The Thinking Head’s “Pursuit of ________”

As an American, two things have always struck me about two of the US’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  First, the Declaration’s language posits a very idealized, even humanistic, view of people’s place in the world.  Tremendous amounts of responsibility are laid in the hands of everyday, average citizens in both documents.  Second, while describing the rights of the average citizen in very abstract terms, both documents make extensively catalog what governments cannot or should not do, sometimes in exhaustive detail.  The Declaration’s body is constructed largely of grievances aimed at the actions of British Parliament and King George III. The Bill of Rights almost exclusively lay out citizens’ rights in terms of what the United States’ new government is forbidden to do.

What strikes any close reader of the documents is this:  individual liberties are rarely, if ever, asserted in positive terms with respect to what citizens can do in their lives.  Instead, the Declaration lays out its most assertive claims of individual liberty in this way:

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.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…

It’s well known that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are lifted from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), with the one significant revision.  Locke’s original phrasing intimated that man had the right to “life, liberty, and property“, which many scholars interpret to mean a right to a privately owned estate.  Why the change? 

According to the general program-wide lectures my World Cultures students used to sit through on the subject, one reason is because the Founders were a little worried about a phrase that might suggest the government’s role was to insure that people had such a property. The “pursuit of Happiness” was a little easier to guarantee in the kind of society Jefferson, Washington, et al. had planned for the still New World.  The right to property seems to have struck a little too close to some kind of communal utopia so ardently satirized in as early as Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516.  While we tend to associate Communism with Karl Marx, he didn’t exactly invent the idea.  Communal societies were quite de rigeur throughout Europe for centuries, whether they were feudal societies or ones that sought some level of independence.  Marx just married a systematic program for preserving a distribution of wealth in an agrarian society with a rather stringent critique of Industrial Capitalism.

For a government to guarantee property, it had to be far more proactive in individual lives than most founders were comfortable with.  Such a government would demand power and resources.  Well, that’s what the founders were fighting against in their struggle for independence.  The project was all about turning citizens loose in their own lands to sustain themselves and their neighbors upon their own initiatives.  I’ve also heard famous Jefferson historian, Clay S. Jenkinson, describe Jefferson’s ideal citizen as a farmer who would make his own bread during the day and read Plato in the evening.

Then, the Bill of Rights almost exclusively frame citizens’ rights in terms not of what they are free to do, but in terms of that from which they are free.

So, what can I do with this?  It leads me to two principles that I can most assuredly underline in my own thinking.  One is a tendancy to agree with both Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau:  that which governs best also governs least.  I like this phrasing because it allows for the second aspect:  my rather utilitarian nature.  While I definitely think in principle a smaller government is best, I’m not dogmatic enough to think it’s absolute, irrespective of the circumstances.  Current political discourse from both sides (you know, the “talking head”) has turned the concept into an absolute conservative maxim, unbreakable and inviolable (unless a conservative does it…).

Under both parties, government and its role has expanded tremendously in my lifetime.  But, I often wonder how much “expansion” could be considered in relative terms.  Yes, government has expanded immensely.  But, so has the United States, in terms of its foreign and domestic commitments, and most importantly, its population.  I’m no expert (something you’ll see me say a lot here), but I feel fairly confident in saying that Thomas Jefferson and his peers never imagined a country expanding to more than 300 million people.  The world’s population in 1750 is only estimated to have been a little more than double that!

What does “small” mean in the current context?  Do we cut entitlement programs?  Do we cut the DoD’s rather staggering budget?  Do we get rid of some departments/agencies?  If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then where, why, and how?  I always have this argument with students who want to trim their tuitions costs.  I sympathize wholeheartedly with their plight, but I always ask the practical question:  “Okay, we trim your tuition, and that means we trim the money coming into the school.  What do we cut to save costs?  What are you, as a student, willing to give up?”  They always say to cut administration salaries, which do often range into six figures.  I sympathize with this.  But, my Republican father-in-law always asks, “Haven’t they earned that salary?”  He tends to presume that salary level indicates merit.  I’m not quite convinced.