love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
“love is a place” by E.E. Cummings from Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George James Firmage. Copyright © 1935, 1963, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1978 by George James Firmage. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. (poetrysociety.com)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Maimonides Moses ben Maimon | |
|---|---|
| Speculative 18th-century depiction of Maimonides | |
| Born | 30 March[1] or 6 April[2] 1135 Possibly born 28 March or 4 April[3] 1138 Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain) |
| Died | 12 December 1204 Fostat, Ayyubid Sultanate (present-day Egypt)[4] |
| Notable work | Mishneh Torah The Guide for the Perplexed |
| Spouse(s) | (1) daughter of Nathaniel Baruch (2) daughter of Mishael Halevi |
| Era | Medieval philosophy |
| Region | Egypt |
| School | Aristotelianism |
| Main interests | Religious law, Halakha |
| Notable ideas | Oath of Maimonides, Maimonides’ rule, Golden mean, 13 principles of faith |
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| showInfluenced | |
| Signature | |
| Part of a series on the |
| Philosophy of religion |
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Moses ben Maimon[note 1] (1138–1204), commonly known as Maimonides (/maɪˈmɒnɪdiːz/ my-MON-i-deez)[note 2] and also referred to by the acronym Rambam (Hebrew: רמב״ם),[note 3] was a medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages. In his time, he was also a preeminent astronomer and physician, serving as the personal physician of Saladin.[8][9][10][11][12] Born in Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain) on Passover eve, 1138 (or 1135),[13][14][15][16][17] he worked as a rabbi, physician and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt. He died in Egypt on 12 December 1204, whence his body was taken to the lower Galilee and buried in Tiberias.[18][19]
During his lifetime, most Jews greeted Maimonides’ writings on Jewish law and ethics with acclaim and gratitude, even as far away as Iraq and Yemen. Yet, while Maimonides rose to become the revered head of the Jewish community in Egypt, his writings also had vociferous critics, particularly in Spain. Nonetheless, he was posthumously acknowledged as among the foremost rabbinical decisors and philosophers in Jewish history, and his copious work comprises a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. His fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah still carries significant canonical authority as a codification of Talmudic law. He is sometimes known as “ha’Nesher ha’Gadol” (the great eagle)[20] in recognition of his outstanding status as a bona fide exponent of the Oral Torah.
Aside from being revered by Jewish historians, Maimonides also figures very prominently in the history of Islamic and Arab sciences and is mentioned extensively in studies. Influenced by Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and his contemporary Ibn Rushd, he became a prominent philosopher and polymath in both the Jewish and Islamic worlds.
His full Hebrew name is Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (רבי משה בן מימון), whose acronym forms “Rambam” (רמב״ם). His full Arabic name is Abū ʿImrān Mūsā bin Maimūn bin ʿUbaidallāh al-Qurtabī (ابو عمران موسى بن ميمون بن عبيد الله القرطبي), or Mūsā bin Maymūn (موسى بن ميمون) for short. The portion bin ʿUbaidallāh should not imply that Maimon’s father was named Obadiah, instead bin ʿUbaidallāh is treated as Maimonides’ surname, as Obadiah was the name of his earliest direct ancestor. In Latin, the Hebrew ben (son of) becomes the Greek-style patronymic suffix -ides, forming “Moses Maimonides”.
