Secular / Sacred

We hold these truths to be self evident:
that all men are created equal.
US Declaration of Independence

Durkheim observed that the common thread in the religious mind isn’t God or even good, but rather a confidence that such minds can reliably distinguish sacred from profane. Every culture has its sacred cows, and these days most of what’s shoved up our noses as sacred is secular. In National Treasure the sacred treasure is the US Declaration of Independence.

Adams and Jefferson, appointed the composition committee, each tried to pass the buck to the other, Adams prevailing. So Thomas Jefferson wrote:We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.One thing about the sacred is: you memorize it, but don’t really think about it. Well, that worked for me too: until I got older. Now I like to think about the unthinkable, one unthinkable thing after another. I’ve long had my doubts about the utility of political misuses of mathematical concepts, equal for example. I know what "equal" means in arithmetic: 2 + 2 = 4. I sort of know what it means in mathematics in general. And I also know what it means in a Declaration of Independence: but I know it with an entirely different kind of mind.

The English-speaking American colonists thought they were far enough away from King George that they could finally tell him to bug off: that they, last century’s misfits, excess population, felons, dissenters ... could claim that they were peer to the House of Hanover -- and hoped to get away with it. It certainly did not mean that they were peers among themselves: except in the sense that male Athenians property holders in the time of Pericles, all two thousand of them (in a population many times that) pretended to be peers for a generation or two.

You have no peers.
pk’s lawyer

Thomas Jefferson himself owned slaves. Indeed, Jeff owned more slaves than all but one other in his county. I’ll bet he thought of his wife as his property. (Didn’t the church ritual, penned in the Sixteenth Century, say so?)

Under George (and George didn’t invent it), a few English peers (wherever they were born: Shropshire, Kent ... Germany) got to decide who had to pay tithes to whom. In the Bible everyone was supposed to pay 10% of their year's income to God (in the person of some church, some temple: a bunch of human priests). In the political era you have to pay some percentage to the state; what you give to God comes out of what ever is left over for you: double tithing. Jeff and his pals were telling George that they weren’t going to pay.
(George Washington proved, by the Whiskey Wars, that he and his pals were just as capable of taxation without representation as George of Hanover.) (Oh, but we had representation: George Washington and his pals!) (Hell, George Washington, Adams, and Jeff had had representation too: Hanoverian George and his pals!)

I’ve thought about all this for a long time. Some friends, my son, my diary ... have heard about it. But to date I’m not sure how much has leaked into Knatz.com (temp. offline).

It was seeing Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson (seeing part of it -- I bailed out early) that got me seething to blog something like this: before developing it further at K. Russell Baker decades back posted a marvelous Times op-ed contrasting serious with solemn: serious being elevated, solemn denigrated. Ken Burns to me is solemnity personified. And he looks how Gainsborough’s Blue Boy would look if it were turned over to Disney for popularization: the infantile canonized; the macroinformation deleted. I thought his Civil War series was solemn enough, but it was his ten minutes of Wynton Marsalis for thirty seconds of Louis Armstrong in his Jazz series that really made me hate him. (Just like Jeff, Washington, Franklin ..., he sticks his pals where the subject belongs.)

But dig this: Jeff wrote, "We hold these truths to be self evident ... (that all men are created equal ...)" Truths?!?!? Self evident?!?!? Is it true? Is it self evident? Did Jeff believe it for a second? Do you?

I deny that equality is either true or self-evident in any visible political system, past or present. Is Bush equal to any member of his Cabinet? Is the Pope equal to a Cardinal? Not arithmetically. They’re not the same size, they don’t weight the same ... And not politically either. That’s why we have a head of state.

I theorize about the macroinformation latent in paradox, in contradiction, in complex systems ... but distinguish it from mere muddles: as in political discourse. (By the way, apropos of my title (and the base theme here), Jeff had earlier penned: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." See? Sacred! Undeniable? Sure: as in You better not try it!)

more coming Oh, and what’s coming will concern that problematic key word: "created!! I don’t see how it can be denied that Pleroma, the physical universe, AND Creatura, the universe of life, both exhibit design that neither Darwin’s theory of evolution nor its upgraded descendants can account for, but the term created intrudes a set of unnecessary specifics. Some things seem to have been designed, but we have no good ideas how. Say "God," and in truck unending freightloads of superstitious rubbish: with either Guido or Abdul thinking he’s in charge!

2005 10 04 Ha! Just a few days later! "A court in Pennsylvania is now hearing a suit brought by parents against a school district that teaches intelligent design -- the view that life is so complex some higher being must have designed it -- alongside evolution in biology class." Reuters.
The best arguments I’ve seen are in Michael J. Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Now a Roman Catholic cardinal has published a parallel argument.