America Turns 250!
Happy Birthday, America!
by Sean W. Malone
The United States of America is 250 years old today.
That is a milestone that deserves unreserved pride, gratitude, and celebration.
In an era where doomer nihilism and focusing exclusively on grievances are everywhere, and when both social networks and traditional media primarily reward outrage with attention, it can be surprisingly easy to lose sight of what’s truly important.
But I’m here to tell you: America is important.
Contrary to increasingly popular belief, this country is exceptional in a multitude of incredibly significant ways.
Unlike virtually any nation before us, we built our entire civic structure around timeless philosophical principles. And those ideas were not merely vague slogans or inherited customs; they were codified and written down; debated in public; defended in essays, letters, speeches, newspapers, pamphlets, and sermons; and our founding values have been preserved and ensconced in the law by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
We — uniquely, before anyone else — declared that human beings possess natural rights and argued that those rights do not come “from” the government but from our very humanity.
Our founders rejected factionalism and asserted that legitimate government exists only to protect the rights we all already have at birth. They deliberately limited the power our rulers could deploy. They protected freedom of speech, defended freedom of religion and conscience, supported the right of individuals to defend themselves and challenge their own leaders, and they grounded all political authority in the consent of the governed instead of by divine right or violent coup.
That foundation gave America the rarest form of national identity.
We are bound together by a civic tradition, not a single bloodline, tribe, dynasty, or church. People from every continent, language, religion, and background have come here and become American by joining that tradition and embracing American principles. The result is one of the most successful cultural melting pots in human history.
And for anyone who says America has “no history” or “no culture,” I would invite you to look all around you. It’s everywhere.
Our culture is so dominant that many people mistake it for the natural atmosphere of modern life.
Jazz, blues, country, rock and roll, hip-hop. Hollywood, Broadway, stand-up comedy. Comic books, blue jeans, fast food, baseball, basketball, theme parks, skyscrapers, road trips, national parks, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Nashville, Motown. Disney, Apple, Google, YouTube, and Coca-Cola… These have all shaped the world’s imagination.
Our music fills stadiums not just at home, but equally well in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South & Central America. Our movies define the visual language of entertainment across the globe. Our technology carries the world’s conversations. Our slang terms are known and used worldwide. Our debates about liberty, equality, rights, race, religion, speech, markets, and justice are discussed internationally every day.
We helped give the world a functioning constitutional, republican government at scale. We helped make free speech, due process, equality under the law, abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and democratic self-correction central to the definition of “good government”.
Our innovators and entrepreneurs gave the world the airplane, the practical light bulb, the telephone, recorded sound, assembly-line manufacturing, modern computing, the internet, the smartphone revolution, the moon landing, and the greatest engine of prosperity ever built.
At 250, America has a history long enough to command respect and a record of civilizational change that is simply incontrovertible.
But in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln:
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
We are a nation founded on liberty, sustained by argument, renewed by invention, and open to anyone willing to become part of our story, and we should all fight to preserve that for the future. Not just for our own children and grandchildren, but as a beacon of freedom and opportunity for the entire world to emulate.
Happy 250th birthday, America.
It’s a birthday thoroughly worth celebrating.
America is the Frontier
by Henrik F. Rasmussen
America is the frontier, even at the ripe old age of 250 years. It is the place where driven people can come from anywhere in the world and build something new, pushing the limits of established ways of life and business, creating vibrant communities in the process. The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the young American nation in 1831 and was struck by its bustling energy, observing in Democracy in America: “The American, taken as a chance specimen of his countrymen, must then be a man of singular warmth in his desires, enterprising, fond of adventure and, above all, of novelty.”
This frontier energy has been my image of America since I read the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and immersed myself in the life of Davy Crockett as a young boy in Denmark. And it was this spirit that ultimately drew me to America as an immigrant. America does not always live up to its own ideals, but nowhere else is the ideal of the frontier as pronounced and as solidly woven into the fabric of national culture as in America. Anyone who believes in the energetic pursuit of happiness will find it hard to resist the pull of America over time, however disappointed they may be about this or that failure, indecency, or inconsistency at any given moment. Idealism and optimism play well in America; cynicism and pessimism do not.
