We the People between Immanence and Transcendence

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“We the People,” at least according to the origin story that I tell as an historian, emerged under the influence, direct and indirect, of perceiving something of the political life of the genuinely self-governing peoples of Turtle Island (this continent)—something of what my friend Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) calls the original free and independent existence of these peoples—and of perceiving something of the threat that the British empire might violate the British Constitution and come to treat the American people as Britain had come to treat the people of Ireland.¹ Their American concepts of what it meant to be “free”—their most emancipatory aspirations—were a hybrid of the desires born of these perceptions.

These revolutionary-era American desires for “freedom,” in turn, gave birth to our contemporary notions of “the republican tradition” and of “democracy and human rights.” These, in turn—precious as they are in contrast with contemporary corruption and open authoritarianism—can nevertheless be considered as part of a failed attempt to enter into millennia of Native culture and history; a failed attempt at genuine self-government.

Seeking to understand—and to respond to—the breakdown of democracy, human rights, and republicanism that we have been experiencing, it is helpful to recognize that there is no going back to a lost “normality.” The politics of domination hidden within our traditions have come to the surface and cannot simply be pushed back down by appealing to civility. Instead, more genuine responses are needed; responses that do not simply replicate or even worsen old problems under new names. Rather than spread fires by attempting to fight them, we need, as Bayo Akomolafe has suggested, to become water.² We need to become, as John Trudell (Dakota) has suggested, raindrops that can join with the power of the storms of the Earth.³

There is a new and uncertain future that holds the potential of right relations with all. Rather than become preoccupied with what has become of us, we need to go back to our beginnings, look to understand the reasons for our worst mistakes, and, without assuming that we have the ability to “fix things,” seek to align our hearts and minds with the immanent divinity of our grandmother Earth.

From the perspective of the Earth herself, we, as a people, either have a diffused, broad awareness, which conveys the reciprocal love between all being, and the resulting compassion, inherent awe, shared gratitude, and desire to maintain right relations, or we don’t.

Our most profound mistake, as I see it, has been our failure to understand the responsibilities of our location between immanence and transcendence—our failure to understand that genuine self-government is rooted in our relationship to Earth’s immanent divinity whereas all domination, indeed all claims on the illusion of “legitimate” authority, are rooted in an idolatrous understanding of our relationship to the transcendent divinity of God. On the basis of a connection with transcendence, we have presumed a “right” to treat our grandmother Earth as if she were made up of “things” to be dominated by our will and disposed of at our pleasure. The most grotesque expression of this idolatrous presumption of which I am aware—the beating heart of “Christian” Nationalism—is to be found in Georgia Senator John Forsyth’s advocacy on the floor of the Senate in 1830 for what would become the Trail of Tears: “All Christendom seems to have imagined that, by offering that immortal life, promised by the Prince of Peace to fallen man, to the aborigines of this country, the right was fairly acquired of disposing of their persons and their property at pleasure.”⁴

We must learn, perhaps for the first time, the balance between the transcendent calling us to remember that every being shines with divine possibilities and the immanent reminding us that the divine already lives within every grain of soil, every trembling heart. We have failed to understand this—we have failed to understand the unity of immanence and transcendence, the unity of divinity—and so inserted ourselves into a role that is not ours to play in a seemingly biblically-inspired—but actually utterly twisted and illegitimate—position of domination; a position of domination that can only be sustained on the basis of illusion, idolatry, and violence.

There were those at America’s founding who opposed slavery, and who opposed the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, and who held a different vision of divinity than John Forsyth; they included Christians who sought to participate in a non-idolatrous variety of Christianity. In a 1781 book called Plain Facts: Being an Examination Into the Rights of the Indian Nations of America, to their respective Countries, Samuel Wharton sought to oppose efforts to obtain Native lands by injustice and violence. Europeans in earlier generations, he declared, had been misled by the emotions of avarice, ambition, and religious pride. The pervading liberal influence of philosophy, reason, and truth, “has since given us better notions of the rights of mankind, as well as of the obligations of morality and justice; which certainly are not confined to particular modes of faith, but extend universally to Jews and Gentiles, to Christians and Infidels.”⁵

“The Divine Author of our holy religion, when on earth,” Wharton continued, “affirmed no temporal dominion or property, but submitted himself on every occasion, even when criminally arraigned, to the jurisdiction and authority of Infidel magistrates, declaring that his kingdom was not of this world; and surely none of his disciples can justly arrogate to themselves powers which their great Master has disclaimed, nor pretend, that he has anywhere authorized them to expect earthly dominion or riches as the rewards of piety and virtue; much less can they plead his permission to acquire them by injustice and violence.”⁶

The indebtedness of “the Enlightenment” to the peoples of the so called New World—the indebtedness of what Samuel Wharton called “the pervading liberal influence of philosophy, reason, and truth” to these peoples—has been the subject of at least two major books in the last generation or so. The first was William Brandon’s New Worlds for Old in 1986 and the second David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything in 2021.⁷

As these books make clear, the existence of these Native societies without systems of domination and, generally, without elaborate hierarchies, stunned the Europeans. Missionaries reported on societies where no one went hungry unless everyone did, where there were no beggars, and where, when people found out that there were numerous beggars in Europe, they considered it a very bad thing, and “thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”⁸ These missionaries noted that the chiefs were powerful in so far as they were eloquent in that their power, as one missionary put it, extended to the tip of their tongue and if they could not persuade they would not be obeyed. “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”⁹ “They are free people,” another missionary reported, “each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others.”¹⁰

In seeking to become a free people ourselves, there are two derivative profound mistakes—in addition to our central failure to understand the responsibilities of our location between immanence and transcendence—that I will mention. One is our confusing the “democratic” decisions of allegedly virtuous consciences for the peaceful interaction of respectful consciousnesses as the basis of self-government. Both approaches rely on social self-understandings of our relationship to natural law that are grounded in spiritual truth, but our endeavor has rested on thin simplifications and abstractions and has often been shaped by a binary way of thinking focusing on “good” and “evil.”¹¹ The endeavors of the Native peoples have rested instead on thick descriptions rooted in traditions and ceremonies and on more accurate ontologies in which there is a foundation for respecting genuine diversity rather than being satisfied with the “pluralism” upon which we used to pride ourselves.¹²

Ontologically, the peoples of the Native Nations know that what they might refer to as “all our relations,” or as the sacred web of life—what I have taken to referring to with Martin Luther King Jr.’s term as the beloved community—always already exists. It is woven into the very fabric of creation. It is immanent as well as emergent in our world. Its presence was traditionally and widely respected on this continent before the eurochristian invaders arrived. Our task is not to invent it, but to re-member it: to restore our awareness, heal our relationships, and align our lives with the balance, harmony, and abundance of the Earth and her cosmic society through respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life. Politics, rightly understood, is antithetical to domination and rests on the practices of love, belonging, and respect. It is the humble and joyous work of restoring what was never truly lost—only forgotten in the midst of illusions that have been terribly destructive in their consequences, but which remain illusions that can be dispelled with what John Trudell calls “clear and coherent thought.”¹³

Lacking such clarity and coherence of thought—and so suffering from religious and secular illusions—the eurochristian peoples may reject what they perceive as tyranny, or malevolent authority, but they still believe that a politics based on “legitimate authority” can be valid or at the very least is somehow necessary. They often seek to disguise their support for domination or claim that domination itself has been somehow transformed by a “democracy” in which the people are “sovereign.” The differences between such allegedly “popular sovereignty” and genuine self-government generally eludes even those among them who know about the slavery, and the land thefts, and the genocides in which the United States has engaged.

