[Platt]
No -- a homage to individual rights -- of life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness -- not provided by culture, but endowed by the Creator.
[Arlo]
"There is no "self-evidence" in European history that all men are
created equal. There's no nation in Europe that doesn't trace its
history to a time when it was "self-evident" that all men are created
unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for
this doctrine, certainly didn't get it from the history of Europe or
Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon
Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual
who lived in the New World, the person he called the "Noble Savage."
Multiculturalism.
"The Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The
American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values." (LILA)
Multiculturalism.
As for "not provided by culture", your merely repeating the same
mistake Pirsig warns against. "...in the historic process of freeing
itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to
invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own
benefit. Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the
objective world, never from the social world. The world of objects
imposes itself upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever." (LILA)
"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They
originate out of society" (LILA)
"Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived." (LILA)
These rights are most certainly culturally-derived, in this case from
the culture of the American Indian.
Not "endowed by the Creator" but emergent from culture. Not from God, from us.
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