Human Dignity and America’s 250th

Like many Americans, I’ve been refreshing my knowledge of the American Revolution in anticipation of July 4 this year. And, at the same time, I’m finding myself comparing the Founders’ notions of human dignity with the way the term is frequently being used these days, even within the Church. 

Like most pre-modern thinkers, the Founders believed that, in each of us, there is something divine (“Men have been endowed by their Creator. . .”). As the pagan Stoic Seneca, much read by both the Founders and almost all Christian thinkers until modern times, put it, Homo res sacra homini (“Man is a sacred thing to man.”).  

But they were also aware of the other side of the coin: Homo homini lupus (“Man is a wolf to man.”). It would probably be an exaggeration to say that Church and State have forgotten the latter, but it’s clear that both have lately been paying “human dignity” a lot more compliments than in the past.

In one way, this is understandable: we speak a lot about human dignity because so much in our world denies it. Materialism denies it. As do relativism, skepticism, scientism, communism, consumerism, postmodernism, and most modern psychologies. And all this is long before we even get to the old threats like economic exploitation and political tyranny, and new threats like the “technological paradigm” and its demon-child, AI. 

Still, replacing one extreme with another is rarely wise. Both our classical and Biblical traditions, properly understood, looked elsewhere. We talk a lot, even in the Church, about exclusion and marginalization as if they are the primary sins against “human dignity.” But our civilization once saw the cultivation of virtue and the construction of institutions to constrain vices as crucial ways to honor the properly human. 

Gordon Wood, the recently deceased and justly famed historian of early America, argues in his book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, that the American Founders regarded licentiousness as second only to slavery as a threat to liberty. 

We’ve all read of John Adams’ remark: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” And there’s also Benjamin Franklin’s equally trenchant response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Such sentiments were widespread at the moment of America’s birth.

In this, Americans were following millennia of human thought which emphasized that virtuous habits – our efforts to form ourselves to the Good and the True within ourselves – are what make us truly free – and help lead to ordered liberty in society. 

Several strong modern voices – notably Joseph Pieper, Romano Guardini, Fulton Sheen, Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Kreeft, even Jordan Peterson – have been raised to recover the older wisdom, but so far without much effect. What used to be considered one of the main tasks of a human life – developing virtues (under God’s grace) in order to be able to live a good life individually and with others – has all but disappeared from our horizons.

What’s replaced that “paradigm” is a bit harder to specify, but it’s something akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Men are born free but are everywhere in chains.” This preposterous claim suggests that every baby, if only preserved from the distorting influences of parents, church, school, community, etc. would grow into a virtuous – and free – human being.

There’s a tiny kernel of truth in this because all human beings, babies included (as St. Augustine starkly pointed out in Confessions) are damaged by Original Sin and transmit it to others. As Freud notoriously showed in secular terms, families can harm us. But Freud hadn’t yet seen what the absence of nurturing families and other natural societies would do to us. That’s an experiment we’re engaged in, with terrible results, just now.

The Founders spoke a lot about virtue even prior to the Revolution, even as they recognized the need for social structures to ensure a proper liberty. Wood says that many colonists feared tyranny from England because they believed that the English people, along with the monarchy, had been corrupted by wealth and power, and that, therefore, the English constitution needed to be restored:

Yet everyone knew that reducing the constitution to its first principles – “restoring it to its pristine Perfection” – was impossible if the people themselves had become corrupted and sunk in vice. Until the society itself had been infected, until there was “a general depravity of morals, a total alienation from virtue, a people cannot be compleatly [sic] enslaved.”

We hear a lot about the death of democracy at present. But it’s worth noting that the Founders feared pure democracy. They saw what – from antiquity on – could happen when public life was dominated by the unstable will of mere majorities. So they put together republican constitutional structures that would both allow for popular input, but channel it through differing offices – executive, legislative, and judicial – that would regulate one another.

As Number 51 of The Federalist Papers formulated it:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. (Emphasis added.)

Government cannot create a virtuous people. That work needs to be done by families, Church, schools, and communities. But how well do these institutions perform that task today?

Pope Leo XIV has remarked, “If you want to change the world, begin by letting God change you.” True enough, but lots of people today have their own ideas of what God wants, rather than what God has told us He wants. 

The Church with its deep-rooted traditions of the Cardinal and Theological Virtues, Seven Deadly Sins, and Gifts of the Holy Spirit has a great deal that it could bring to our dear ailing America on this, its 250^th birthday.