The dominion of the Almohad Caliphate at its greatest extent, c. 1200 CEFurther information: History of the Jews in Egypt § Arab rule (641 to 1250)
Maimonides was born 1138 in Córdoba, Andalusia in the Muslim-ruled Almoravid Empire during what some scholars consider to be the end of the golden age of Jewish culture in the Iberian Peninsula, after the first centuries of the Moorish rule. His father Maimon ben Joseph, was a Spanish dayyan (Jewish judge), whose family claimed direct paternal descent from Simeon ben Judah ha-Nasi, and thus from the Davidic line. Maimonides later stated that there are 38 generations between him and Judah ha-Nasi.[21][22] His ancestry, going back four generations, is given in his Iggeret Teiman (Epistle to Yemen), as Moses son of Maimon the Judge (hadayan), son of Joseph the Wise (hachakham), son of Isaac the Rabbi (harav), son of Obadiah the Judge.[23] At an early age, Maimonides developed an interest in sciences and philosophy. He read those Greek philosophers accessible in Arabic translations, and was deeply immersed in the sciences and learning of Islamic culture.[24]
Maimonides was not known as a supporter of Kabbalah, although a strong intellectual type of mysticism has been discerned in his philosophy.[25] He expressed disapproval of poetry, the best of which he declared to be false, since it was founded on pure invention. This sage, who was revered for his personality as well as for his writings, led a busy life, and wrote many of his works while travelling or in temporary accommodation.[26] Maimonides studied Torah under his father, who had in turn studied under Rabbi Joseph ibn Migash, a student of Isaac Alfasi.Maimonides’ house in Fez, Morocco
Another Berber dynasty, the Almohads, conquered Córdoba in 1148 and abolished dhimmi status (i.e., state protection of non-Muslims ensured through payment of a tax, the jizya) in some[which?] of their territories. The loss of this status left the Jewish and Christian communities with conversion to Islam, death, or exile.[26] Many Jews were forced to convert, but due to suspicion by the authorities of fake conversions, the new converts had to wear identifying clothing that set them apart and made them subject to public scrutiny.[27][28]
Maimonides’s family, along with most other Jews,[dubious – discuss] chose exile. Some say, though, that it is likely that Maimonides feigned a conversion to Islam before escaping.[29] This forced conversion was ruled legally invalid under Islamic law when brought up by a rival in Egypt.[30] For the next ten years, Maimonides moved about in southern Spain, eventually settling in Fez in Morocco. During this time, he composed his acclaimed commentary on the Mishnah, during the years 1166–1168.[31] Some say that his teacher in Fez was Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Cohen Ibn Susan, until he was killed in 1165.[32]
Following this sojourn in Morocco, together with two sons,[33] he sojourned in the Land of Israel before settling in Fustat in Fatimid Caliphate-controlled Egypt around 1168. While in Cairo, he studied in a yeshiva attached to a small synagogue, which now bears his name.[34] In the Land of Israel, he prayed at the Temple Mount. He wrote that this day of visiting the Temple Mount was a day of holiness for him and his descendants.[35]
Maimonides shortly thereafter was instrumental in helping rescue Jews taken captive during the Christian Amalric of Jerusalem‘s siege of the southeastern Nile Delta town of Bilbeis. He sent five letters to the Jewish communities of Lower Egypt asking them to pool money together to pay the ransom. The money was collected and then given to two judges sent to Palestine to negotiate with the Crusaders. The captives were eventually released.[36]
Juan Michael Porter II July 5, 2021 (SFChronicle.com)
Every Sunday after church, my father and I had a date. Invariably, my behavior would lead him to beat me once we returned home. It’s perverse to say, but at a certain point the pain transformed into something I looked forward to.
We took drives to purchase fruit yogurt to reward me for having endured the beating. I have always hated fruit yogurt, but I look back on those rides as the sole moments of calm that we ever shared.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered how uncommon it was to run out of the house screaming to escape a post-bath belt-whipping. Or, after I was hunted down, to be laughed at as my oozing welts stuck to my pajamas.
I was 9 years old when I gave up on winning my parents’ love.
Because I was an outspoken brat who never skipped an opportunity to talk back, I was told that I wanted and deserved the treatment I received. The horror is that I accepted this rationale. It imbued me with an “I’m screwed no matter what I do, so I might as well screw up big” world view — one that I’m still struggling to unpack.
Whenever the possibility of an argument materialized, I ignited it. If I’d bitten my tongue, I might have escaped. But I couldn’t; my parents’ slaps were the only love language that I was offered. It was also the sole form of control that I had over my life. I could not make my parents smile, but I could trigger their hate effortlessly at the drop of a dime — and though it left me scarred, at least their rage was a sign that I mattered.
But I eventually grew tired of dealing with my bruised skin and emotions. So I put away childish things, targeted other grown-ups, and pumped them full of the feelings I didn’t dare show at home.
I groomed older men and women at the church where I served as an altar boy and blackmailed adults who showed me untoward attention into having sex. I made clear that refusing me would result in the accusation of raping an innocent boy with highly litigious parents.
My first time was with a 25-year-old congregant. I was a 10-year-old boy who had sexual desire but no business sleeping with an adult. Besides confusion, what stays with me is the memory of relief that someone was finally touching me because they wanted to use me for pleasure and not because they wanted to hurt me.