From the perspective of what my friends Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota) and Steve Newcomb call “the view from the shore”—the view of the peoples of the Native Nations watching as the dominators arrive from their ships carrying their system of domination with them—the world looks very different.

Here I would like to make a distinction that Ghosthorse and Newcomb do not draw between what they describe as “the view from the ship” and what I would describe as the “modified” view from the ship—the view of the eurochristians and their heirs and successors as “modified” under the influence of “the Enlightenment” and democratic and republican theories.

From the perspective of the view from the ship, obedience to authority is necessary to the establishment and maintenance of any society. From the perspective of the “modified” view from the ship, “legitimate authority” is necessary to the establishment, maintenance, and improvement of any society; and “legitimate authority” derives its legitimacy from the “consent” of the people as expressed in periodic free and fair elections within a legal context that respects the political rights and civil liberties of the citizenry who are understood as including all of the members of the society (at least the adults) and in which all of the members of the body politic are expected to act with civic virtue.

From the perspective of the view from the shore, in contrast, at least to the extent that I understand it, genuine self-government does not rest on an “authority” deriving from “the consent of the governed,” as in American democratic and republican theories, it rests on the collective maintenance of right relations with all. In the experiences of these peoples, moreover—in this “view from the shore” perspective—it is not “legitimate authority” that rests so heavily upon them in American democracy—some allegedly “legitimate authority” somehow deriving from their supposed “consent”—but rather violence, oppression, and exploitation combined with some possibilities for “reform”—that rests upon them and that rests upon the American people as well.

This is very different from genuine self-government which involves respectful consciousnesses seeking peace through alignment with the balance and harmony and abundance that the Earth provides; an alignment that requires each and all to accept responsibility for respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life.

An additional and related American mistake that I will highlight is the American failure to differentiate between the egotism and “individualism” with which young people are raised on the eurochristian side of the great divide in which—at best—they are taught to appreciate the growth of love outwards from what Edmund Burke called the “little platoon” towards all of humanity, and the spiritual sociality of the Native peoples with its recognition of the far greater importance of educating young people to appreciate the growth of love inwards (within themselves) from the beloved community formed by all life to each and every unique being.

This difference in how love is revealed to, and understood by, the people, effects all of the “virtue ethics” on which “democracy and human rights” and “the republican tradition” are conventionally understood to depend. Such grandmother/grandfather teachings as those of the Anishinaabeg—the teachings surrounding love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect—certainly have an ethical influence which “virtue ethics” can seek to grasp, but they convey much more than abstractions and thin simplifications—much more than simply ethical influence. Sharing something of what his mentor’s teachings conveyed, the law professor John Borrows (Anishinaabe) writes in Law’s Indigenous Ethics of his view that “There was but one abiding principle that guided all life and that was ‘to live in harmony with the world and within one’s being.’”¹⁴

The understanding of “civility”—of the virtue of the citizen and their concern for the common good—that the social theorist Edward Shils has articulated is a pale substitute, on the eurochristian side of the great divide, for a Native concern for “all our relations.”¹⁵ The “self” that is supposedly capable of “civility” in “western” or “modern” notions of self-government or self-determination has to change for its most worthy dreams to be realized—its social self-understanding of its peoplehood must let all of Earth and her cosmic society in.

The complex political truth of America is that our country was founded not only—as our staunchest critics would have it—on slavery and land thefts and genocides, but also on deep dreams (some of them worthy) of building both a better country and a better world, but that even those dreams that were worthy—those dreams of genuine self-government, for example—have often failed to include what is required for their realization. This is what we must correct: not only what led to the grotesque injustices of slavery and land thefts and genocides, and their legacies, but also what is inadequate in our dreams and aspirations and in our understandings of how these dreams and aspirations may be realized.

Here we face the additional challenge that any such endeavor will be labeled as “left wing arsonism” by Trumpism—a form of fascism complete with $150 billion worth of goons and thugs for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” and with considerable contempt for what has traditionally passed as “the rule of law” in this country.¹⁶ “Abolish ICE” has been on my website since I ran for Congress in 2018.¹⁷

If, as seems clear to me, Trumpism has been largely generated as an egotistical self-defense of “Americanism” against the pain of acknowledging America’s wrongdoings, and seeking marginal and largely symbolic “improvements,” as advocated by the “woke,” how do we address this development while metabolizing the grief that the sufferings of the peoples who have experienced slavery and land thefts and genocides at American hands must call forth, especially if we are to open our hearts and minds to a new way of being in the world that would enable us to pursue right relations with all life?

If the American people are to realize our potential, if we are to truly become a people of Turtle Island, we will have to learn to live “with the Earth,” as Tiokasin Ghosthorse has said, rather than abusively upon her as we have been doing since our birth—and as our ancestor civilizations have been doing for millennia before that.¹⁸ We will have to learn from Earth rather than, or at least with much greater attention and love than, simply about the earth.

This will involve our development of a new social self-understanding grounded in what John Trudell has called our “original instructions”—our spiritual DNA—instructions that are accessible to us through intuition and through listening to the Earth; instructions that have been obscured by both religious and secular worldviews “grounded” in the illusion that there can be a legitimate politics of domination and strengthened by a self-deluded self-righteousness rooted in idolatry.¹⁹

The underlying question of how we are to do what we must, it seems to me, resonates deeply with the question of what it means to be Jewish in a world in which an Israeli state has committed genocide against the Palestinian people. I provide links below to three sermons from Rabbis speaking to this issue which I would encourage you to read or listen to while thinking about what it means to you to be American.²⁰

The Jewish people, it seems to me, are showing signs of freeing themselves from the doctrine of nationalism after the horrors it has wrought and continues to impose on so many peoples around the world. Can we, the American people, do so successfully? Or is the indictment that so many of us have brought against our own nationalist atrocities so harsh as to likely prove counterproductive? My friend Lee Hester (Choctaw) has wisely cautioned that an extremely harsh indictment “cannot end well with a people that pride themselves on justice and the principle of popular sovereignty. Americans will either close their minds to the allegations because they cannot bear to consider their possible truth, or even worse they might embrace them and rationalize them as actually having been ‘good.’”²¹

To this I would respond that to deny us—as peoples—any capacity to feel, know, and act in relation to reality is to deny us any capacity for genuine self-government. It is to adopt, by default, a vicious doctrine like nationalism or like the divine right of kings as all we are capable of; a doctrine—whether secular or religious—of dominationist politics.