America is Gary Cooper in High Noon, my favorite western: The reluctant frontier sheriff, challenging both bandits and timid townsfolk, struggling internally to stay strong, and ultimately willing to do the work that needs to be done, alone if necessary. America must “do our share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos” in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, frontier president. Because no one else is coming.
America is home. It is the country that raised my wife to be the embodiment of the frontier ideal, dreaming big, building businesses and charities, seeking new adventures, facing every challenge with grace and grit, and making life beautiful with prairie quilts and flowers. It is the places where we have made our life together, surrounded by heroic history: Virginia, where the first settlers carved a country out of the wilderness, where America struggled to live up to its own ideals, and where American heroes launch from today to defend freedom around the world. Springfield, Illinois, home of Lincoln, our greatest president, savior of the American dream. Philadelphia, where Jefferson wrote the words of the Declaration of Independence and Washington’s troops immortalized those words through their suffering at Valley Forge.
America is the future. It is where we strive to raise our children in the spirit of the frontier, exploring new rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, cities, countries, and oceans with the vision to look beyond the horizon and the humility to recognize nature’s obstacles and our own weaknesses. All over the world, children are growing up right now who will one day look to America as an ally, as a source of inspiration through education, business or travel, and perhaps as a place to dream big and build a new home. Let us build a country that will be worthy of them.
Henrik F. Rasmussen is an immigrant from Denmark who became an American citizen in 2010.
Trust, but Verify: The Declaration Through AI’s “Eyes”
by Richard Lorenc
It’s common these days to read musings about the capabilities and limitations of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), and to speculate how they are poised to change civilization.
Zeynep Tufekci of Princeton University provided some needed clarity on this in The New York Times recently:
"Large language models are not reasoning machines. They’re plausibility engines. It’s not just that they don’t test their outputs to make sure they’re correct or logical, or that they fail to do so in certain instances. They can’t, and they’ll never be able to on their own. They can only assess which answers are probable, based on the data on which the models have been trained."
AI chatbots like ChatGPT write probabilistically, which means they lack inspiration, cultural context, and true creativity. The same cannot be said for the writing of the Declaration of Independence as we celebrate its 250th anniversary.
Journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson's latest book entitled The Greatest Sentence Ever Written delves into the history and meaning of its first sentence:
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
That single sentence is jam-packed with sentiment, ideas, and faith. Provided we now have the benefit of the hindsight of history, we can see easily why Isaacson called it “the greatest sentence ever written.”
Although Thomas Jefferson is most credited with the authorship of the Declaration, we shouldn’t discount the efforts of his fellow (active) committee members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. A copy of this famous painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris hangs on the wall of my living room reminding me of the frustrating group project.
It’s well known that Jefferson drew inspiration from the writings of the English philosopher John Locke.
But what if it were Franklin citing his favorite philosopher who drafted the first sentence of an alternative declaration of independence?
I used ChatGPT to imagine what might have been had Jefferson been a bit less eager to lead, and left it to his elder committee member Franklin:
When a people, long patient under injuries, find that their good can no longer be honestly pursued under the government that commands them, it becomes both prudent and necessary that they declare the causes which oblige them to set up for themselves, and to seek, under Providence, that liberty and public happiness which every just society is formed to secure.
ChatGPT informs me: “Franklin was less a disciple of one political philosopher than Jefferson was of Locke. For this exercise, I’d use Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good as the influence, since Franklin himself later credited it as a formative source for his idea of public usefulness and civic improvement.”
Is that more or less clear than Jefferson’s version? Does it sound like Franklin? Is it more or less aesthetically pleasing to read silently or aloud? Teachers who ask these questions of their students will have interesting classroom conversations that engage imagination and help their students to develop taste and discernment.
Only if we are familiar with Franklin and Mather as well as the core ideas of the time and place of the Declaration can we make judgments about what a large language model (LLM) has generated in mere seconds.
