America’s 250th Anniversary, Part Two — Founding of America: The Enlightenment
Editor's note: This is the second in a five-part series of essays on American history by Uyless Black.
In this piece on America’s 250th anniversary, we examine a man who was a key contributor to the Declaration of Independence. It was not Thomas Jefferson, although he is rightfully credited for penning most of the words. It was John Locke, who lived between 1632 and 1704.
Thomas Jefferson and four others on the committee to draft the Declaration were highly educated. They knew the ideas of Locke and other learned men who had preceded them by some 100 years when they assembled. The founding fathers did not start from scratch.
The Enlightenment
The ideas expressed by John Locke seem unremarkable today. We take them for granted. But Locke was a key element in the social and political revolution that took place in the Western world. It was a phenomenal set of events that began in the late 1600s and came to be known as the Enlightenment.
Prior to these times, many members of the human race lived a miserable existence. Food was often scarce, as was shelter. Over the centuries, the state and church had become repressive and authoritarian to all but a very few people. Political potentates and religious pontiffs controlled much of the wealth. They had unrestrained power over the population, and most individuals were treated with noncaring disdain.
The Enlightenment movement witnessed the emergence of reason and inquiry, rather than blind acquiescence to life’s goings-on. The philosophers of the day embraced empirical evidence in place of unthinking acceptance of events. They asked how and why.
Individual liberty became a fundamental part of the Enlightenment. The idea and its practice challenged traditional authority, religious dogma, and monarchs who reigned supreme over the population.
We Americans routinely take advantage of these enlightenment-founded ideas, usually without giving them much thought. Far too often, I subconsciously — mostly unconsciously — go about my days assuming they have been part of human existence since humans existed. Our nonchalance is understandable. We are too caught up in the present to ruminate on the past.
A Profound Change in Human Behavior
Nonetheless, consider the wonder of it all. Until the 1600s, enlightenment ideas were largely absent from human thought and practice. Six thousand years ago, humans began writing about their activities. From that time until about 400 years ago, with rare exceptions, there was nothing recorded in our history concerning individual freedom from the state or the church.
It is an astounding idea. Only very recently has individual freedom become an ingredient in human perceptions of themselves and in the practices of their societies. Consider that the earliest known governments were formed about 5,000 years ago.¹ 400 years of individual freedom represent only 8 percent of that time.
We can be thankful we did not live in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. The chances are good that we would have been slaves. If not slaves, most citizens of those days were subjugated
to more powerful people. They continued this way of life until the Enlightenment’s thinkers and doers appeared on the scene.
Freedom, Locke, and the Declaration of Independence
Thus, freedom is a relatively new practice for the human race. As stated earlier, John Locke was not the sole contributor to this enlightenment idea. But Thomas Jefferson relied on Locke for some of the key ideas embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
The genius of Jefferson (among his other talents) was encapsulating many ideas in Locke’s writings (and those of Thomas Paine) into about five pages of today’s typewritten text. He was able to capture Lock’s philosophy in the basic principles of the Declaration: the natural rights of all humans, consent to be governed, the right to equality from birth, and the right to revolution to obtain freedom.
¹ About 3000 BCE, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley