amorphous_constellation
Well-Known Member
I'm sure it cannot be updated, since it is a historical, not a legal document. There is no provision to update that. We could paraphrase it though. Thomas Jefferson is known for words with high ideals without following through on those ideals, so I am not surprised if he thinks nothing of slandering the natives. He seems to exist in idea space in his letters but in life not so much. He did show courage in signing the document, because he must have known this would bring trouble from the crown. He probably did think that the natives were savages, too; and that somehow he was superior though he states in the document that all men are created equal. I'm not sure what to say about it, but you really are pulling us way out into a different conversation. He's dead. We're not.
I guess it's just to show the flaws in the transitory movement that those men were developing. We consider it a milestone, but you probably wouldn't like to bring those men aboard a modern forum, for example. Perhaps we can also apply this example to modern politics, each side trying to say the apple is rotten, if only perhaps some of it is rotten. For we are the dead-to-be, and someone in a lofty future might be fit to castigate all of us, yet lionize us. And so maybe it is not right to make the 'perfect the enemy of the good,' or perhaps more to the point, 'the process the enemy of the goal.' Unless the goal is never to be reached, and it is all process, in which case there are always flaws
Last edited: