We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; That all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It was Benjamin Franklin who crossed out "sacred and undeniable" with heavy backslashes and inserted "self-evident." It seems to me there is a lot at stake in the change. I am increasingly persuaded that the root of social order is sacred order. I have been transported recently by Philip Rieff's powerful book, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, volume one of a three part series entitled Social Order/Sacred Order.
Too often in contemporary times we hear sacred and we run for our First Amendment establishment clause. Apparently Jefferson, the author of Virginia's statute for religious freedom, didn't see the contradiction. I don't either. Part of the problem arises from our tendency to argue that the opposite of sacred is secular. That is, of course, incorrect. Secular can and does mean opposed to the church, but denotes a measurement of time, originally time away from a monastery. Secular means the things of the world and the measurement of time. Sacred, as opposed to profane, refers to people and things set apart, of which there are too few these days. Reverence and "thou shalt not" is the rhetoric of sacred. Culture, Rieff says, is renunciation; whereas, our culture looks too much like the renunciation of renunciation. Holy and accursed are the two sides of the same coin. Often and often the scourge and the sanction restore us to human limits.
And, anyway, even if you're not buying that . . . are the rights really self-evident? I'm having trouble buying that. After all, if they are, why the need for Jefferson's eloquent, rhetorical work?
No comments:
Post a Comment