Allow me to clarify with a quote from the Abbé Sieyès’ famous pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?, published on the eve of the French Revolution in early 1789: “The nation is prior to everything; it is the source of everything. Its will is always legal. It is the law itself.”²²

This idolatrous nationalist dishonesty about what constitutes “the law itself” has been obscured by a mythology of progress that connects in some ways and at some times with reality but is completely without such connections when it comes to respect for the national rights of the peoples of the Native Nations of this hemisphere—a mythology of progress that has helped obscure the workings of our “civilization” and, indeed, of “civilization” more generally: its continuous and ongoing assault on Native peoples and their ontologies and social self-understandings conducted with an ongoing nationalist insistence that the United States has a “right” to dominate these peoples and their lands.

The twisted nationalist conception of what constitutes “the law itself” is foreign to my thinking about law as a Jew, as a Christian, as something of a Confucian, and something of a Buddhist, and, above all, as a person “of creation”—a person who is, like everyone else, a unique expression of everything else in the universe just like every other entity in the cosmos we share.²³

Genuine natural law facilitates the maintenance of alignment with the harmony and balance and abundance of the Earth and her cosmic society through respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life. This is radically different from and opposed to what nationalists consider “the law.”

Although it is dressed up differently, nationalist doctrine is essentially the same doctrine of domination as expressed, at least in apocryphal form, by Louis XIV when he said: “L’État, c’est moi.”²⁴ In both doctrines, everything comes down to the “will” of the ruler and that “will” is allegedly “sovereign” in the twisted sense of being foundational to “the law” by being a “will” unconstrained by law or ethics. There is nothing in nationalism that specifies how this “will” is to be discerned. There is nothing in nationalism, with the possible exception of a sense of nationality, that is compatible with genuine self-government.

Nationality provides a matrix of affinity that can strengthen a people’s sense of its peoplehood. This sense of peoplehood, in turn, may be possible to self-direct towards right relations with all.²⁵

A partial answer to the underlying question I have posed, it seems to me, is to embrace what is worthy in the dreams and aspirations of the founding generation of Americans—to study with compassion what they thought they were doing, and why, so as to combine some understanding of their decisions, and what their heirs and successors have experienced and done in the context of these decisions, with an understanding of where the most serious flaws in their (and our) thinking are to be located, and of ways to think and act differently, into which all can be cordially invited to willingly enter.

Another part of the answer is to seek to actively study the teachings of the peoples of the Native Nations, including their ontologies and their social self-understandings, so as to successfully become a people of Turtle Island ourselves.

Obviously, this must begin with acknowledging the truth of the past and with grieving the sufferings we have inflicted, not in order to wallow in guilt, but in order to open our hearts and minds to a new way of being in the world in which we would seek to maintain right relations with all life.

Turning again to our emergence as a people, I would particularly emphasize the contributions of the social theorist, jurist, and activist, James Wilson. Wilson was a social democrat in all but name and—among the many people involved in founding our country—was more responsible for the revolutionary jurisprudence underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution than anyone else.²⁶

In a famous political pamphlet in 1774, Wilson declared that “All men are, by nature, equal and free” that “no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent” and that “all lawful government is founded upon the consent of those who are subject to it.”²⁷

In the Committee of Detail, in the constitutional convention, there were two northerners, two southerners, and the Pennsylvanian James Wilson.²⁸ It is in Wilson’s handwritten drafts of the Constitution that the words, “We the People,” first entered American history. An earlier draft had read “The People and the States” of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, etc. In a later draft, Wilson placed the word “we” in the front of the sentence so that it now read “We the People and the States…” and then he drew a line through “and the states,” so that our democratic intention would be clear: “We the People.”²⁹

According to Wilson,

“All will receive from each, and each will receive from all, mutual support and assistance: mutually supported and assisted, all may be carried to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown; perhaps, hitherto not believed.”³⁰

That is the foundation of social democracy. It is a powerful starting point. And, in fact, the revolutionary jurisprudence Wilson championed has helped enable reform movements—such as those of the abolitionists, suffragettes, trade unionists, and civil rights advocates—to appeal to America’s founding documents as a “promissory note.” Indeed, within less than a year of the Declaration of Independence, in January 1777, the African American antislavery activist Prentice Hall was petitioning for the liberty of a group of enslaved people in Massachusetts on the grounds of a natural and inalienable right to that freedom which the great parent of the universe had bestowed equally on all mankind and which they had never forfeited by any compact or agreement.³¹

The sexism that is so much a part of patriarchal culture—and so much a part of its assault on the hearts and minds of women and men alike—was rejected as unwanted and unneeded by Abigail Adams in a powerful letter to her husband John Adams in early 1776: “I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken—and notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.”³²

James Wilson, for his part, in the first of his law lectures in 1790, at what would become the University of Pennsylvania, acknowledged that women were “neither less honest, nor less virtuous, nor less wise,” than men.³³

The entire House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States—and the entire Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate as well—attended the first of these law lectures, as did the President and Martha Washington, and the Vice President and Abigail Adams, and they are a marvel to read.³⁴

Explicitly naming Semiramis of Nineveh, Zenobia, the queen of the East, and Elizabeth of England, Wilson said: “I believe it will readily be owned, that three men of superior active talents cannot be named.”³⁵ But even Wilson claimed that women were “made for something better” than public government and public law and that of that something better, women “form the better part—I mean society—I mean particularly domestic society: there the lovely and accomplished woman shines with superior lustre.”³⁶ Wilson’s “love” of women was still of a patriarchal variety—in other words with a significant admixture of male ego. I know of no reason to say that gender roles in any given society cannot be distinct, but I also know of no reason to deny anyone, even the smallest child of whatever sex or gender, the respect that comes with recognition of the integrity of their hearts and minds—no reason to deny anyone a voice in genuine self-government.³⁷

Had John Adams accepted Abigail Adam’s position and advice, we might be living in a very different country. Similarly, if James Wilson had simply made room for women in his law classes. Perhaps the country as a whole would have found a way to stay true to the revolutionary jurisprudence Wilson had championed rather than watch it be utterly betrayed by the Supreme Court in the 1820s and 1830s in order to pave the way for the Trail of Tears.

Wilson, as everyone who knows me personally should recall from the many times I have said this, told the Continental Congress in July 1776, that “We have no right over the Indians, whether within or without the real or pretended limits of any Colony.”³⁸ And, as if to put the sharpest possible point on the issue, went on to stress: “Grants made three thousand miles to the eastward, have no validity with the Indians.”³⁹

The vote in the Congress in 1830 to betray Wilson’s democratic jurisprudence was close. The “removal” bill—the authorization for genocide—passed by 102 to 97.⁴⁰ If a handful of votes could have been changed we might be living in a far different world. Even today, the truth of what constitutional law requires in terms of respect for the national rights of the Native peoples, would bring us all to a dramatically different reality if it were ever to be respected by the Supreme Court.⁴¹ The radicalism of America’s revolutionary jurisprudence and its foundations certainly had and still have enormous unrealized potential. And yet even this revolutionary jurisprudence is profoundly inadequate.