At the time, I felt proud of my accomplishments; I was finally worthy of painless attention. It doesn’t feel so great now to realize that my “partners” were pedophiles or that I was a predator.
I separated from my parents at 16 and appointed my best friend’s mother as my guardian. I became the son she never had, the overachieving brother my new sister never wanted, and celebrated my triumph by pretending that everything was fine, while pushing away the friends who cared about me.
I told my adopted mother that I didn’t want to be like my father. She kindly informed me that I would be unless I figured out how to undo the damage that had been done to me.
I am still learning.
Some people say that if you spare the rod, you’ll spoil the child. Corporal punishment teaches values. All it taught me was that violence was the answer — though I substituted psychological warfare for brute force.
My list of misdeeds is long.
After a bad breakup in 2003, I demanded that my ex-girlfriend, who was a professional photographer, delete every digital picture she had taken during our yearlong relationship. If she refused, I told her that I would expose her illegal sublet to the management of her Section 8 housing, which would have resulted in an immediate eviction.
She deleted the photos.
There are other stories. Many far worse.
When I moved to New York City in 2000, I spent my first two years celibate because I didn’t trust myself.
I still don’t.
I admit that I’d rather inflict harm than feel like a victim. This legacy haunts every survivor of sexual abuse, because hurting people is what we have been taught to do.
We can spot each other from 15 miles away. We twist our heads in a peculiar fashion while sizing people up. We tilt our pelvises while laughing as if to invite someone, anyone, to spend the afternoon exploring what it means to finally be in love. What I recognize in my fellow survivors is the desire for something that we lost a long time ago and possibly never had.
What keeps me going is the knowledge that I don’t have to behave monstrously.
Whenever I feel doubtful about this, I remember that there is life after abuse. I remember that it is possible to grow beyond victimhood without transforming into the people who hurt you.
Confronting your trauma can be excruciating, but it also allows you to heal. And we all deserve to live unencumbered by someone else’s decision to abuse us.
Juan Michael Porter II is the staff writer for TheBody and TheBodyPro, as well as a contributor to the Christian Science Monitor. His writing has appeared in the New York Observer, Time Out NY, Anti-Racism Daily, American Theatre, Dance Magazine and Xtra.
Written ByJuan Michael Porter II
©2021 Hearst
Core Integrity A wonderful clip featuring Mary Bancroft from the documentary on C.G. Jung “Matter of The Heart.” When Jung poked Mary with a very simple question, she was shown a reflection that she wasn’t quite ready to honesty acknowledge… Her response is a quintessential example of “projection”. Jung’s connection to the unconscious meant that he could peer into the depths, and bring it right back out to meet you. This intuitive sensitivity meant that Jung could “know” the (supposedly) unknowable. Watch documentary here: https://youtu.be/Ed3vPb9bmcw
It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind — a stage on which, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed in his landmark work on consciousness, we often “use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.”
We do this on the personal level — out of such selective memory and by such exquisite exclusion, we compose the narrative that is the psychological pillar of our identity. We do it on the cultural level — what we call history is a collective selective memory that excludes far more of the past’s realities than it includes. Borges captured this with his characteristic poetic-philosophical precision when he observed that “we are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” To be aware of memory’s chimera is to recognize the slippery, shape-shifting nature of even those truths we think we are grasping most firmly.
Art by Cecilia Ruiz from The Book of Memory Gaps, inspired by Borges
Nearly a century after Nietzsche admonished that what we call truth is “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms… a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished,” the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910–September 6, 1998) created an exquisite cinematic metaphor for the slippery memory-mediated nature of truth in his 1950 film Rashomon, based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove” — a psychological-philosophical thriller about the murder of a samurai and its four witnesses, who each recount a radically different reality, each equally believable, thus undermining our most elemental trust in truth.
As researchers in the second half of the twentieth century came to shed light on the foibles of memory, Kurosawa’s masterpiece lent its name to the amply documented unreliability of eyewitness accounts. The Rashomon effect, detailed in this wonderful animated primer from TED-Ed, casts a haunting broader nimbus of doubt over our basic grasp of reality — we only exist, after all, as eyewitnesses of our own lives.
