![]() Whether or not those beliefs are factual, true, or self-evident in today’s America is secondary to forging an agreement that they are, nevertheless, worth fighting for. A government whose mandate is to safeguard the security of those who give it legitimacy. Some of Jefferson’s words remain quite useful for that exercise: equality, inalienable rights, life, liberty. Regardless of what America has been in the past-in all its glories and failures-the Fourth of July affords us a chance to articulate a new set of beliefs about why we exist and why we deserve to be an independent nation. Though this may feel treacherous, it also offers us an opportunity to cast the old American story aside and forge a new one-not based on a static foundation of facts passed down to us from the founders, but on a new set of beliefs about human rights and human dignity that can propel us forward in the decades ahead. And now, the era of self-evident truths is past, and a new era of arguments and beliefs upon us. The shifting sands beneath our feet have a much longer history, as Lepore summarized in that article, that includes postmodernism, relativism, and fundamentalism. ![]() While social media and the web have radically re-ordered our world, they are not solely responsible for ushering in the post-truth, post-fact era. Read more: ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’: The History of Frederick Douglass’ Searing Independence Day Oration ![]() Depending on what evidence you assemble in what order, conservatives and progressives can each demonstrate to each other a compelling belief system that is self-evident, supported by facts, and threatened by “repeated injuries,” “usurpations,” and “tyranny” of the other side-words that Jefferson used 246 years ago. In the public sphere each day we argue about which pieces of information, assembled in which order, reveal which self-evident truths that should become the basis for our actions. When those agreements become unraveled, we must find new ones-and, indeed, we are in the midst of such a tumultuous process. A national history is, after all, an imagined agreement on facts shared by a diverse group of people. Our very existence is tied to a world of facts and self-evident truths. ![]() If the world of facts is collapsing, perhaps that is also why the very foundations of the American experiment feel on shaky ground. As Lepore wrote, “the origins of no other nation are… as answerable to evidence,” as the United States. Our independence, Jefferson made clear, also relies on that premise. As historian Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2016, so much of our modern world-from law and science to history and journalism-has been shaped and ordered by “the fact,” the notion that something could be definitively known. To expert-centric fields of knowledge, such a world poses many threats. We forge our own realties, finding ample justifications for why we believe each reality is self-evident. We each re-write our personalized realities each day, curated from fragments of information scattered across the web and surfaced to us by recommendation engines. With so much information available to each of us, we no longer require-and, indeed it may not be possible to have-a shared set of facts or self-evident truths. Indeed, an argument can be made that a world of facts has been superseded by a world of beliefs. The success of these pieces of e –history often has little to do with facts or truths. Today, the information about the past we encounter online is increasingly shaped by algorithms, platform designs, crowd-sourcing, and disinformation campaigns.
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