What if ChatGPT were to create a version based on Adams’s style and inspirations?
When, in the course of human affairs, a people, long habituated to reverence law, to cherish liberty, and to seek only the security of those rights which nature and the Author of nature have placed beyond the just disposal of kings or parliaments, are driven by repeated injuries and usurpations to resume that equal station among the powers of the earth to which the law of reason, the constitution of free commonwealths, and the immutable principles of justice entitle them, a decent respect for mankind requires that they declare, with firmness and candor, the causes which compel so solemn and necessary a separation.
This Adams version is longer, but is it better? This version finds its footing in legalistic ideas and language, which could be appropriate for the formation of a new country–but is it more persuasive?
ChatGPT: “Adams is safest paired with Cicero: a lifelong model for Adams’s ideas of law, republican virtue, mixed government, and resistance to tyranny. The Adams touch is the emphasis on law, constitutional balance, public duty, and the sober necessity of separation rather than Jefferson’s more elegant Lockean abstraction.”
I must know something of the way that Adams and Cicero thought to judge the quality of this version of the opening sentence. This is where my reading of Isaacson's Adams biography is helpful.
Restating important language is an effective way to understand and clarify its meaning, so these alternative versions can be helpful not only for understanding “what might have been,” but also for analyzing each co-author’s potential contributions, as well as the specific stylistic value that Jefferson brought.
It’s impossible for us to know whether another author’s version of the opening to the Declaration of Independence would have been as inspirational or effective as the one that we know and celebrate today. I am partial to the original, but is it only because it is so familiar and revered?
AI tools are changing the ways we learn, teach, and create every day. They can help us understand better and more fully, but only if we ask good questions and evaluate answers critically.
Using AI doesn’t have to limit our understanding of the great texts in our history, such as the Declaration of Independence. Instead of letting the models’ probabilistic changes just happen to us, we can use them to empower human talents and skills by knowing how to ask good questions and evaluate answers critically. In doing so, we can change and improve civilization with AI as a tool, not an obstacle or a crutch.
Politics is Anxiety, the Declaration Is Hope
by Jacob Nestle
Everyone is afraid these days. Sometimes they have a good reason. Politics is, at its core, anxious. If you just listen to the news, you get the impression that every election is existential, every law the end of the world, every SCOTUS decision either the fall of the republic or the rise of fascism. We shouldn’t ignore the importance of those things. Sometimes our fears are justified. But we shouldn’t let that fear rule our lives.
As Americans, today is a great reminder that our great republic is more than the next election, the next law, the next judicial ruling, the next anything. We are part of something greater, and it all began 250 years ago when the Declaration of Independence forged a union based on eternal principles.
Thomas Jefferson himself was careful to remind his contemporaries that he was not trying to create something altogether new. The people of the colonies already existed, and the principles he was writing about were ancient, natural—even belief in them, he insisted, was only a statement of what the patriots already believed. That humility was a smart thing to emphasize in the 1800s. It downplayed the achievement, made it seem natural and even inevitable. Jefferson did not want us to think of him as innovating, and he was right: The ideas in the Declaration did not originate from his pen. But no nation had ever been built on them before.
Since that fateful day in 1776, nations around the globe have sought to emulate the Declaration of Independence. Self-government and human rights are now taken for granted. The fish, as the saying goes, does not know it swims in water. In the same way, we often forget how transformative the Declaration of Independence was for world history. It inspired revolutions and reshaped the world.
We are the heirs of this remarkable legacy. When we look around us, stuck in the immediate moment, it may seem like the sky is falling. The Declaration reminds us of what is eternal and true—natural rights, self-government, the American people—and it assures us that even a backwater colony can become great if it is built on great principles. Nothing about the Declaration of Independence was inevitable. (Sorry, Jefferson.) It took courage and, most of all, it took incredible hope.
Thanks to the Declaration of Independence, we can continue to have that hope today. The anxieties can fall away. Politics might be daunting, frustrating, far from perfect.
Today we celebrate the greater legacy. We carry forward the incredible hope.
