Well, it’s Tuesday, the 4^th of July, and in the United States, it’s Independence Day.  It’s often just referred to by the people of America as “The 4^th of July”, rather like the holiday “Cinco de Mayo” in Mexico, but I strongly prefer to refer to it as Independence Day, because that way we are more likely to remember what is being celebrated:  The official beginning of the United States of America as an independent nation, as announced in the Declaration of Independence.

I’m a fan of the Declaration of Independence, and I encourage Americans at least to read it every year.  It isn’t very long, and if you want, you can sort of skim through the list of grievances.  But the idea of the Declaration is important.  To my knowledge, it was the first founding document of a nation that explicitly states that governments are not ends in themselves, but are means for the protection and support of the rights and well-being of the people of the nation.

I know these ideas weren’t original to the founders of the United States, but as far as I know, it was the first time they were declared, in an official document, as the reason for existence of a nation, of a government.  Not God, not kings, not some “greater good” that supersedes a person, but the rights of each individual person, and of all of them in total, are the point of a government.

And, of course, the stated “self-evident” truths are interesting:  “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.”  Then follows the statement that people make—or tolerate—governments as a means to an end or ends; they are not ends in and of themselves, and if they’re not doing what they’re meant to do, or not doing their job well, it’s within the rights of the various people to change those governments and try to make something better, though this should not be done lightly.

Many people, quite correctly, point out that there is hypocrisy in the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  Many of the founders were slave-holders, and they all clearly had less-than-ideal attitudes toward women, and toward the rights of native Americans and so on.  This does not invalidate the Declaration of Independence, because the ideas expressed within it are bigger than any individuals of any given era or of any given outlook and set of prejudices.

The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are aspirational.  It’s not saying “this is what we are,” but “this is what we strive to become, what we think we should be.”

One does not hold it against someone if, on the day they begin a new diet and exercise regimen, they are not already paragons of physical heath and beauty.  The whole point of the regimen is to become better than one already is, and this, I think, is the spirit in which one should take the Declaration of Independence, (and the American Constitution)***.

We were not perfect then (the “we” is a bit presumptuous, since none of my ancestors, as far as I know, were in the US before the end of the 19^th century) and we are not perfect now, but there is little room reasonably to doubt that we are better now than we were then, as individuals, as societies, as a civilization.

It’s going to require continuing effort, with strict rigor, to continue getting better, by whatever measure of “better” we might choose.  There is much work yet to be done.  Maybe civilization will never be perfect.  Perfection is a rather woolly concept anyway.

So it’s not unreasonable to celebrate Independence Day (though we now are quite close allies with Britain, from which nation we declared independence).  It’s not a celebration of enmity, but perhaps more analogous to the celebration of a child having left home and having become an adult in its own right.  Maybe that’s a condescending attitude, I don’t know.

But I’m a fan of the United States in terms of ideas and approaches, though there are many things about it that are imperfect.  I have no sympathy with anyone who would say, “My country, right or wrong”; that’s no better than saying, “My street gang, right or wrong.”  Loyalty should be earned, and I think that, at its root, the idea and practice of the United States, for all its faults and its continuing need for improvement, is worth at least provisional loyalty.

The USA has the capacity, and the inherent goal, to get better.  It doesn’t—at least when we are honest—claim to be perfect or divine (or even divinely inspired) or the best possible government that could ever be.  It carries, however, an implicit intent always to continue improving.  And that’s something worth celebrating.

So, Happy Birthday, USA (in the words of The Bears’ Almanac)!  Happy Independence Day.

*Note that here, of course, is an example of the greatest injustice in human history, the ages-long failure to recognize that the majority of humans (i.e., women) are fully human.  When I think of how many Emmy Noethers and Ada Lovelaces and Marie Curies and how many George Eliots and Brontës sisters and Mary Shelleys and so on were out there but never had the chance to become what they might have been, I want to weep.  It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that the human race might be twice as scientifically and mathematically advanced and have twice as much great art and literature, if only women had not been repressed throughout the ages.  Nevertheless, we can’t hold the writers (mainly Jefferson) of the Declaration of Independence too blame-worthy, at least relative to others, in this failure.  As late as the 1960s, and in as forward-thinking a show as Star Trek, the opening invocation still said, “…to boldly go where no man has gone before.”  It took until the 1980s with TNG to correct that to “…to boldly go where no one has gone before.”  They continued to split the infinitive, however, so some progress still remains to be achieved.

**Please note the clear implication that these are not the only rights that are considered unalienable or self-evident.  Of course, George Carlin, in a famous routine, pointed out that, at least in a certain way of looking at things, you have no rights, because those rights can be withdrawn and are allowed to you by those in power.  However, this isn’t necessarily logically correct.  Just because rights are infringed, even for decades or centuries or millennia, does not mean that those rights might not exist.  From a certain point of view, all rights are human inventions, are “fictions” of a sort, but based on many reasonable foundations of morality, rights are implicit, and they accrue to individuals.

***Which, after all, contains the power to amend itself, like an AGI that can change its own code, and that power has been used more than two dozen times since the thing was created.  Inherent in its writing is the recognition that it is not a perfect document as it is, but it is an improvable document, and it can, in principle, work toward better and better government asymptotically.