Compared to What?

Distinguishing Human Universals from the Founding of America

What if someone asked me to describe you? What would you like me to say?

I could say that you are a collection of organic systems surviving on water, oxygen, and a daily intake of calories. I could say you are a mammal, specifically of the Homo sapiens lineage that originated in East Africa. But how helpful would that be? If I were setting you up on a blind date, that description would likely only frustrate the person I was describing you to.

The reason that description is so annoying is that it describes all humans. There is nothing unique about it that distinguishes you as an individual. The same applies to how we describe groups of people, societies, or nations.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, celebrations have—rightfully—already begun. This nation has produced ideas and material realities that our Founders could never have imagined. Along with those celebrations come descriptions of our history that help frame our successes and our failures.

---

Famed economist Thomas Sowell argues that our political and moral disagreements often stem from two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world: the Unconstrained Vision and the Constrained Vision.

The popular trend of focusing solely on America’s “warts” is a product of the Unconstrained Vision. This view assumes that human nature is perfectible and that evils like poverty or prejudice are “problems” with specific “solutions.” From this perspective, the existence of slavery or genocide is seen as a unique, avoidable failure to meet a moral ideal. It compares the reality of 1776 to a perfect world that has never actually existed.

In contrast, Sowell’s Constrained Vision—which he also calls the “Tragic Vision”—assumes that human nature is inherently flawed and limited. In this view, there are no “solutions,” only trade-offs. If you view the world through this lens, you realize that for most of human history, the “default settings” for our species were poverty, tribalism, and forced labor.

When we ask, “Compared to what?” we are shifting from the Unconstrained Vision to the Constrained one. We stop comparing the Founders to a modern, idealized utopia and start comparing them to the actual world they lived in.

Slavery, genocide, and supremacy were not unique failures of the United States; they were the global norms. What was unique—what was the “miracle”—was the creation of a system specifically designed to restrain human nature’s worst impulses. It was a system that provided the tools to eventually dismantle the very evils it inherited.

What I find interesting is what makes the United States unique—in the same way I would want to know what makes you, dear reader, stand out from a crowd. In the case of the United States, what was it about our founding that produced a place where slavery, genocide, and supremacy became unacceptable? Why are those ideas, when held by an individual or group, now used as slurs instead of simple descriptions of reality?

What was it about our founding that created a nation that spent so much treasure and spilled so much blood to end slavery, and then moved to stop it in other nations? Why do we now presume slavery is an inherent evil when we were founded at a time when it was a worldwide expectation?

Why did we evolve from a place where only land-owning men could vote to a society that debates the voting rights of non-citizens? How did “white supremacy” shift from a presumed fact of the era to a devastating slur?

What, in particular, was it about our founding ideas that took us from being on par with other nations to leading the way? That is the truly interesting question.

---

When discussions about our founding arise, remember to ask: “Compared to what?” The beauty of human beings and their societies is not found in a static snapshot of any one time, but in the evolution of those conditions, the direction of that growth, and the seeds that sprout such profound change.