All of these psychological perplexities arise from the basic neurophysiological infrastructure of how memories form and falter in the brain — something the great neurologist Oliver Sacks explored in his classic medical poetics of memory disorders, and something South African biomedical scientist Catharine Young explores in another TED-Ed episode, animated by the prolific Patrick Smith:
Complement with Neurocomic — a graphic novel about how the mind works — and the animated science of how playing music benefits your brain more than any other activity, then revisit Virginia Woolf on how memory seams our lives, Sally Mann on how photographs can unseam memory, and neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin on how medicine’s most famous amnesiac illuminates the wonders of consciousness.
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary in her seventy-seventh year as she looked back on a long and lush life to consider the central role of solitude in creativity.
A generation before her, recognizing that “works of art arise from an infinite aloneness,” Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) explored the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity in his stunning correspondence with the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul.
Posthumously published in German, these letters of uncommonly penetrating insight into the essence of art and love — that is, the essence of life — now come alive afresh as Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary (public library) by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows: two women who have lived into the far reaches of life — Macy was ninety-one at the time of the translation and Barrows seventy-three — and who have spent a quarter century thinking deeply about what makes life worth living in translating together the works of a long-ago man who barely survived to fifty and who was still in his twenties when he composed these letters of tender and timeless lucidity.
1902 portrait of Rilke by his brother-in-law, Helmuth Westhoff
Anticipating the illuminations of twentieth-century psychology about why a childhood capacity for “fertile solitude” is essential for creativity, self-esteem, and healthy relationships later in life, Rilke writes to his young correspondent in the short, dark, lonesome days just before the winter holidays:
What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss.
Echoing Kierkegaard’s ever-timely insistence that “of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems… to be busy” and Emerson’s observation that “our hurry & embarrassment look ridiculous” the moment we pause the headlong rush of sociality through which we try to escape from ourselves, Rilke adds:
“Solitude” by Maria Popova. Available as a print.
And yet the crucial, exquisite creative tension that Rilke so singularly harmonizes is the essential interplay between solitude and love — each enriching the other, each magnifying the totality of the spirit from which all art springs. In another letter penned the following spring, he writes:
To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Available as a print.
Two decades before Kahlil Gibran offered his abiding poetic wisdom on the difficult balance of intimacy and independence in true love, Rilke calls for shedding the ideological shackles of our culture’s conception of love as a melding of entities. “No human experience is so rife with conventions as this,” he observes with an eye to those who have not yet befriended their sovereign solitude and instead “act from mutual helplessness” to “simply surrender to love as an escape from loneliness.” He offers the liberating alternative that still requires as much countercultural courage in our day as it did in his:
[…]
This more human love (endlessly considerate and light and good and clear, consummated by holding close and letting go) will resemble that love that we so arduously prepare — the love that consists of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.
Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
In another letter, Rilke adds the complexity of physical intimacy to this realm of transcendent difficulty, formulating his advice on how to best harness eros as a creative force:
Sexual pleasure is a sensory experience, no different from pure seeing or pure touch, like the taste of a fruit. It is a great, endless experience given to us, a natural part of knowing our world, of the fullness and brilliance of every knowing. And nothing we receive is wrong. What’s wrong is to misuse and spoil this experience and to use it to excite the exhausted aspects of our lives, to dissipate rather than connect.
Long before scientists shed light on how the sexuality of early flora and fauna gave our planet its beauty, Rilke adds:
Oh that humans might humbly receive and earnestly bear this mystery that fills the earth down to the smallest thing, and feel it as part of life’s travail, instead of taking it lightly. If they could only be respectful of this fertility, which is undivided, whether in spiritual or physical form. For this spiritual creativity stems from the physical, derives from that erotic essence, and is but an airier, more delightful, more eternal iteration of its lush sensuality.
Red poppy from A Curious Herbal by Elizabeth Blackwell, 1737. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
So too with the role of the erotic in creative work:
For more of and about this ravishing new translation of Letters to a Young Poet — one which embodies the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s notion of “that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original,” and the finest such miracle performed on a classic since Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist translation of the Tao Te Ching — savor this On Being conversation with Macy and Barrows about the wider resonances of Rilke’s work in our world, then revisit Rilke’s contemporary Hermann Hesse on solitude and the courage to find yourself, physicist Brian Greene’s Rilkean reflection on how to live with our human vulnerabilities, and Rilke himself on what it takes to be an artist.
