Special Nostos : Wed Sep 11 2024

9/11 & the Core Theory of the American Experiment

Dear Friends of Odyssey,

Where were you on the morning of September 11, 2001? I was in Blacklick, Ohio, driving my silver, 5-speed manual Ford Ranger to a friend's house to go on a long training ride. In those days I was obsessed with cycling and running, and my two wheeled steed was a sweet Quintana Roo Tequilo (which I ended up selling to buy a wedding ring so I could propose to my now-wife).

Unloading my bike from the back of my truck, I hastily walked into my friend's apartment to find him sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV. Seemed weird to me. "Dude, you ready? Let's go, man," I teased and in his tense silence I stopped.

Crouching next to him, we stared wide-eyed. An hour later, we picked ourselves up, saddled our bikes, and rode harder than ever, barely speaking. We both knew something important was happening. I felt proud -- and scared -- in the wind on the back roads that day to be a citizen of a country founded on a beautiful idea.

The idea? The core theory of the American founding is that all human beings are born equal with respect to the right to tell another human being what to do. That is, parents notwithstanding, no human being has an inherent authority to tell another human being how to live.

That's what the Declaration of Independence means when it says "all men are created equal." And this is an equality that no government can grant, only protect, because it's natural and precedes all government.

We are equal in authority regardless of what any politician, monarch, or theoretician says.

So how do you set up a goverment in light of this natural fact? You guessed it: consent. The only valid reason one person has to tell another human what to do is that the first person has given the second person such authority. Hence: elections.

On 9/11, I wasn't yet an academic but I had read enough intellectual history to know that this core idea was worth defending. And that plenty of folks disliked the individual freedom that the idea entails. And that we are in a war of ideas.

It was later, in graduate school, studying classical philosophy and the history of ideas that I fell in love with my country's ideals based on a rigorous cross-historical comparative analysis and an honest study of human nature. The Founders are right.

Around here, therefore, 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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

If you have forgotten who did what to whom on this day 23 years ago, or you really have no clue, or you're just generally curious, this video is worth it. It’s called Debris 9/11 Film by Tony Anderson.

My heart of gratitude goes out to the heroic Americans who suffered and strived on that day to save their friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. Thank you.

For 10 years I taught on the classics faculty at The Ohio State University, whose motto is Disciplina in Civitatem, Latin for Education for Citizenship. Odyssey Coffee's not a university, but it is a vigorous refuge for thinkers, and we could just as well adopt the same motto.

When you need to get away from the political noise and reconnect to the beautiful ideas at the heart of the American experiment, we're here.

To that end we work,

Joey