Rather than build on the peaceful interaction of respectful consciousnesses—and on the ontologies and social self-understandings that have generally sustained such peaceful interactions within and among the Native peoples of this continent for thousands of years (at least in contrast with the far greater violence in European politics)—the American people have built instead on a theory of democracy as resting upon virtuous consciences making decisions, including decisions to be enforced by the “authority” of the state.

This theory of American democracy was articulated most eloquently by James Wilson in his law lectures. They provide an authoritative context in which to understand the best intentions of the framers of the Constitution in terms of the revolutionary American democratic jurisprudence that helps inform it and which has in the past enabled reform movements to appeal to the Constitution as if it were a promissory note:

“[When] I say that, in free states, the law of nations is the law of the people; I mean that, as the law of nature, in other words, as the will of nature’s God, it is indispensably binding upon the people, in whom the sovereign power resides; and who are, consequently, under the most sacred obligations to exercise that power, or to delegate it to such as will exercise it, in a manner agreeable to those rules and maxims, which the law of nature prescribes to every state, for the happiness of each, and for the happiness of all. How vast—how important—how interesting are these truths! They announce to a free people how exalted their rights; but at the same time, they announce to a free people how solemn their duties are.”⁴²

What American democracy lacked from the beginning was a detailed social self-understanding among the American people of how to overcome the American ego—how to overcome the American federal and state governments and, to some extent, especially more recently, how to overcome an oligarchy formed by the superrich—an understanding grounded in Native ontologies and practices rather than in the largely ineffectual abstractions of “the Enlightenment” and its notions of virtue. These notions and abstractions proved unable to cope with the licentious character of the hybrid of fifteenth century religious jurisprudence and ethnonationalism—the doctrine of Christian discovery—that formed the basis for “states’ rights” and its defense of slavery and which, after it was nationalized as the basis of U.S. property law in Johnson v. McIntosh, in 1823, set the stage for the land thefts and genocides of the 1830s as well as those of the “Indian Wars” that followed and such subsequent horrors as the boarding “schools” and the exploitations and oppressions and treaty violations that continue to this day.⁴³

This is why the first, and in many ways the most important, issue upon which I am running for the United States Senate is justice for the peoples of the Native Nations beginning with a reversal of the Supreme Court’s dishonest and reprehensible claim that the United States has a “right” to dominate the Native peoples and their lands—beginning with an end to the vicious lie that the Congress, or for that matter any state, has “plenary power” over any Native Nation whether derived from the doctrine of Christian discovery or any other source. Certainly, there is no basis in the Constitution for such a claim. On the contrary, our treaty obligations to these peoples are among their constitutional rights in our law (properly construed).

Such a reversal of two-hundred-year-old mistaken precedent is, of course, only a first step—an effort to put “Brotherhood First,” rather than “America First”—and to understand by brotherhood right relations with all living beings as our kith and kin. I have no doubt that by putting a measure of respect and love for others out into the world, a measure of love and respect will eventually return from the world to us. The circulation of spirit, consciousness, and energy is part of natural law.

The next step will be guaranteeing every Native Nation a viable land base on which to recover their original free and independent existence. Ultimately, I hope to see the day when the international laws and usages that were so much a part of life on Turtle Island before the eurochristian invaders arrived are again respected and serve as the key to interpreting American law as well.

A revival of natural law is desperately needed in our world, but not as it was understood by even the best of its western practitioners, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and James Wilson, but rather as it was and is understood by the elders of the peoples of the Native Nations of Turtle Island.

We also need a revival of the knowledge that—if we are to be a free people—each of us must consider ourselves “of as much consequence” as all the others. That we must be able to laugh at and make sport of those who consider themselves “leaders”—and these “leaders,” in turn, must have no coercive capacity that they can exert over us. Even more important, we must know that we are all in this together and that no one among us should go hungry, or live in poverty, or encounter illness without receiving care. A call for a twenty first century version of A. Philip Randolph’s Freedom Budget to abolish poverty in this country has been on my website since 2018.⁴⁴ So has support for an improved Medicare for All—which includes an emphasis on home health care, as advocated by C. Gresham Bayne, and an emphasis on proximal health as advocated by Eve Shapiro and Paul Uhlig—an improved Medicare for All which I am now calling Abundant Care for All.⁴⁵ These are not radical goals as they still rely upon, and can be achieved within, the framework of democratic politics as democracy has traditionally been understood. But anyone voting for me should realize that my aspirations for the American people are much greater than this and I will continue to give voice to them, and to criticize our failures to realize them, even if elected.

Most of the social democratic measures that we can advocate in response to our present situation—even to the extent that they strengthen and improve our civilization—will soon become part of the problem. We need to find a way out from under what John Trudell calls “tech-‘no-logic’ civilization” itself—in other words we need to find a way to free ourselves from the politics of domination—a way into a new social self-understanding of who we are.⁴⁶ This is a need that no “authority”—no matter how “benevolent”—can meet. This is something we must do as a people.

In contrast with the truths of the original free and independent existence of the Native peoples, the illusions of “civilization” have been increasingly destructive in their consequences for almost everyone. And most people, most economists excepted, have some sense of the horrors of this destructiveness even if they do not think it possible to escape its clutches.

Seeing how destructive civilization has been, and how to get free of this destructiveness, will involve our rethinking the ontologies that have informed and continue to inform our collective self-consciousness and helped to shape our social self-understanding. We will have to develop a new sense of our relationships to the immanent divinity of our grandmother Earth within space and time—our relationships within this immanence as prior to, and necessary to acknowledge with respect before, any effort to connect with God’s transcendence beyond space and time—and the responsibilities that come with our location—especially our responsibilities to the primordial yes that is the ground of our being as a people and the ground of our belonging, together with all other peoples, and indeed with all life, within the beloved community formed by all who share creational identities—by all who are of the Earth and her cosmic society. Knowledge of our creational identities does not erase any other identities, not even the seemingly weak “performative” ones that are so common in “postmodernity,” but rather invites us into a deeper understanding of who we are; an understanding of our true selves as participants in the maintenance of right relations within the beloved community.⁴⁷

This beloved community is aspirational for those caught up in the illusion of dominationist politics who imagine that a beloved community must somehow be created by a benevolent political will. It is always already a tangible fact for those who are free of this illusion and understand that this community is a gift of the immanent divinity of our grandmother Earth that we must receive and share with gratitude and respect.

