CHAPTER 55
In 1766 Blackstone wrote, the Commentary on the Law, a document that helped to inspire Jefferson and America’s Founding Fathers. In it Blackstone defines the “Law of Nature” as “revealed or divine law found in the holy scriptures.”432 He went on to rationally argue that “man’s reason is corrupt, full of ignorance and error…[and as such] man must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.”433 The Declaration of Independence being based on this premise, states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
To secure those rights that lead to life, liberty and happiness America’s founders instituted a Constitutional government with a Constitution as the standard upon which all laws should be weighted. It claimed to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. However, like ancient Rome of old, many are concerned that Americas foundational walls are crumbling, eroded by moral decay and by those who raised their hand pledging to protect it. They see Americas Constitutional banner once unfurled as too restrictive, old and soiled, basing their views on the fabric of academic and evolutionary thought, which now restricts the Pledge of Allegiance to God and country in our public classrooms.
Have the moral underpinning ties been severed from a nation, which, at one time, believed in a divine creation of this world and of mankind? Does a majority of Americans now believe in these evolutionary thoughts as to the origin and evolution of man, a belief that has lead society down the path of a whole new way of thinking and existing. Has it placed society on the path of a whole new sexual morality, which includes mindless and harmful entertainment, a lack of respect for life and for the laws that have been put into place, for the defense of marriage and family? This moral decay in American society is most readily apparent in the media, as seen in the simple stereotyping of the religious or of traditional families.
Some believe that this ideology and new morality is something new to the history of mankind, introduced in the era of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. But that is not the case, for this foundational doctrine looking into the origin of man, as it’s foundation, started well before Morgan published his book on “Ancient Societies” and well before Powell shared his essays on “Human Evolution” or on “Darwin’s Contribution to Philosophy.” For thousands of years skeptics have questioned the existence of God or of a supreme being playing a role in the organization found in nature.
These early men of science in the late 1800s may not have been the first, but were perhaps the most influential in mainstreaming their foundational evolutionary theories as to the origin of man to cultures worldwide. As these early theorists grew in stature in both science and government, they would look to advance “the science of man,” with all of its many complexities, which now falls under the realm of cultural anthropology. Today’s dictionaries are now defining ethnology and cultural anthropology as being the same.
John Wesley Powell and Lewis Henry Morgan, were searching for answers of how to address what they saw as serious ethnological questions facing America in the 1800’s. They found in their studies of ancient societies and in the newly emerging evolutionary sciences, answers that could be advanced through the sciences. As a new wave, cultural anthropology organizations were being organized in both England and the United States. They came to realize that they could place every variant on what has been referred to as the Evolutionary Stairway. In so doing they had come to understand that by advancing these theories as to the origin of man, theories developed by Malthus, Spencer, Darwin and Morgan, it would provide a philosophical foundation to address a whole host of political, religious and social questions facing society. Malthus who promoted the idea that the Indian populations should be kept in check, coupled with Darwin and Morgan’s evolutionary stages, and Karl Marx and Engels views into “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” paved the way for American expansionism and Manifest Destiny, along with a whole new way of thinking and existing, a new socialism agenda that set the stage for what has been referred to as an “Evolution Revolution.”
In the words of the late Dr. Roger Kennedy, former director of the American History Museum at the Smithsonian, as a parting admonition he stated: “The search for harmony is not a new phenomenon…as we move forward toward an attempt to restore our own harmonious relationship to our mound-building predecessors, we may find, in the Old or New Testament texts, analogies to the physical testaments they have left to us. Analogies do not explain things away. Instead, they may be an opening to understanding, declaring that we are all baffled by the enigmas of the universe, and that it is possible that the American Indians, we, and ancient peoples of the Old World, including the Jews, may have sought ways of seeking harmony with mysterious systems we cannot understand and cannot control. In this spirit, let us return to the mounds, and risk some guesses about why and how they were built.434
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432 Tom Christensen: Securing Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, 1 #2 ref. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (Robert Bell, Philadelphia 1771) Vol. I 41-42
433 Ibid.
434 Kennedy, Hidden Cities; 242.