THE CHOICE BETWEEN BEING BRIGHT OR BEING AMERICAN:

We Hold These Truths Because They Are True (G. Tracy Mehan, III, 12.29.10, American Spectator)

In 1960 the venerable publishing house of Sheed and Ward released We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S.J. It was a series of essays exploring "the American Proposition" which Abraham Lincoln cited in the opening lines of his Gettysburg Address.

Father Murray understood that, even in the 1950s, "the serene, and often naïve, certainties of the eighteenth century have crumbled." Thus, the "self-evident" truths of the Declaration of Independence "may be legitimately questioned."

"What ought not to be questioned, however, is that the American Proposition rests on the forthright assertion of a realist epistemology," asserts Murray. "The sense of the famous phrase is simply this: 'There are truths, and we hold them, and we here lay them down as the basis and inspiration of the American project, this constitutional commonwealth.'" Over and against positivists, Marxists and pragmatists, the Founding Fathers thought that "the life of man in society under government is founded on truths, on a certain body of objective truth, universal in its import, accessible to the reason of man, definable, defensible."

"If this assertion is denied, the American Proposition is, I think, eviscerated at one stroke," argues Murray. "For the pragmatists there are, properly speaking, no truths; there are only results. But the American Proposition rests on the more traditional conviction that there are truths; that they can be known; that they must be held; for, if they are not held, assented to, consented to, worked into the texture of institutions, there can be no hope of founding a true City, in which men may dwell in dignity, peace, unity, justice, well-being, freedom."

Murray says "we hold these truths because they are true. They have been found in the structure of reality by that dialectic of observation and reflection which is called philosophy."