"We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident"

Walter Isaacson's The Greatest Sentence Ever Written is an essay about the second sentence of the Declaration of 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."

Sadly, ironically and perhaps dangerously, the philosophy behind the sentence is radically out of step with post-modern thinking. The Founders, in that sentence, were operating under 19th century liberal principles and Enlightenment rationality, but post-modern thought is completely and unfortunately different. 

Consider the clause “self-evident,” which has a precise philosophical meaning for the people who wrote it. 

A truth is "self-evident" if any rational mind must assent to it immediately, without needing further proof or external authority. It is not merely "obvious to me" or "feels true"; it is objectively obvious based on the use of reason alone. 

Contrast that to post-modern thought, which sees nothing as self evident, all things being conditional. 

For the authors of that revolutionary and world-changing sentiment, it is fundamental that:

• Humans possess a shared rational faculty capable of grasping universal truths.

• These truths are discovered (not invented), grounded ultimately in nature, nature’s God, or the structure of reason itself.

• Self-evidence is the highest form of certainty; it is the axiom or first principle from which political legitimacy is deduced.

For post-modernists, there is no objective, universal, rationally accessible truth:

• All truth claims are historically contingent, linguistically constructed, and embedded in power relations.

• What presents itself as "self-evident" is actually the result of hegemonic discourse (power)

• Reason itself is not a neutral, universal faculty but a culturally specific tool of domination.

Element	18th-Century Liberalism ("self-evident")	Post-Modernism (denial of absolute truth)
Foundational truths	Exist and are objectively discoverable by reason	Do not exist; all "foundations" are contingent constructions
Role of reason	Universal faculty that grasps necessary truths	Historically situated, power-laden discourse
"Self-evidence"	Immediate rational assent once terms are understood	Ideological effect that masks power and exclusion
Natural rights / human equality	Self-evident axioms from which politics is deduced	Socially constructed, historically variable, often oppressive
Legitimacy of political order	Derived deductively from self-evident principles	Produced by contingent power/knowledge regimes
Attitude toward universality	Strongly affirmative (moral truths are universal)	Deeply suspicious (universality = disguised particularity)
Possibility of objective critique	Yes: appeal to self-evident reason and rights	No neutral ground; critique is always from another narrative

So the authors of the Declaration of Independence believed in natural law, while post-moderns reject it. But what is “natural law?” 

Natural law is the philosophical tradition arguing there exists a universal moral order inherent in human nature and the structure of reality itself, discoverable by human reason, and binding on all people regardless of time, place, or positive (man-made) law.

Natural law suggests morality is not invented, not merely commanded, and not reducible to power or preference. “Rights” do not, therefore, come from governments. They come from nature or reality or God.  

Post-moderns cannot accept this, of course. But one little-known fact is that the global Catholic church continues to believe in natural law, and is therefore profoundly countercultural to the dominant post-modernist project. 

And since post-modernism rejects"self-evident truth," the two positions are perfectly opposed on the question of whether anything can be rationally indisputable. 

In other words, the two schools of thought fundamentally disagree about  whether truth can exist, valid across time and space. Beyond “my truth and your truth” (which 18th century liberals might call “your opinion or my opinion”), both schools of thought radically differ on whether any objective truth, standards or realities exist. 

One therefore wonders, when applied to societies, economies, science or cultures, whether any of those things can actually survive, if “everything” is relative and conditional, based only on power relationships. 

One obvious and morally disturbing consequence is that all “ethics” or “morality” is based on some entities subjecting other entities to their understandings because of their power. In principle, there are not timeless principles that we all must or should observe; no “right” or “wrong.”

Sorry, I believe in natural law. Some things are self-evident. Some things are objectively true; others objectively false. We can disagree on what those things might be. 

But as a practical matter, any group of humans living together in large groups must functionally acknowledge objective “truth.” Stop signs mean one thing. Grammatical rules exist. Syntax exists in language. 

As an abstraction, we might hear some argue that all such rules are essentially arbitrary, which is correct. The problems arise when all human values are considered to be arbitrary, and are based solely on the exercise of power. 

For believers in natural law, good is to be done and pursued, while evil is to be avoided. But that involves some discernment about what is “good” and what is “evil,” and for any large group of humans, that cannot be a matter of personal taste.