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“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”
Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.