BY CRAIG HAMILTON | JUL 2, 2020 | craighamiltonglobal.com
As a spiritual guide and teacher, I’ve worked with thousands of people aspiring to realize their spiritual potential. And if I’ve learned anything in the process, it’s that to evolve on the spiritual path, we need each other.
To truly realize our highest potentials, we need to engage in transformative interactions with other people who share our aspiration to evolve.
It’s a simple idea. But its implications run deep.
Notice how this idea strikes you, and perhaps you’ll see what I mean.
For instance, this notion that we can’t walk the spiritual path alone may resonate with the part of you that longs for connection and support on your journey.
But you might also notice that another part of you finds it difficult to swallow.
In our modern world, in which independence has become almost a religion, the notion that we need other people for anything seems like heresy. Indeed, if we were to embrace such an idea, wouldn’t we be giving away our power, and our freedom?
When we think about traditional depictions of the spiritual path, the picture that often comes to mind is also of a solitary, independent journey. The lone sage on the mountaintop. The yogi alone in the cave. The hermit in a hut. The wandering pilgrim.
Even if we attend church services or classes or meditation groups, most of us still tend to think of our spiritual path as a private, internal, solo quest in which we are the sole determining factor of our own spiritual destiny.
But how independent are we really?
If you’ve ever attended a personal growth workshop or spiritual retreat, you’ve probably noticed that in an environment where everyone is focused on our higher evolutionary potentials, it’s relatively easy to experience a spiritual “high” or to break through to new ground within ourselves.
But what happens when you come home from such an event, and find yourself again surrounded by people who don’t share your higher values and aspirations?
For most of us, in the absence of a supportive social container for our awakening, we find ourselves quickly losing touch with the new potentials that had seemed so accessible in the retreat or workshop environment.
Although we like to think of ourselves as independent, the reality is that we are social creatures. Our ability to co-exist with one another depends on our willingness to abide within a matrix of shared values, assumptions and agreements about what is real, what is important, and what is acceptable behavior.
So unless we surround ourselves with others who share our highest spiritual values and aspirations, we will almost inevitably find ourselves fighting against a kind of invisible but powerful “social gravity” pulling us back into the unenlightened, unevolved “world mind” we’re trying to break free from.
It’s not impossible to generate “escape velocity” on one’s own. But, for most of us, a sustained context of “evolutionary partnership” with kindred spirits becomes essential.
Where and how do we begin to create such an environment?
Begin by asking yourself some important questions:
If a number of people come to mind, count yourself among the fortunate, and then arrange a meeting with your newly identified “evolutionary partners” to begin to create a conscious container for ongoing evolutionary partnership.
In that meeting, make your shared agreements and values explicit. As a starting point, I invite you to discuss with them one of the Principles of Evolutionary Relationship I teach in my Integral Enlightenment 9-week course:
Evolutionary Relationship Principle #5: We agree that the context for our relationship will be leaning into our evolutionary edges. Rather than meeting in our limitations and problems, fears and doubts, we take a stand for meeting in the expression of our highest potential. We take up the challenge of showing up and engaging from that place, stretching to manifest that potential now, and explore that potential with each other.
This is just one of seven Principles of Evolutionary Relationship I explore in the Integral Enlightenment course. But even on its own, if engaged with sincerity, it can serve as a powerful foundation for deepening into evolutionary partnership.
If your relationship inventory does not immediately reveal a core group of potential evolutionary partners, you may need to begin searching for a new group of kindred spirits with whom you resonate at the deepest level.
You can do that in your local area, and thanks to the ever-expanding power of the Internet, you can also now find community online. More and more opportunities are emerging all the time for us to not only find loosely knit spiritual community, but true kindred souls whose aspiration and focus is deeply aligned with our own.
Wherever your spiritual journey takes you, remember: you’re not in this alone. You never will be.
So, seek a supportive context for your higher development. If you do, you may find your solitary spiritual journey being replaced by a rich and joyous relational spirituality, in which the fruits of the path begin to show up immediately as love, trust and shared inspiration with your newfound partners in evolution.