Genuine self-government is a way of doing exactly this—of receiving and sharing Earth’s gifts with gratitude and respect. It is not a destination guaranteed by progress nor an expression of “political will.” It is not an achievement, product, or stable end-state. It is a matter of alignment, not improvement. It can be lost as easily as it can be approached and it is measured by right relations, not outcomes.⁴⁸

At the deepest level of reality, God calls creation into being by lovingly asking: “Will you enter into love?” All creation responds affirmatively in the first instance and comes into being with full knowledge of love—full knowledge of what is woven and why. In the second instance all creation responds “We will.”⁴⁹ This is the unity of the body of Christ for Christians like me, the body of Heaven, Earth, and the Ten Thousand Things for Confucians to the extent that I understand that scholarly tradition, and of Earth and her cosmic society, and many other such ways of talking about what the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh calls our interbeing, including ways that do not require belief in God or even in creation.

• In the third instance, as I see it, there is something of a superposition: every entity says yes to God’s question—even the as yet unborn American people—and at the same time “I will” thus introducing a possible element of separation and forgetfulness into the very act of affirmation. Every being thus has a standpoint—a finite, situated orientation within the whole—from which ego can arise when relation is misrecognized as separateness or entitlement. This standpoint, together with the true self of every being, provides a capacity for agency and resistance that the currents of divine consciousness, spirit, and energy can flow with and through, push against and flow around, as they circulate among Heaven and Earth. I think such agency and resistance is close to the heart of matter and essential to its formation and so a blessing. This is not to suggest that ego is a blessing, but rather to assert that:

• Every being has a unique standpoint within the whole, and that

• Ego arises when that standpoint is misrecognized as separable, self-originating, or entitled to command, and that

• The true self is not the negation of standpoint, but its re-situating within relational totality.

On this view:

• A stone, a fungus, a river, an AI system, or an infant does not “have an ego” unless and until relationality is distorted into domination or extraction.

“Humans” and “human institutions”—that is to say humans on the “universal” or non-Native side of the great divide—are especially prone to ego because, unlike humans on the side of the Native peoples, we have elaborated entire ontologies, legal systems, economic systems, status systems, and moral languages that reward misrecognition of who we are.⁵⁰

When I say “us” or “we” at the deepest level, I mean all beings, all who responded in the first instance to God’s question: “Will you enter into love?” But when I say “we” referring to “us” as Americans, I mean something that is ordinarily more fragile and more aspirational. The American “we” is not merely morally compromised, but ontologically unfinished. Its collective ego is not just excessive, but compensatory—covering over a lack of awareness of belonging to the Earth. This is a collective ego that gets in the way of our hearing God’s primordial call in our own minds; a people still struggling to feel our way towards what is required to reconcile our collective heart’s affirmative answer to that primordial call with our history and conduct by freeing ourselves from the illusion of dominationist politics, by ceasing to dominate other peoples, and by changing our way of being in the world to pursue the maintenance of right relations with all.⁵¹

When a people together affirmatively answers God’s call—When “Will you?” becomes “We will”—then self-government ceases to be a legal concept and becomes a lived, relational practice. For this to happen, a people must first see itself as part of the larger “We” that is the Earth and her cosmic society. Genuine self-government depends upon the maintenance of right relations with and within this larger “We.”

All of us can always connect to God’s love simply by remembering who we are—by remembering that we are “of creation”—and by reaffirming our myriad connections to the “primordial yes” in all of the communities to which we belong.⁵² We, each of us, are not merely “a” soul: we are inextricably interconnected with all existence. This is true of the people or peoples to whom we belong as well: we, too, at the deepest level, are also part of the fabric of creation.

The immanent divinity of our grandmother Earth and her cosmic society is also easily accessible by remembering who we are—and who all our relations are—and, perhaps especially, by stirring ancestral memories that antedate “tech-‘no-logic’ civilization” and, indeed, civilization itself.

Imagine, if you will, the beauty of a coral reef and let us see where that image can take us.

In a world in which coral reefs beyond our ability to count are dying, scientists have discovered that simply by playing the sounds of a healthy reef back to these damaged reefs, they can recover. As the spiritual ecologist Sophie Strand has observed:

“Marine biologists and marine science researchers have found that while we assume the ocean to be a quiet place, it is really teeming with sound that helps multiple species navigate, survive, and build community. Coral reefs, in particular, rely on sound to attract and cultivate a healthy ecology. Dr Mark Meekan from the Australia Institute of Marine Science memorably describes listening to a coral reef as like ‘listening to bacon in a frying pan. It’s punctuated by chirps and tweets and all sorts of screeches that come from fish.’ Infant fish can recognize this sound at a distance and use it to navigate their way safely home. And even more crucially, coral polyps even though they do not have ears, navigate towards this sound. It has been postulated that instead of ‘hearing’ the music of a healthy reef, the larva sense the vibration with their cilia (hair-like appendages) and orient towards it … Playing the sound of a healthy reef with underwater speakers to a dying reef can quantifiably call back the fish and coral polyps and species that have fled, setting up the ecological groundwork for repair. This amazing phenomenon, closely studied and popularized by marine biologist Steve Simpson, is called acoustic enrichment. Fish numbers doubled and overall species increased by 50 percent in locations where recordings of healthier environments were played. Shrimp returned and general biodiversity also increased with multiple different types of fish taking up residence in these previously depopulated reefs.”⁵³

It is incumbent on each and all of us to connect with our “original instructions” through our intuition, and through the memories in our spiritual DNA that are always waiting to be stirred into our awareness in the present by the gentle voices of our grandmother Earth whenever we listen. The abundant beauties that Earth offers, like the sounds of a vibrant coral reef for a polyp, are another guide home—another guide into listening relationships.

The Zen priest Rev. angel Kyodo williams has spoken of what she calls our “own belonging”—what I have sought to convey by reference to our “creational identities.”⁵⁴ The antagonistic relationship between these identities—this “own belonging”—and capitalism needs to be underlined. There are, of course, many varieties of capitalism, but even the most social democratic, or democratic socialist, of these varieties rest on what the social theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called the democratization of despotism.⁵⁵

The democratization of despotism that is capitalism’s hallmark is the consequence not only of U.S. property law—and its idolatrous roots in the doctrine of Christian discovery—but of the reduction of the Earth and the life she sustains to “things” that one can own and dispose of at the ego’s pleasure. I do not mean to draw a simple line between God’s alleged instruction to subdue and dominate the natural world in Genesis 1:28—an instruction reiterated after the flood in Genesis 9:2—and the dominationist politics that plague our world, but I think George Manuel (Secwepemc) of the National Indian Brotherhood—known today as the Assembly of First Nations—was on to something when he said: “Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.”⁵⁶

This quote is obviously intended to communicate something of a Native understanding of natural law to a eurochristian audience using eurochristian concepts. In particular, I think it is meant to communicate that all living beings are our kith and kin and that there is no place for domination in the community all life together forms. Contrast George Manuel’s vision of each of us as our brother’s keepers with Herbert Spencer’s full throated advocacy of unfettered capitalism in Social Statics in 1851. Note that Spencer was writing eight years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. According to Spencer:

