Liberty and the Adventure of Life

T hrough their reason, experience, and understanding of history, America’s Founders learned that all people are created equal and receive from God fundamental rights. The Declaration of Independence calls these “self-evident” truths.

Today, Americans can and should look back at the same history that informed the Founders. But today’s Americans can also taste the fruit of the tree of liberty the Founders planted 250 years ago. Just as world history and reason taught the Founders that liberty is necessary for human dignity, American history demonstrates for those willing to look that liberty sets the stage for prosperity.

The idea of adventure, the often indirect and difficult journey toward a meaningful objective, drives the narrative of the foundational stories of Western civilization from Abraham to the Exodus. It is also there at the beginning of the American story.

John Robinson, pastor of the congregation that produced the Pilgrims, encouraged the Pilgrims-to-be, “as the people of God in old time were called out of Babylon civil . . . so are the people of God now to go out of Babylon spiritual to Jerusalem.” And so, the Pilgrims embarked on a dangerous mission to establish a colony where they could worship God according to their convictions.

Movement was set down as a core principle of the nation’s creed in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that among each person’s God-given rights was “the pursuit of Happiness.” For the Founders, “Happiness” was more than a sense of immediate well-being or contentment. As John Adams wrote a few months before he signed the Declaration, “All sober enquiries after truth, ancient and modern, Pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity consists in virtue.”

And Adams’s son John Quincy Adams encouraged his own son to consider himself “as placed here to act a part — That is to have some single great end or object to accomplish; towards which all the views and all the labours of your existence should steadily be directed.”

A life of happiness — one of virtue and meaning — is, by necessity, one of pursuit. This is not only because growth in negative virtue, refraining from immoral behaviors, requires effort but because, in the Western conception, virtue entails constructive action.

As Frank Meyer wrote in National Review in 1962, the Western “concept of virtue is positive, the performing of acts honorable, noble, valorous, glorious, generous. The free law of love is its highest command, not the meticulous performance of scheduled actions.” The virtuous man grows in virtue as he builds and creates a life for himself and his family.

Human dignity thus demands liberty, space for each person to pursue, imperfectly as is inevitable, the “part” he is here to play, guided by his convictions and constrained by reality, not by the narrowness of another’s vision. Granted that room for exploration and adventure, Americans have prospered. No nation in history has innovated more, done more for global well-being, or had more of a cultural impact than America.

Americans today carry on that tradition. They move across the country to follow opportunity, they start businesses out of their garages, they plant churches, they establish schools, and they run for the local school board. They understand that they are here to “act a part,” and they continue to demand the space needed in which to experiment and learn, to direct the “labours of [their] existence” to those ends.

Just as American history demonstrates that freedom is the foundation on which people can and will build prosperity, Americans today are demonstrating with their feet that freedom still works as they move from overregulated and oppressive states to those that respect economic liberty and conservative values.

Americans love exploration and adventure, building and refining. In these ways, the American spirit is really the human spirit unleashed, at its best. That such endeavors present myriad and diverse challenges, that they involve pain, setbacks, and losses, is not only unavoidable but is what makes them meaningful and rewarding.

This is the pursuit of happiness that the Founders recognized was the right of every individual: to contend with reality, to grow in virtue, to explore, create, and build, according to the convictions of his conscience.

A quarter of a millennium after the founding, some on the left and ostensibly on the right invite Americans to cede greater power to the government to direct the nation’s affairs. These thinkers and politicians claim that government can solve America’s problems by imposing their vision of virtue grounded not in the liberty essential to protect human dignity but in their own conception of the good.

In 1962, Meyer wrote: “The West is in decay not . . . because ‘the free society has come to take priority over the good society,’” as one commentator argued at the time, “but because freedom has declined as virtue has declined.” The solution? “The recovery of one demands the recovery of the other; the recovery of both” was in 1962 and is today, “the mission of conservatives.”

As the Founders had learned from history, “Life” and “Liberty” are the twin cornerstones upon which respect for human dignity is built. As they knew, and as Americans can see in their own history, free people must build the structure of prosperity atop that foundation through their “pursuit of Happiness.”

Americans are now embarking on a new quarter millennium. Looking forward to the next 250 years, if Americans want to preserve and contribute to American greatness, they must fight to protect and honor life, to preserve and restore liberty, and to pursue happiness without reservation. Human dignity demands nothing less.

Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a four-part series on constitutional order.