July 4, 2019 – Canton, Ohio
“like it or not, we live in an interdependent world.”
Bishop John Michael
Now that I’m home at last, I find that I am writing my blog less frequently, and that it’s harder to write at home than when I’m on the road. There seems to be less time available when I am home, and I am trying to understand why that is. Regardless of the time zone you’re in, each day still has the same 24 hours. How can I have more time for something on one day, and less on another?
Obviously, it is not a matter of the amount of time, but rather where you put your attention and focus. Where you put your attention has a lot to do with your priorities, and the funny thing about priorities is that we do not, cannot set them for ourselves in a vacuum, without regard to the people around us. I think parents have the clearest idea of what this means, but it applies to everyone, in all circumstances.
If you need to get from Canton to Cleveland, say, and you have made the trip many times, you have an idea of how long it takes to get there. If there is a meeting that is make-or-break for a deal you are working on, then getting to Cleveland can be a huge priority, and you set aside the time you know it takes to get there.
Then there is an accident ahead of you on I-77 north of Akron. Traffic is at a dead stop. You are between exits and there is no way to get out of your place in traffic. It makes not one bit of difference what your priorities are that day. The social environment you are in determines whether or not you will be able to attend the meeting that is your goal for the day. Suck it up; we’re all in this together, my friend!
I use this example to express that, like it or not, we live in an interdependent world. What we do, what we are able and unable to do, depends to a very large extent upon the people around us. In our day, this means practically everyone on the planet, since what I do effects countless others I will never come to know, and what they do has an effect I barely recognize on me.
“Interdependence” is very nearly a swear word nowadays. We Americans highly value the so-called “self-made man” (or woman), but such a person does not exist. Not a single person in the history of the planet is responsible for bringing him- or herself out of nothingness into existence. All of us have started existence totally dependent on other people for everything except breathing, and that only after we had been carried in our mother’s womb for nine months.
For well and ill, our dependence upon one another is as unavoidable as it may be regrettable. We have been designed by our creator to be together. We need each other, and we affect each other’s lives whether we wish to or not. As English poet John Donne so famously put it:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
This essay (“Meditation 17” in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624), influential as it has been for nearly four centuries, was originally written in prose, but the loftiness of its sentiments and the beauty of its language soon rendered these thoughts into a poem sometimes called “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or “No Man Is an Island.”
152 years after its composition, however, another prose essay of perhaps greater influence in human history was written. The Declaration of Independence, approved in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, by the representatives of the thirteen English colonies acting in congress, i.e., by coming together, declared their colonies to be independent of Great Britain, but together as the United States of America. These representatives of the people not only declared the political independence of the colonies, but also their unity with one another: e pluribus unum.
The influence of this document lies in the fact that it goes far beyond the statement of injustices committed by one man (King George III) and those in collusion with him. It goes further than being merely a statement of political intention or, “that these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.” By what “right” did these colonies make this declaration? And what did it mean by “free and independent?” Independent of what? Or of whom?
The world-historic influence of the Declaration of Independence may be seen in the simple inscription in the book held by the goddess Libertas (Liberty) in the statue given to the people of the United States by the people of France: “JULY IV MDCCLXXVI” (July 4, 1776), namely. the date on which the Declaration was approved and began to appear in the world. Its influence is based in the first reason it cites for independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But the second reason listed is as influential as the first: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” Simply put, a group of men came together in Philadelphia in 1776 to draft a document that would put into practice the new ideas of the French and English political philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the philosophical movement known rather grandiosely as “The Enlightenment.”
According to these ideas, free people are not isolated from each other, atoms in a moral void, even if their freedom is realized in their individuality in the form of “unalienable rights,” what Catholic social teaching would term the “inherent dignity of each human being.” Rather, they congress, “come together,” to create a good that cannot be created by one person acting alone, especially if that one person happens to be a king. The “good” created is a self-governing social order known as a democracy.
The Preamble of the Constitution, which starts, “We, the people of the United States,” only underscores that it is the collectivity of citizens that creates the social order needed to “secure” each person’s individual rights. It is not that interdependency is implied in the foundation documents of this country; it is clearly and unambiguously expressed. A monarch or tyrant needs no foundation documents and need not secure anyone’s rights, but even he or she is dependent upon some kind of social organization to protect him or her from the violent revolt of an oppressed people. Or so learned King George III.
For a people to exalt divinely-instituted individual liberty without recognizing the equally divinely-instituted dependence upon one another that is hard-wired into our nature is to court disaster. Such cultural movements succeed only in destroying themselves, as well as the freedom they stand for, by creating the conditions within which tyranny, autocracy, demagoguery, oligarchy, and every other form of political oppression may arise. One might have thought that the human race would have learned this lesson all-too-painfully in the twentieth century, but it seems that the lesson has been forgotten on a global scale in the twenty-first.
I am grateful for this Fourth of July holiday. Certainly, it gave me the time and inspiration I would otherwise not have had to write this blog post. After all, I am only a priest, a minister of the Good News of Jesus Christ, and neither a political philosopher nor America’s greatest patriot, I’m afraid. Nevertheless it is good to reflect upon the beliefs that we Americans say our country is founded upon, the beliefs that have inspired so many around the world in their own countries, and which likewise have drawn so many people out of their own countries to the Lady who holds the lamp in New York harbor, in order to create for themselves a life of dignity and freedom on these shores: people such as you or your ancestors.
I am also grateful that my hometown newspaper, The Canton Repository, found it well to print the Declaration of Independence in its entirety today, and that I took the time to read it once more. Not only is it worthwhile to reflect upon the interdependence that makes independence possible, it is also worthwhile to read the catalogue of grievances (the “indictment”) it contains. Americans need to be able to recognize tyranny when they see it.