* To be fair, there have been encouraging signs of a reversal of this trend in recent years.