AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
I suppose it makes sense that the new nation, the United States of America, should have been so contradictory. It came into being just as several momentous developments had been or were taking place around the globe:
- The Scientific Revolution
- The Enlightenment
- The Age of Revolution
- The Industrial Revolution
The Scientific Revolution was hatched in the 1500s and it gave birth to The Enlightenment (1680s-1790s). In those pre-mass media days, both those radical transformations in thought had yet to completely overtake the old ways of thinking in every corner of the world. In fact, neither phenomenon, to this day, has been universally embraced. Millions of people, here and elsewhere, continue to believe an all-powerful god still steers the course of history and his (always his) word forever triumphs over reason, science, natural rights, Newton, Copernicus, Aquinas, and Aristotelian evidence.
The Founders, though — Jefferson, Franklin and others among them — were influenced and driven by both the Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment. But no change ever really happens in the snap of a finger, so their thought processes were both revolutionary and hidebound. Contradictory, in other words.
Today’s contradictions — a modern, computer-driven, post Einstein, post-Heisenberg, space-traveling age in which many leaders implore us to pray for solutions to our problems — exist not only in this country but all around the planet. We humans are a baffling bunch.
The Revolutionary fervor played out here, in France, in Haiti, in Ireland, and in Central and South America. It featured a rejection of hereditary royalty and colonialism. People, revolutionaries preached, could lead themselves. Nations didn’t need god-appointed, blood lineages to boss them around. We, the revolutionaries said, could boss ourselves.
Then again, that hallowed we possessed then, and continues to possess today, an unerring capacity to exclude certain peoples from the club of us.
And then the Industrial Revolution, in which combustion engines and electric motors drove machines that replicated our human motions and labor, freeing us to live lives of leisure and intellectual and artistic pursuits came along. Yeah, sure. The people of 2026 are busier, more stressed, more neurotic, more scared, more in danger of wiping ourselves out than any previous generation.
The world is filled with contradictions and the United States, the most representative nation on Earth, is the most contradictory land of all.
It was born in an age of confusion. Ironically, the smarter we’ve become, the less sure we are of what, where, and who we are. And that’s all of us, not just Americans.
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