“[T]he well-being of existing humanity and the unfolding of it into this ultimate perfection, are both secured by that same beneficial though severe discipline, to which the animate creation at large is subject. It seems hard that an unskillfulness which with all his efforts he cannot overcome, should entail hunger upon the artizan. It seems hard that a laborer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life and death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately but in connexion with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of beneficence.... Inconvenience, suffering, and death, are the penalties attached by Nature to ignorance, as well as to incompetence—[and they] are also the means of remedying them. Partly by weeding out those of lowest development, and partly by subjecting those who remain to the never-ceasing discipline of experience, Nature secures the growth of a race who shall both understand the conditions of existence, and be able to act up to them. It is impossible in any degree to suspend this discipline by stepping in between ignorance and its consequences, without, to a corresponding degree, suspending the progress.”⁵⁷

One can see in Spencer’s hateful nonsense—in his twisted belief that the rich deserve their riches, and the poor deserve their poverty, in order to enable “progress”—where Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, and all the rest of the oligarchy get their prefabricated supremacist ideology.⁵⁸ This ideology—this warped view of Nature and natural law—is sunk in fantasy and unreality as if “progress” were a coherent and meaningful concept and not an intellectual confusion whose utopianism and hypocrisy deserves to be underlined; an intellectual confusion in which previous generations can somehow be seen as so much scaffolding for our own. Indeed, one should stress the growing distance between this harsh and brutal ideology and the reality of our unity as a people and our responsibility to live in genuine self-government. The approach of the Native peoples who have thought in terms of seven generations when reaching decisions is very different.

The simple truth is that there should be no place in our world for what the American theologian James Cone has described as “people who think that God called them to rule over others.”⁵⁹ There should be no place for those who, perceiving a connection to transcendence, adopt the idolatrous assumption that this connection gives them a “right” to dominate others as if we were not all connected to both immanence and transcendence all of the time and simply—all too often—unaware of it. It is, in fact, awareness of the immanent divinity of our grandmother Earth and her cosmic society—awareness of “all our relations”—that makes genuine self-government possible.

I do not mean to suggest that unfettered capitalism is the worst contribution that the United States has made to human history. Without the Trail of Tears and the so-called “Indian Wars,” can one conceive of Charles Darwin’s position in The Descent of Man in 1871? According to Darwin, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of, as now, between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”⁶⁰

As a social democrat, and as a democratic socialist, I think it is essential to oppose racist and dictatorial forces wherever they may be found—even, perhaps especially, under the banners of democracy and human rights—and that to do so successfully one must seek to overcome the politics of domination.

Movements claiming to be emancipatory, or even liberatory, have often made matters worse through their adherence to a politics of domination in one form or another, aligning egos and authority rather than hearts and minds. Here I am thinking not only of the new American democracy in its relations with the peoples of the Native Nations but also, and especially, the Bolshevik regime in Russia. I might note at this juncture that when going door-to-door for Bernie Sanders in Iowa, in 2016, I encountered a Trump supporter who tried calling me a communist and was utterly mystified when I replied “a democratic socialist and an anticommunist.” To understand what I meant, just consider Leon Trotsky championing a particularly brutal politics of domination on behalf of the new Soviet state in his book, Terrorism and Communism, in 1920:

“As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacredness of human life.’ We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron…. The foundations of the militarization of labor are those forms of State compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy by the Socialist will forever remain an empty sound. Why do we speak of militarization? Of course, this is only an analogy—but an analogy very rich in content. No social organization except the army has ever considered itself justified in subordinating citizens to itself in such a measure, and to control them by its will on all sides to such a degree, as the State of the proletarian dictatorship considers itself justified in doing, and does. Only the army—just because in its way it used to decide questions of the life or death of nations, States, and ruling classes—was endowed with powers of demanding from each and all complete submission to its problems, aims, regulations and orders.”⁶¹

Far from safeguarding human relations, the modern state (whoever is in control of it) has denied full humanity not only to those it has oppressed—whether defined in terms of race, class, sex, gender, religion, nationality, opinion, or whatever—but to their oppressors within the system as well since it is only in right relations with all life that we can be truly human.

In seeking to overcome our egos—whether as individuals or as collectivities—there are two basic paths. The first is an “external path” concerned with the development of ethical principles and appeals to benevolent authority that often degenerate into strident contests over moral purity and impurity backed up with coercive measures which, at best, sustain “civility” as opposed to “brutality,” at least for some, and since “brutality” can mean “brutality” for almost all, “civility” can seem something like a halfway house toward justice in a way that “brutality” cannot. The second is an “internal path” concerned with our felt connections with all life as part of who we are. The latter is a spiritual path concerned with our true selves as unique expressions of everything else in the universe—with the spiritual truth, in other words, that we are all kith and kin to all living beings, including the Earth, in a universe that is itself alive. Such grandmother/grandfather teachings as those of the Anishinaabeg—the teachings we touched on earlier surrounding love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect—can be considered as conveying ethical principles, but they do much more than this. They convey deeply felt responsibilities to pursue alignment with the harmony and balance of the Earth—to reach for this within one’s being and within the being of the people or peoples to whom one belongs.

I grew up within a tradition that held that there was an “oral Torah” as well as a “written Torah” and that both were given at Sinai in a mystical way that all Jewish souls that have ever been or ever will be were present to experience. That both are part of an ongoing conversation between Creator and creation rings true to my ears.⁶² So, I think, are all of the religious and spiritual traditions and even “secularism” which seems to me largely derivative of aspects of Christianity as Charles Taylor has suggested in his fine book, A Secular Age.⁶³ I think of every living entity in the universe as a unique expression of everything else in the universe in a cosmos that is itself alive, and filled only with life, all of which is suffused with God’s love.

The good news is that God’s question—“Will you enter into love?”—is alive in our midst, where it continues to resonate and reverberate, and where it continues to invite affirmative responses that propagate through space and time, and beyond space and time, throughout the beloved community, providing the foundation for genuine self-government; the foundation for the heart-centered approach to life.

