Difficult Balance

AlterNet: Personal Voices: The Unalienable Right to Independent Thought

AlterNet: Personal Voices: The Unalienable Right to Independent Thought

"The Declaration of Independence itself provides notable guidance about what it means to think independently and about what modes of discourse encourage such thinking. In his new biography, "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life," Walter Isaacson points out how Franklin edited Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable," and Franklin changed it to " We hold these truths to be self-evident."


Isaacson argues that this change emphasizes a rational rather than a religious basis for these truths; but let's look at it from a slightly different angle. "Sacred" suggests a hierarchy of some kind, in which there are certain truths that are set apart, perhaps handed down to us from above, and thus they are separate from us, and may need to be controlled. There would always be an anxiety about such a truth, an embattled quality, a need to defend. "Self-evident" truths, meanwhile, are evident without proof of reasoning. That is, self-evident truths are intuitively available to all of us at all times, whoever and wherever we are.


The "self-evident" truths thus resemble the "unalienable" rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that they name: neither the truths about the rights nor the rights themselves can be alienated from us; that is, they cannot be transferred to another.


The right to be independent and to think independently can therefore be taken away in a given circumstance but not alienated from us. They still always exist as our rights even if we are enslaved, tortured, terrorized, killed, repressed. That is what Amnesty International is all about: the power of creating a community to recognize human beings as human beings, to remember that they exist even if they are hidden away and repressed for thinking and speaking independently, and to recognize the wrongful acts of those who try to take away these rights. "

posted by Lucia Knoles @ 4:07 PM