Franke: Unalienable Rights
by Mark Franke
What is it about us Americans and our hurry to move on to the next thing? By Christmas night the TV commercials are changing over to the next retail season and by New Year’s Day, the advertising demigods have made the snow disappear. Forget the 12 days of Christmas and the fact that winter has just begun. It is time to move on.
I fear the same has happened with our celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We celebrated it in a grand way; but now, what’s up next?
I, for one, am not ready to push the importance of July 4, 1776, into the dim recesses of memory.
Neither is my Socratic discussion group. We decided to take on the Declaration of Independence over three consecutive months, each month focusing on a different aspect of that incredible document. August was devoted to the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We begin each session with what we call a provocation, a potentially controversial statement that advances a proposition but with several caveats in the form of questions.
Here is what we considered this month:
“If the “unalienable rights” that inhere to all men are God-given, then does it follow that natural or divine law is the foundation of these rights? Must individual rights be limited by compliance with natural law so that society stays an ordered one? Is consensual limitation of some rights essential to the protection of other higher order rights? How are conflicting appeals to individual rights adjudicated?”
It is no wonder that the last question above received immediate attention. Zoning laws are merely an attempt to adjudicate between conflicting property rights. Then there is the current controversy over Flock cameras and their insinuation into the space between public safety and personal privacy. We wondered if corporations, as legal persons under the law, have the same unalienable rights as individuals?
All these questions get at the role of government in a representative democracy founded on individual liberty and the rule of law. Since the Founding Fathers were Enlightenment era classical liberals, the central question is the philosophical construct of mankind’s escape from a state of nature by forming limited government under a social contract. What is the role of government under this construct?
Each month one of our number is assigned the role of owner of the provocation and serves as the focal point of the discussion. The procedure is that members address questions to the owner who is responsible for answering as best he can.
This month’s owner opened with a framework for understanding the limited role of government. His was a threefold taxonomy of government’s role: There are times when government ought to act; there are times when government may act; and there are times when government should hesitate to act.
Intelligent people of goodwill can disagree on where to draw the lines within these situations. Remember the Covid debates about government’s responsibility to protect the citizenry without attacking individual liberty? Those debates are on-going, and that is probably a sign of a healthy republic exercising its responsibility under a social contract with its citizens.
How much liberty did we surrender during the Covid crisis? Can this liberty be recovered or has it passed permanently to the government? Benjamin Franklin’s quote comes to mind:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Compare Franklin’s philosophy to that of Rahm Emmanuel, former Obama White House chief of staff and mayor of Chicago:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
My discussion group is composed of conservatives of varied schools of thought but you can guess which of the two quotes above align with our shared philosophy of limited government. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Therein lies the great divide in today’s political landscape, and our deteriorating commitment to the principles of the Declaration.
The problem as our group sees it is that too many Americans have compliantly surrendered the responsibility of citizenship. Tough questions are presented to us every day but we are conditioned to deflect them. Our brains have become so overstimulated by cultural noise that we can’t process it all.
The age of artificial intelligence will just make this situation worse.
There is a cancer eating away at the moral fabric of our society. It has left us permissively transgressive, as one of the group described it. We are no longer a community of patriots resolute in the defense of liberty.
Jefferson’s pursuit of happiness was to be realized through human flourishing. Look around. How much flourishing do you see?
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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