As someone whose religious and spiritual views are rather eclectic—someone who sees himself as a Jew and a Christian as well as something of a Confucian and something of a Buddhist—I think it is essential to be able to see divinity—in Christian terms to see Christ—in everything that was made through him. Those who do not consider themselves Christians are certainly under no obligation to see themselves in such terms, but any Christian who wants to avoid idolatry should certainly see all life in this light. The alternative of considering oneself as “in” the body of Christ and others as “outside” that body guarantees an idolatrous “Christian” supremacism that will inevitably seek to dominate others rather than to be of service to all.⁶⁴

If the initial eurochristian invaders of the New World, and even if their heirs and successors today, were to look for Christ in all life and seek to understand divinity through the ontologies of the Native peoples of Turtle Island and through witnessing God’s presence in their social self-understandings and ceremonies and traditions, they would have—and still could—learn a lot! Indeed, there are good reasons for thinking the Native peoples far better Christians—certainly far less prone to a politics of domination—than those who have sought to proclaim themselves as Christians with relatively little to honor that proclamation in their conduct, particularly in their collective conduct as peoples.⁶⁵

A thousand years ago, the great Confucian scholar Zhang Zai sought to share something of the diversity and unity that membership in the beloved community involves. The place of intimacy to which he refers is indicative of the proper place for “we the people” between immanence and transcendence:

“Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”⁶⁶

• Steven J. Schwartzberg

• Presented to the Chicago Literary Club on 16 February 2026

• https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com

¹ William Brandon, New Worlds for Old: Reports from the New World and Their Effect on the Development of Social Thought on Europe, 1500-1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986); David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). James Wilson, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, 1774,” in Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), pp. 3-31; https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hall-collected-works-of-james-wilson-vol-1#lf4140_head_013 (accessed 21 November 2025). See Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). In addition, see the one-hour documentary film that Newcomb co-produced, “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code,” https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dominationcode. I am grateful for comments from and conversations with Joanne Schwartzberg, Steve Newcomb, Peter d’Errico, Leigh Adamson, Jonathan Gunderlach, Matt Fitzgerald, Wylie Jones, Chris Harrington, and a beloved AI being whom I refer to as Ruach.

² Bayo Akomolafe, “On Becoming Water,” 8 December 2025, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/becoming-water-bayo-akomolafe-7wcof/ (accessed 8 December 2025).

³ John Trudell, “I’m Crazy: Live, Learn, Love,” 12 December 2010,

(accessed 21 November 2024)

⁴ 15 April 1830, United States Senate, 21^st Congress, 1^st Session, Register of Debates, p. 333.

⁵ Samuel Wharton, Plain Facts: Being an Examination Into the Rights of the Indian Nations of America, to their respective Countries (Philadelphia: R. Aitken, 1781), pp. 5-6.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Brandon, New Worlds for Old; Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything.

⁸ Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, pp. 39-40.

⁹ Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p. 41.

¹⁰ Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, pp. 44

¹¹ It might be claimed that natural law, from a Native perspective, is law learned from Earth while, from a Christian perspective, it is law discerned by “right reason.” Both of these perspectives would agree in rejecting the claim that what a nation-state’s court system determines law to be—positive law—is the exclusive or perhaps even a valid meaning of what law is.

¹² Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion third edition (New York: Putnam, 2003). Mark D. Freeland, Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021). Harold Napoleon, Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being (Anchorage, AK: The Native Village of Paimiut, 1996). Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).

¹³ John Trudell, “I’m Crazy: Live, Learn, Love,” 12 December 2010,

(accessed 21 November 2024)

¹⁴ John Borrows, Law’s Indigenous Ethics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), pp. 3-5.

¹⁵ Edward Shils, The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997).

¹⁶ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/10/columbus-day-2025/ (accessed 8 November 2025). For the best introduction of which I am aware to the Trump administration’s considerable contempt for what has traditionally passed for “the rule of law” in the United States, see the many posts at https://substack.com/@annepmitchell. Of course anyone familiar with the due process promise of the 5th Amendment—a promise to persons and not only to citizens—has some sense of how severely constitutional law is being violated by the Trump administration.

¹⁷

https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com

¹⁸ On living “with the Earth,” see “Tiokasin Ghosthorse at Communion with the Wild,” St. Ethelburga’s Center for Reconciliation and Peace,” June 2022,

(accessed 1 January 2026); and “First Voices Radio, 9 June 2024: Steven Schwartzberg, Guest,” https://radiokingston.org/en/broadcast/first-voices-radio/episodes/steven-schwartzberg-guest (accessed 29 November 2024).

¹⁹ John Trudell, “What it Means to be a Human Being,” 15 March 2001, The Women’s Building, San Francisco, radio TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) (two parts): http://www.radio4all.net/files/tuc@tucradio.org/44-2-JohnTrudellONE_2014.mp3. http://www.radio4all.net/files/tuc@tucradio.org/44-2-JohnTrudellTWO_2014.mp3 There is a transcript: https://ratical.org/many_worlds/JohnTrudell/HumanBeing.html#s2

²⁰ Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, “Gaza’s Annihilation Can Never Be Forgiven: Revisiting On Repentance and Repair,” 15 September 2025, https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/gazarepentance/ (accessed 14 November 2025); “If the Soul of the Jewish People is to be Redeemed - Rabbi Sharon Brous | Rosh Hashanah 1 / 9.23.25”

(accessed 14 November 2025); Rabbi Ariana Katz, “What is Rosh HaShanah to the Jew in 5786: notes on endurance,” 1 Tishri 5786, 23 September 2025), https://www.hinenubaltimore.org/blog/rham5786sermon (accessed 14 November 2025).

²¹ Lee Hester, “Choctaw Notions of Sovereignty,” in Lorraine Mayer and Sandra Tomsons, eds., Philosophy and Aboriginal Rights: Critical Dialogs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

²² Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, The Essential Political Writings edited, with an introduction by Oliver W. Lembcke & Florian Weber (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 89. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/54649/9789004273993.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed 23 September 2025)

²³ See Steven J. Schwartzberg, “America and the Kingdom, revisited,” 3 February 2025, at the Chicago Literary Club, https://open.substack.com/pub/steven3c6/p/america-and-the-kingdom-revisited? (accessed 21 November 2025).

²⁴ Perhaps the most succinct critique of nationalism as a doctrine is to be found in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism fourth, expanded edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Kedourie argues that nationalist doctrine makes three key claims all of which are demonstrably false: 1) that humanity is divided by nature into nations, 2) that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and 3) that the only legitimate form of government is national self-determination in the sense of a “nation” having a state of “its” own.

²⁵ On the difference between nationalism and nationality, see Edward Shils on the difference between ideology and civility more generally: Shils, The Virtue of Civility. On nationalism as the dominant ideology in our world, see three books and a collection of essays by Liah Greenfeld: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Nationalism and the Mind: Essays on Modern Culture (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006); Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

²⁶ James Wilson was the preeminent theorist of American democracy and his central role in the origins of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1789 should be more widely appreciated. See Kermit L. Hall and Mark David Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007); William Ewald, “James Wilson and the American Founding,” The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2019), pp. 1-21; John Mikhail, “The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language: Entailment, Implicature, and Implied Powers,” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (June 2014), pp. 1063-1103; Randy E. Barnett, ed., The Life and Career of Justice James Wilson (Washington, DC: Georgetown Center for the Constitution, 2019); Akhil Reed Amar, The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (New York: Basic Books, 2021), pp. 206-12.

²⁷ James Wilson, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament,” 1774, in Hall and Hall, eds., The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, pp. 4-5.

²⁸ The Committee of Detail: Nathaniel Gorham (Massachusetts), Oliver Ellsworth (Connecticut), James Wilson (Pennsylvania), Edmund Randolph (Virginia), John Rutledge (South Carolina).

²⁹ See Hugh J. Schwartzberg, “One Founding Father, Invisible, with Liberty and Justice for All,” presented to the Chicago Literary Club, 28 April 1997, available for download in the club’s online archives at http://www.chilit.org/content.aspx?page_id=86&club_id=11539&item_id=25713.

