Every time I visit the National Archives in Washington, D.C., I relive my original moment of shock. As a teenager, I walked in and thought, “Hmmm, that looks just like the Declaration of Independence, and that other thing right next to it looks just like the U.S. Constitution.” It took me several moments to grasp that I was seeing the real things — not copies or facsimiles, but the bona fide founding documents of the United States. Right before me was Thomas Jefferson’s actual handwriting, setting forth enormous ideas about freedom and independence on a thin sheet of parchment.
To me, the National Archives is nerd nirvana, not just for Americans but for anyone who wants to see what can happen when you put scientific principles to work in building a nation from scratch. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (along with the Bill of Rights — it’s there, too) describe the principles for creating not just a new government but a new kind of government.
{mosads}Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, John Hancock, and the other founders mined the best ideas from history and political philosophy. They took inspiration from the dreams that had already led generations of settlers to the New World: freedom from tyranny, escape from superstition and repression, fair representation, and the ability to observe any kind of faith, even no faith at all.
Just imagine the mood in the early summer of 1776, when breaking free from England changed from an abstract threat to a world-changing reality. The founders began by formalizing a military rebellion, listing the reasons for wanting to be rid of King George III. They readily acknowledged that they could be hanged for what they were doing. Then they went much further.
They were thinking, “If we could design a government from the bottom up, we could have a system that continually refines itself, that continually sharpens its edge.” They decided to do everything all at once: to collect as much information as possible and evaluate it meticulously before taking on this colossal, idealistic project.
They followed the best design practice, starting with fundamental principles first and only then devising the structures to implement them. Their defining sentence is so famous that it’s easy to forget how radical it was at the time, “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.”
The greatest intellectuals of the American colonies were declaring independence not just from a king but from an entire impoverished system of thought. They were declaring that everyone has equal rights under the law — at least as far as they were able to extend that idea within the attitudes of the age.
Equality remains one of the greatest goals for political progress around the world. The founders of the United States were only human, operating within the assumptions, biases, and ideologies of the day. Women were pretty much excluded from the Constitution when it was written. Black people were discussed as though they were two-thirds of Caucasian guys and gals for the purposes of the census. Worse, they were treated as property rather than people when it came to basic democratic rights.
In scientific terms, you might say that the founders were creating the best system they could working with the information and culture of the time. Doctors of that period did their best to heal, but they did not know about the germ theory of disease.
Engineers produced helpful technologies despite being hindered by an incomplete understanding of the laws of thermodynamics and a complete ignorance of atoms. Astronomers could observe only what their lenses would reveal. Jefferson and company likewise extended their vision as far as they could across their political field of view.
We don’t normally think of laws as things that people discover, but that is very much what was happening during and immediately after the American Revolution. A group of scholars pulled together the best examples of good governance, and then set out to discover something even better. The founders were not all of one mind. They disagreed, often bitterly, but accepted that a compromised achievement is better than an unattainable perfection. Those compromises were possible because they knew that, in elevating principles above structures, they had created a process that would allow ongoing discovery and refinement.
Contrast the nascent process of the United States with the ways of a monarchy, in which a king can make laws unchallenged and order any action, including the lethal decision to go to war. Monarchy is inherently static unless the people rise up in revolution. The American Revolution was, in that sense, a scientific revolution as well as a political one. Right now, anti-science forces appear to be ascendant in the United States, but the system will adapt; evolutionary change and a process of governance akin to the scientific method are built in.
The potential for progressive change that’s built into the U.S. Constitution is reminiscent of Darwinian evolution and, more fundamentally, of the scientific method itself. Just as science doesn’t claim to attain absolute truth, the Constitution does not claim to achieve the utopian ideal of government. It promises “a more perfect union” not “a perfect union.”
The founders understood that the documents they wrote were not going to be the last word (or words) on how to run a just and peaceful society. They acknowledged that the nation’s laws had to allow for change in response to new needs and new information, just as scientific theories change in response to new ideas and new data.
I’m not the only one who is convinced of this adaptive resilience. People from all over the world still dream of working here and of becoming American citizens. A big part of what makes them want to take their chances in a strange land is our tradition of fairness.
Although the United States still has many glaring flaws, the laws in this country recognize merit over pedigree. That’s huge. There is a nerdy honesty that was incorporated into the system from the start.
Nerds treasure knowledge, because it is what allows us to find answers and develop better solutions to our problems. It promises that tomorrow will be better than today — because we will make it so. For me, there is no question that Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and company were full-on nerdy progressives.
The 4th of July is therefore a day not just about freedom from political oppression. It is also a time to celebrate our liberation from the older, stifling notions that we are doomed to stasis and individual impotence. Drawing inspiration from the nation’s founders, we can be progressives, too. We can each refer to America’s scientifically informed principles, adapt them to our modern problems, and change the world.
Billy Nye, commonly known as “The Science Guy,” is an American science communicator, television presenter, and mechanical engineer.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.