Homework answers / question archive / How can some people see further ahead than the majority of us? How do we treat them? Do you agree with Allen that we, the citizens, have a responsibility to observe and understand the direction we are heading? Relate these questions to Socrates' role in the Allegory of the Cave

How can some people see further ahead than the majority of us? How do we treat them? Do you agree with Allen that we, the citizens, have a responsibility to observe and understand the direction we are heading? Relate these questions to Socrates' role in the Allegory of the Cave

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How can some people see further ahead than the majority of us? How do we treat them? Do you agree with Allen that we, the citizens, have a responsibility to observe and understand the direction we are heading? Relate these questions to Socrates' role in the Allegory of the Cave. Additionally, you can use any references to any famous historical and contemporary figures

ANOTHER WORD FOR RIVER Oce fon Dec 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 man- kind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. That is our beginning, a sentence so long and rich that we can't take it all in with a single glance. We have to begin by focusing on the very beginning, just one clause to start: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people ...." Yet even an entire clause is too much to grasp in one go. Let's stop right here: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary. ...." That beginning seems overdone. Why not just say, “When it becomes necessary ...?? Why add “in the course of human events”? And what exactly is the course of human events” anyway? Since “course” is another word for “river," an image of a waterway lies behind this sentence. Although Jefferson may not have been thinking explicitly about rivers when he wrote the first draft, the language itself, JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR RIVER [ 111 ] he word "course,” has this useful image built into it. We can use this image of a river to work our way into the sentence. A river has a definite shape. An infinity of droplets combine into a single flow, all moving together in the current's one direction. And all that water is rolling toward some knowable destination. The muddy Missis- sppi, for instance, may meander, but it descends inevitably into the Gulf of Mexico. Now the job is to apply those ideas to human events. As a 1773 alma- mac puts it, “Time, like a Stream that hastens from the Shore, Flies to an Ocean, where 'tis known no more.” Imagine an infinity of human events Bowing together into a great stream and hastening on. The Declaration is saying that human events, like the infinity of drop- lets in a river, cohere. Human events are going somewhere; they have shape and direction; there is meaning to their sequence. We should be able to tell where we are collectively headed. Unlike mindless driftwood, we should be able to see to the river's mouth. Another important feature of rivers helps us understand what the Declaration says about human events. It takes a huge amount of work to alter a river's path. The city of Chicago, for instance, spent eleven years working to reverse the course of the Chicago River sewage would flow away from and not into Lake Michigan. Happily, diverting a river and redirecting a river's course are easier than reversing it, even if such projects take work, too. The same is true of human events. The course can be altered—with strenuous effort. The phrase "When in the course of human events, it becomes neces- sary" implies that the colonists did not just wake up one day and think, -Gee, this looks like a nice day for a revolution.” Instead, they had stud- ied the events of the past, including of their own recent experience, and concluded that those events had, like a river, a current. They were flow- ing in a specific direction: King George was becoming a tyrant. Because events were flowing in such a direction, the colonists had reached a point where they desired to change course, just like Charles Prince, the CEO of Citigroup, whom I mentioned above. On a much larger scale than Mr. Prince, the colonists would have to dig in to redirect the course of human events. so that [112] READING THE COURSE OF EVENTS The seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, whose ideas were among those that would influence Madison and the Constitu- tion's framers, argued that government should rest on the will of the peo- ple and that people have a right to revolution whenever their government is becoming a tyranny. The hard part is this: how do you know when a government is turning into a tyranny? Locke answered that their right to revolution required citizens to see through the fog and haze of events in order to discern a government's true course and destination. He compared the experience to being a pas- senger in a ship whose course, despite being continually redirected in small ways, consistently heads toward a slave market in Algiers. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, he wrote, If all the World shall observe pretences of one kind, and actions of another; arts used to elude the law, and the trust or prerogative [held by the Prince] ... employed contrary to the end, for which it was given: if... a long Train of Actings shew the Councils all tend- ing that way, how can a Man any more hinder himself from being perswaded in his own Mind, which way things are going; or from casting about how to save himself, than he could from believing the Captain of the Ship he was in, was carrying him, and the rest of the Company to [be sold in a slave market in] Algiers, when he found him always steering that Course, though cross winds, leaks in his ship, and want of Men and Provisions did often force him to turn his Course another way for some time, which he steadily returned to again, as soon as the Wind, Weather, and other Cir- cumstances would let him? Late in his career Locke would work to undermine slavery in the colony of Virginia, and here he uses the fear of being captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates as a metaphor for political anxiety generally. Citizens need to see through myriad twists and turns of politics in order to tell whether their political leaders are steering toward a slave market in Algiers. This is a very hard thing to do. How are we to tell how things are going for us as a community? How can we see what course we're on? JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR RIVER [ 113] The twentieth century has provided chilling examples of people's not foreseeing what will befall their community, with the experience of many European Jews before and during World War II being among the most salient. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, writes about how the inhabitants of the little town of Sighet treated the one man who kept telling them what was coming as a fool. He was a modern-day Cassandra, pouring out the truth but considered mad. What he described seemed to make sense only out- side sanity's tree-ringed grove. As a consequence, none of the villagers escaped while escape was still possible. Then there are the cases where the passengers of the ship can see the dangerous rapids lurking just beyond the horizon but can't get help. Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell provides a whole list of examples: Armenia, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo. Power asks why Americans have so much trouble recognizing that a genocide is occurring or is about to occur and believing in the value of a strong response against the perpetrators of genocide. Her book overflows with stories of how the majority of people failed to see the course being set by political leaders and future perpetrators of genocides. Power describes “an instinctive mistrust of accounts of gratu- itous violence," but also the difficulty of settling on a clear understanding of the facts at hand in conditions where nearly every purveyor of informa- tion has an agenda. There is, in addition, the difficulty of trying to sepa- rate the true consequences of a pattern of actions from whatever claims any actor may make about his actions. On the other hand, Power records minority reports from people who could, in contrast to everyone else, see what was happening. She writes, for instance, about the Armenian genocide that “U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. examined the facts and saw a cold blooded campaign of annihilation; [Secretary of State] Robert Lansing processed many of those same facts and saw an unfortunate but understandable effort to quell an internal security threat." Why could Morgenthau see what Lan- sing could not? Why do we call some people “farsighted”? What skills have they honed that make them better readers of unfolding events than the rest of us? As we trace the argument of the Declaration, we will dis- cover answers to these questions. [ 114 ] READING THE COURSE OF EVENTS 11758. FEBRUARY hath 28 Days. URE there is none but fears a future State S do not Their trembling Hearts bely their boa?ting Tongues. Divines but peep on undi?cover'd Worlds, And draw the di?tant Landkip us they plea?e : But who has e'er return 'd from tho?e bright Regions, To tell their Manners; and relate their Laws ? 26 10 25 Lakt Quart. 1 Day 4 Morn. First Quart. 14 Day 6 Night. New Moon 8 Day Morn. Full Moon 22 Day 9 Night M.W.Ceterus Alpe8sWortb;&40.3. RO S.F, Sea, V.ROS. 14 0 12 21 217 5.8 5 43 160 16 2 S 2 12 & 162 227 4 5 6 36 29 1 24 3. Some warm Weather237 5 7 25thighs - 36 47808 violent Winds 247 2 5 8 16 27 3 331 SA clears off cold 2512 1598 knees 4 35 More foul & 3 SL 266 59 6100 2737 3 Sup. C. Portfm. 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When the colonists referred to the course of human events, they were taking responsibility for observing the currents within human action that pull us toward destinations, as identifiable—once we arrive, that is—as the Gulf of Mexico. It is our job as citizens to understand those currents—and to debate them and their direction—in the public square, so that we can see, as early as we can, as best we can, and despite the fogs of doubt and misdirection, the destinations that politicians and leaders are steering toward. The very course of human events depends on it.