I’ve just started reading Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. I saw Allen speak at Loyola University Maryland’s “Democracy and the Humanities Symposium” last September. Her presentation “On Participatory Readiness: Why the Humanities are Necessary for Democracy” was one of the highlights of the program for me. It was clear, precise, and accessible. In it Allen presented the Declaration of Independence as an Arendtian world-making document and proceeded to point to the role that humanities education should play in fostering civic engagement (concluding with Jefferson’s library at Monticello as a kind of conceptual model of this kind of education). That is a very simply summary of a wonderful presentation, and it is what drove me to pick up Our Declaration. And yeah, she had me at the prologue, the third paragraph even where she lays out the importance of language in the Declaration and the importance of cultivating the usage of that language:

When we think about how to achieve political equality, we have to attend to things like voting rights and right to hold office. We have to foster economic opportunity and understand when excessive material inequality undermines broad democratic political participation. But we also have to cultivate the capacity of citizens to use language effectively enough to influence the choices we make together. The achievement of political equality requires. among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures. (21)

As an English and literature teacher, I love this. It doesn’t deny the very important role of material conditions on political equality, but it also points to the importance of language and the world we build with language as essential to democracy.

Oscar Wilde made the much misunderstood statement that “Life imitates art for more than art imitates life.” I often have seen this statement used in the wake of school-shootings and youth oriented violence as a way of blaming violent media for violent behavior. However Wilde’s point is far subtler and more profound. He is actually making a point about how art helps create and shape our cognitive categories and as such actually creates the world. Language helps create the reality we exist in, socially and in our minds. Wilde’s fiction literalizes this at various points (The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Importance of Being Earnest both do this in particular ways). This is one of the great values of literature and why it is important, language and the art we make with it has consequences as Rebecca Solnit has recently pointed out. A large part of Allen’s thesis seems to be that the Declaration of Independence  is one of the great resources available to us not just for discussing and understanding liberty but also equality, and we should be more effectively employing that language and using it to construct our worlds. I look forward to seeing and mulling over the details of her case.