While composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson did a radical thing.
In defining what rights men possessed by virtue of birth, he added “pursuit of happiness” along with “life” and “liberty.”
Previous to the Declaration, Englishmen believed they were naturally entitled to “life, liberty and property.” Jefferson’s editing represented a tectonic shift in the world’s view of a person’s rights, and its effect was intoxicating.
People – principally young men with money – in faraway places like France, Poland and Hungary were thunderstruck by the idea that life might be about something more than duty, drudgery and death, and that a nation might be formed on such a premise. They left their homelands to join the American Revolution and fight for that idea to survive.
The right to pursue happiness, the core of the American Dream, wasn’t pulled from thin air. It grew from Jefferson’s understanding of Western civilization and political philosophy dating back to ancient Greece. Jefferson had studied the Greeks, in Greek. He was a smart, thoughtful guy who understood history.
Like many people, I was dumbfounded by Donald Trump’s nomination as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 2015. That a person so uncouth could come within reach of our nation’s highest office was disturbing to me, so I did the reasonable thing: I bought the Great Books.
The Great Books of the Western World is a series of 60 hardbacks encapsulating the evolution of Western thought, beginning with Homer. The books represent how our greatest thinkers made sense of the world. It includes works by Plato, Euclid, Dante, Shakespeare, Galileo, Tolstoy, Twain and Freud.
These people are the rock stars of Western civilization. Their ideas, born of reason and higher thinking, represent a road map of how we got to where we are, and why it is that we came to enjoy privileges like individual freedom and a vote in elections, and how we escaped the tyranny of bad ideas, including superstition prejudice. Like Jefferson (who considered separation of church and state his greatest contribution) each of the great thinkers pushed the envelope of human progress a bit further.
The Great Books are wildly important today because we live in an era of strong men ascendant: The likes of Trump and Putin have risen in places like China, North Korea, Poland, Hungary and Saudi Arabia. They are tyrants who answer few questions, attack critics and brook no challenges to their authority. They are not interested in an open society or a robust and open discussion of issues.
They want what tyrants through history have always wanted: Power over others.
We need to arm ourselves, not with assault weapons, but with a knowledge and appreciation that the United States became a beacon and a haven for the world not because of what we had, but because we were born of great ideas and the promise that those ideas would take hold and prevail.
The Norwegians, among the most forward-thinking people on earth, a few years ago became concerned enough about our treatment of the environment to create a global seed vault, a storehouse to preserve the future of plant life that supports the human race.
To my thinking, the Great Books are a kind of seed vault of Western thought. They were conceived as a collection in the aftermath of the wreckage of World War II, on the proposition that regular folks – not just college professors or college graduates – should know the great ideas, and that possession of that knowledge would both uplift them and inoculate them from forms of madness and madmen.
Some of these books are thick. They’re complicated and difficult to read. Like most of what’s worthwhile in life, they require effort. The reward for that effort is grasping that America sits at the end of a long road of human progress that took thousands of years to build. As it’s probably our only route to a future, that road is worth maintaining.
(After writing this essay, a friend contacted me concerned about my characterization of Western writers, philosophers and scientists as “rock stars.” My friend noted that my list is of greats comprises only men, many of whom were not as enlightened as some other, lesser-known thinkers. The criticism is a fair one, but I think misses the point of the essay, namely the importance of the progress of ideas. The originators of the ideas are not as important as the ideas themselves, and the understanding that human thought is an evolution. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves. Aristotle’s equality did not extend to women or slaves. Both were captives to their moment in time, as are all of us. Why Aristotle and Jefferson are important is that each introduced radical, new ways of considering the human condition and pushed a bit further the question of the purpose and value of life.)