Monday, July 03, 2006

 

Florida: American History is Knowable, Not Some Construct


In 1763 the Timucua, originally the most numerous native people of Florida, were exiled to Cuba and subsequently eradicated. You probably didn’t know that, as it is not in most history books. In the first place, it was prior to the Declaration of Independence, the universal principles upon which we were established. You see, to understand history, you have to deal with abstractions. Abstraction is the process of picking the important facts to get to the essentials we call reality. In a democracy, we vote, through our elected representatives, on the assortment of facts that make up reality. That is called the establishment function.

Now nobody likes someone messing with reality. Historians (hist-libs) tend to want to slip in new facts and change old ones, in the process disturbing reality. We have been discussing the challenges legislatures face in deciding what is good. Historically speaking, that requires picking the essential facts.

The Florida legislature, in its recently enacted education statute, provides that American history “shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” and as “knowable, teachable, and testable.” So there. Further, “the history of the United States shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”. The statute goes on to enumerate these principles, including “natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights of life, liberty and property” (how can anyone be against self-evident truth?). Of course, not all of that (like limited government and rights of property) is literally in the Declaration, but it is in the penumbra.

Most of us prefer the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution anyway. The founders actually voted for the war before they voted against it. Plus it is shorter and catchier. It is a lot easier to remember “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.” than it is all that detail about what fraction of a person a slave is (I think it was 3/5. Indians were zero).

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