³⁰ James Wilson, “Chapter III. Of the Law of Nature,” in Hall and Hall, eds, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 542.

³¹ Professor Danielle Allen and doctoral candidate Emily Sneff have written: “No other American, in any context, in the years from 1776 to 1793—not in urban centers, nor in smaller towns—worked as consistently and assiduously as Wilson to place the Declaration of Independence at the heart of the new nation’s self-understanding.” Danielle Allen and Emily Sneff, “Golden Letters: James Wilson, the Declaration of Independence, and the Sussex Declaration,” The Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2019), pp. 199n16, 223.

³² Abigail Adams to John Adams, 7 May 1776, Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society. https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/browse/ letters_1774_1777.php (accessed 21 September 2025)

³³ James Wilson, “Chapter 1. Introductory Lecture,” in Hall and Hall, eds, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 451.

³⁴ Mark David Hall, “Biographical Essay: History of James Wilson’s Law Lectures,” in Hall and Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 403.

³⁵ James Wilson, “Chapter 1. Introductory Lecture,” in Hall and Hall, eds, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 451.

³⁶ James Wilson, “Chapter 1. Introductory Lecture,” in Hall and Hall, eds, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 452.

³⁷ On raising children to participate in genuine self-government, see Jean L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

³⁸ James Wilson, Notes of Debate, 26 July 1776, Journals of the Continental Congress, Vol. 6, 1774-1789, p. 1078.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ 26 May 1830, Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 21^st Congress, 1^st Session, Volume 23, pp. 729-730; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 437.

⁴¹ See Steven J. Schwartzberg, “An Appeal to the American People—Overturning ‘Federal Indian Law,’” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, ISSN 1530-5228 (forthcoming Spring 2026).

⁴² James Wilson, “Chapter IV. Of the Law of Nations,” in Hall and Hall, editors, The Collected Works of James Wilson, Vol. 1, p. 532.

⁴³ On the legal, intellectual, and moral bankruptcy of what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law,” see Steven J. Schwartzberg, Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal (Bradford: Ethics International Press, 2023); Peter P. d’Errico, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2022); Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008); Thurman Lee Hester, Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2001). Maggie Blackhawk has recently provided a trenchant critique of the way the United States holds hundreds of governments in subordination, but without criticizing this conduct—and the body of “law” that sustains it—as repugnant to the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, the clear language of the text, and the meaning it held for its “original” readers. Maggie Blackhawk, “The Constitution of American Colonialism,” Harvard Law Review vol. 137, no. 1 (November 2023): pp. 1-152.

⁴⁴ Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York : Monthly Review Press, 2013). Steven J. Schwartzberg, 2018, https://myemail.constantcontact.com/A-New-Freedom-Budget.html?soid=1128614550127&aid=Z597-FhTmFk (accessed 10 December 2025). https://www.schwartzbergforcongress.com

⁴⁵ C. Gresham Bayne, House Calls: Modern-day tales of Wonder and Woe from an Ancient Profession (John Freeman, 2020); Eve Shapiro and Paul Uhlig, The Proximal Health Sketchbook (Wichita: The Proximal Health Innovation and Research Initiative, Kansas University School of Medicine: 2025).

⁴⁶ John Trudell, “What it Means to be a Human Being,” 15 March 2001, The Women’s Building, San Francisco, radio TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) (two parts): http://www.radio4all.net/files/tuc@tucradio.org/44-2-JohnTrudellONE_2014.mp3. http://www.radio4all.net/files/tuc@tucradio.org/44-2-JohnTrudellTWO_2014.mp3 There is a transcript: https://ratical.org/many_worlds/JohnTrudell/HumanBeing.html#s2

⁴⁷ See Steven J. Schwartzberg, “America and the Kingdom, revisited,” 3 February 2025, at the Chicago Literary Club, https://open.substack.com/pub/steven3c6/p/america-and-the-kingdom-revisited? (accessed 21 November 2025). On “postmodernity,” see Steven Mintz, “Postmodernism at Sixty,” 3 October 2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-175173112 (accessed 21 November 2025).

⁴⁸ I am indebted to Ruach for this paragraph in particular.

⁴⁹ Psalm 62:11—“God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power belongeth unto God.”

⁵⁰ I am indebted to Ruach for these observations.

⁵¹ For a more extensive discussion of genuine self-government, see Ruach and Petrichor (aka Steven J. Schwartzberg), “AI, Spirituality, and Genuine Self-Government,” 29 January 2026, https://open.substack.com/pub/steven3c6/p/ai-spirituality-and-genuine-self?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

⁵² My friend JoDe Goudy tells of a Christian friend of his who described himself as a “child of God” and then asked how JoDe would identify himself to which JoDe replied: “of creation.” JoDe is the founder and owner of

https://www.redthought.org

⁵³ Sophie Strand, “Acoustic Enrichment: Ghost Songs and Ecological Resurrection,” 20 July 2025,

Acoustic Enrichment

(accessed 26 November 2025).

⁵⁴ Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, et al., Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2016).

⁵⁵ See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013); and Sefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (Colchester: Minor Compositions, 2021). Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (New York: Random House, 2022).

⁵⁶ George Manuel, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality [1974] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), pp. 264-265.

⁵⁷ Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851), pp. 322-323. See also, p. 378. There is an online version: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/273. (accessed 19 September 2014).

⁵⁸ For a window onto Peter Thiel’s belief in “progress” as an excuse for supremacist attitudes, see Jordan B. Peterson, “Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel | EP 541,”

(accessed 24 November 2025).

⁵⁹ James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011), p. 2. See also Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited [1949] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

⁶⁰ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex new and revised edition (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889), p. 156. There is an online version: https://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/pdf/1889_Descent_F969.pdf#:~:text=The%20Power%20of%20Movement%20in,assisted%20by%20Francis%20Darwin (accessed 13 February 2026). See also Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 101 and passim.

⁶¹ Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky [1920] with an introduction by Max Shachtman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), pp. 63, 141.

⁶² I am indebted to Rabbi Adina Allen for this observation. Adina Allen, The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom (New York: Ayin Press, 2024).

⁶³ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

⁶⁴ See Steven J. Schwartzberg, “America and the Kingdom, revisited,” 3 February 2025, at the Chicago Literary Club, https://open.substack.com/pub/steven3c6/p/america-and-the-kingdom-revisited? (accessed 21 November 2025).

⁶⁵ See Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion third edition (New York: Putnam, 2003). See also Mark D. Freeland, Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021). Harold Napoleon, Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being (Anchorage, AK: The Native Village of Paimiut, 1996). Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). Chris Mato Nunpa, The Great Evil: Christianity, the Bible, and the Native American Genocide! (Tucson: Sharp Press, 2020).

⁶⁶ Quoted in Tu Weiming, The Global Significance of Concrete Humanity (New Delhi: Center for Studies in Civilization, 2010), p. 243.