–Craig Hamilton
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
–Rumi
scienceandnonduality You can watch all our videos at https://scienceandnonduality.com Rupert Spira has a conversation with the audience at SAND19 US. Science and Nonduality is a community inspired by timeless wisdom, informed by cutting-edge science, and grounded in direct experience. We come together in an open-hearted exploration while celebrating our humanity.
The Declaration of Independence’s clause about “merciless Indian Savages” and its deleted passage on slavery say a lot about us.
Jon Schwarz July 4 2021 (theintercept.com)
An illustration by Udo Keppler, “The Triumph of the American Battle-ship,” depicts the celebration of the Fourth of July in 1898.
Illustration: Universal Images Group via Getty
Happy Birthday, America! Today, July 4, 2021, we turn 245 years old. You might think we’d have trouble blowing out all the candles on the cake, but fortunately we can use the downdraft from the Sikorsky S-97 Raider, a new prototype attack helicopter with two rotors that spin in opposite directions.
And now that we’re 245, it seems as though we should be old enough to take an honest look at various dumb and awful things about our birth, and stop believing in preposterous myths.
While the American Revolution officially began at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts in April 1775, for some time afterward complete separation from Great Britain was only supported by a fervent minority. However, nothing works as well as killing and being killed to make everyone believe the other side are irredeemable monsters. By June 1776, public sentiment favored a total break.Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you.I’m in
The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, with edits by several others, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. It is Filled with The kind Of unpredictable Capitalization that was Common before English Was Standardized, and accuses King George III of attempting to impose both “absolute Despotism” and “absolute Tyranny” on the 13 Colonies. With the benefit of hindsight, many of the complaints make this seem like the kind of excitable language you employ to justify a decision you’ve already made. For instance, King George “called together legislative bodies at places unusual” for “the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance.” Bad, maybe, but not the worst crime in human history. This style of wild rhetorical exaggeration survives today among Americans who proclaim that the phaseout of incandescent lightbulbs is exactly like what Hitler did.
The most interesting parts of the declaration are two complaints, one that made it into the final version and one that did not. The one that did make it in is the final entry on the list of indictments of King George: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who just condemned the idea that the U.S. was “founded in racism,” has ever read the Declaration of Independence. He may also never have heard of George Washington, who once told a friend that Indigenous people in the Americas and wolves were both “beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape.”
Then there is the clause about slavery in Jefferson’s original rough draft of the declaration. King George, said Jefferson, had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” This seems like conclusive evidence that white Americans were capable at the time of grasping the concept that slavery was evil. Thus judging those who engaged in it is not “presentism,” in which we impose today’s moral standards on the past.
Of course, Jefferson himself owned at least 600 slaves during his life. Presumably he understood they were not working his plantation by choice, just because they wanted him to have more free time for philosophizing. Jefferson squared this circle by also condemning King George for “now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.” First, King George forced people like Jefferson to enslave human beings, which they never would have done otherwise! And now King George was making these enslaved humans believe it was terrible to be enslaved, something they never would have figured out on their own! This was Tyranny in its purest form.
Decades later in 1821, Jefferson wrote that the slavery clause had been removed by the full Continental Congress “in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia. … Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures, for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” GOP-controlled state governments that today are cracking down on the teaching of history might want to bar Jefferson’s first point but emphasize his second to own the libs. New York City, the capital of liberalism, had one of America’s largest slave markets on Wall Street for much of the 18th century and continues to have many streets named after prominent families of the era that enriched themselves in the trade.
None of this means that the U.S. is uniquely dreadful; the foundings of other countries were similarly bloody and hypocritical. But it does mean that when we’re tempted to bloviate about our unique goodness that we should probably cool it.
And obviously there are some good parts in the Declaration of Independence, ones so universally inspiring that Ho Chi Minh copied them directly when he wrote a Proclamation of Independence for Vietnam in 1945. America was so touched by this that a few years later we considered giving France a few nuclear weapons to drop on Vietnam.
The declaration today resides at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It’s barely legible but is still worth a visit as an opportunity to be honest with ourselves about what our history’s truly about. It wasn’t created by a race of perfect angels, but by people who were just as sweaty, confused, and occasionally drunk as we are. Just like us, they had grievous faults and intermittent noble aspirations. And if they could change the world, and they definitely did, we can too.
