Happy Thanksgiving: An Essay

Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday and while wildly misunderstood as it relates to its origin story, in my view, it is largely and a bit ironically symbolic of individual agency as opposed to community or group belonging.

There has been a lot of talk and memes lately about “what kind of American are you” in the wake of K-shaped economy discourse and then the X geo feature which revealed a lot of spook or bot or LARPer shenanigans.

The US is a state, not a singular nation in the traditional ethnic sense.

Rather, it is a collection of nations which largely coalesced into various individual states with distinct characteristics (see: American Nations) and then banded together out of pragmatism to defeat a common enemy, then stuck together for more practical reasons after requiring Herculean rhetorical effort by a few highly inventive and increasingly talented men (see: The Federalist Papers) who took the building blocks of the Enlightenment and built the edifice of a state built on them which the Europeans simply could not due to the lack of a “canvas”.

America was that canvas and it was the only such canvas to ever emerge in human history at anywhere near that scale due in part to a series of geopolitical, demographic, and biological accidents — most crucially the fact that English-speaking Protestant dissenters with an already individualistic culture achieved First Effective Settlement and imprinted their patterns before any rival group could.

People like Voltaire and Thomas Paine laid part of the intellectual foundation of a nation-less state, leaning cosmopolitan in that they were humanists, citizens of the world, and more or less disagreed with modern conceptions of patriotism because it implied a love of country must therefore mean lack of love for the others, and this was anathema to the human experience where all humans ought to benefit from and possess the same inalienable rights.

As Voltaire put it:

“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.”

Paine — most famous for having said: “These are the times that try men’s souls” and “…there is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island” — echoed this sentiment in declaring:

“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

and

“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”

John Locke aligned with this cosmopolitan humanist view, emphasizing universal natural rights that apply to all mankind, as he wrote in his Second Treatise of Government:

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

Note the lack of mention or reference to a type of man, of a particular nationality, culture, or dogma. Of course it is still a work in progress as is anything else, with missteps and stumbles, but only the USA has truly effected such a state of affairs on this intellectual scale and with this durability. A handful of other societies in the Anglosphere and a few small European federal republics have approached it, but the rest of the world remains stuck in the concrete of ancient conceptions of philosophy, collectivism, feudalism, and deference to authority both in person and in idea, and in my view they always will due to a version of the Effective First Settlement principle.

Of course there were other Enlightenment thinkers who leaned more nationalistic or “patriot” than cosmopolitan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who critiqued the abstract cosmopolitanism of Voltaire and Paine as often detached and hypocritical, warning:

“Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such philosophers will love the Tartars to avoid loving their neighbor.”

Rousseau’s warning is not trivial. Detached “elite” cosmopolitanism can certainly become an excuse to ignore the concrete duties we owe the people closest to us — our neighbors and fellow citizens whose cooperation is required for any free society to function at all. And many of the Founders felt this instinctively. Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, Jay’s appeal to common ancestry in Federalist No. 2, Hamilton’s and Washington’s deep (even if aristocratic) sense of honor and reputation — were all more rooted in a particular people than Paine’s “my country is the world” commentary.

And yet, here is the crucial American difference: the Founders did not enshrine that rootedness as the legal foundation of the state. They used an existing cultural substrate (Anglo-Protestant individualism, the habits of self-government learned in Puritan community meetings in New England and Virginia county courts) as the soil in which the universalist seed could actually sprout. But it was that seed’s “code” — not the soil’s — they deliberately wrote into the Constitution and Declaration. The cultural carriers were necessary as a practical matter, no doubt, but the intellectual views they carried were made primary.

That’s why “We the People” can expand… why a German immigrant in 1850 or a Vietnamese person in 1980 could take the oath and mean it every bit as much as a Mayflower descendant. This is something no European-style nation-state, and almost no other country on earth, has ever managed at scale. In short, America took Rousseau’s “nearest duties” seriously enough to build a real civic community capable of defending liberty and other Enlightenment worldviews, yet refused to tether those duties to blood, soil, or culture.

Let’s look at these two most important quotes from the founding documents:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

The first invokes the universality of the general rights of ma, irrespective of any personal attribute or national affiliation. The second explains the explicit purpose of the founding of the United States of America. It was to form a union of the people. It was primarily a pragmatic and civic creation, not nationalistic or cultural one. There is no invocation of ancestry as the primary basis, no appeal to shared blood or land as the sole glue, no cultural prerequisite written into any of these legal foundations.

Now contrast this with the tone of many other major national constitutions and founding documents… emphasis mine.

Germany’s Basic Law

“Conscious of their responsibility before God and man, animated by the will to serve world peace as an equal partner in a united Europe, the German people have adopted, by virtue of their constituent power, this Basic Law.”

Japan’s Meiji Constitution

“The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.”

Hungary’s Constitution

“We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe.”

Poland’s Constitution

“We, the Polish Nation, all citizens of the Republic, recalling our ancestors’ best traditions…”

France’s constitutional preamble

“The French people solemnly proclaim their attachment to the Rights of Man and the principles of national sovereignty.”

China’s Constitution

“China is one of the countries with the longest histories in the world. The people of all ethnic groups in China have jointly created a splendid culture and have a glorious revolutionary tradition… [and] founded the People’s Republic of China.”

Mexico’s Constitution

“We, the representatives of the Nation of Mexico… have enacted the following Constitution.”

Russia’s Constitution

“We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation, united by a common fate on our land… revering the memory of ancestors who have conveyed to us the love for the Fatherland...”

Brazil’s Constitution

“We, the representatives of the Brazilian People, convened in the National Constituent Assembly… do hereby promulgate, under the ratification of the Nation..”

Even the “civic” or multi-ethnic countries (Brazil, Russia, China) still speak in the voice of a historically continuous people who pre-exist the constitution and whose shared past, land, or revolutionary struggle is what legitimizes or perpetuates the state. The constitution is an act performed by that already-existing “nation” usually in memory of their ancestors, usually tied to a specific territory or civilizational story.

Only the American documents begin with abstract truths and a deliberate act of constitution that brings “We the People” into political existence for the first time, rather than presuming an ancient nation that decides to give itself a new charter.

These are not merely semantic differences. They reflect fundamentally different assumptions about what binds a people together in most of the world. In the US Constitution, there is no such verbiage like “American Nation” or “the American people” or any mention of ancestral land at all let alone shared national myths or pride of any particular shared culture. This is very important and not just a pedantic argument. “People of the United States” is very different than “American People.” The former invokes statehood while the latter invokes nationhood.

What many people do not understand today is just how new to the human experience the concept of acting for oneself is, let alone thinking for oneself. And in my view, “thinking for oneself” is the definition of individual sovereignty. The opposite would be to “defer to authority” or a group, of which conceptions of “nationhood” are part at its core, in my view.

The invention of the printing press followed by the Reformation in Christian Europe created an explosion of individual interpretation writ large that rarely occurred at any other time in the history of human civilization. In many or most cases, you would literally be killed if you said something that differed from the official authority’s view, whether that authority be royalty or the Church. It had nothing to do with whether it was right or wrong, only that it was different.

We take this for granted today. We take for granted how we can go about our day to day lives thinking whatever we want to think and saying whatever we want to say. That there is no longer any ideological authority in the world that we ought to fear seriously. We think this is a normal state of affairs, but it is not even remotely close to normal. It took an unpredictable series of historical accidents and a ridiculous volume of blood, sweat, and tears to maintain it.

So to me, America is an idea and it was always an idea first and foremost, even if that idea required a particular cultural carrier group to take root and endure. It is not a nation in the old sense. It is an idea made possible only by the unlocked and released power of the individual. The fact that it has physical borders is a practical and geographic reality, not a nationalistic or ideological reality at its core.

America is the idea of the sovereign individual, turned into a state whose only legitimate purpose is to protect the conditions under which every human being can actually live as a sovereign individual in both spirit and in practice.

It is the Enlightenment’s one successful political incarnation.

So, today, I am thankful for America.