Timeless Constitution

Saturday was the 229th anniversary of our US Constitution. That’s remarkable, considering written constitutions in countries around the world have lasted an average of 17 years, since 1789. 

Several days ago I listed to an Uncommon Knowledge interview titled “Is the Constitution Out of Date?” Since the answer, to me, is obviously NO, I expected maybe something valuable I could share for Constitution Day. While Uncommon Knowledge offers a variety of opinions, they’re usually in the range we think of as conservative. The interview was with political scientist Terry Moe, author of the recent book Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency. He has been a fellow at the Hoover Institute. So I was surprised when his premise was that the Constitution is outdated. He made claims that we usually hear only from the opposition.

One of his main complaints was that the executive branch doesn’t have enough power. After nearly eight years of Obama’s illegal executive orders, that seems wildly wrongheaded. He suggests that the president should be able to put forth his agenda items, and get them fast tracked through the legislature. The legislators could still vote these things down, but they’d be required to put them up for a vote, without amendment, within a certain length of time.

If that was to be the only change, I might not put it in the southern hemisphere of statist tyranny. But he also asserts that because we are a democracy, we ought to make it easier to enact the will of the majority.

I was waiting for Peter Robinson, the interviewer, to say, “But we’re not a democracy.” I guess he was just trying to allow the interviewee to get his point across, but it got me talking back at the screen.

We are not a democracy—i.e., government by majority rule—we are a constitutional republic. That means we have a written law limiting government, to prevent the majority from imposing injustices on the minority. For example, an evil majority might choose to enslave a particular minority group; in a democracy, the majority vote would rule.

Our Constitution purposely limits government, and purposely lists some of our God-given rights that government must not infringe upon, and adds that any powers not enumerated as given to the federal government are maintained by the states or the individual citizens. That is on purpose.

Moe thinks the Constitution is just a relic of a formerly simpler society, when America was smaller and more agrarian. That those simpleton founders couldn’t possibly have prepared for our complex, technological society.

I’ve been reviewing Hillsdale College’s Western Heritage 101 course (free online), and listened to lecture 4 this week, on Socrates and Plato—which were read and understood by our founders. All of them. The founders heeded the Greeks’ warnings about the despotism of democracy.

In the follow-up Q&A session, lecturer Terrence Moore gives an example of how democracy leans despotic (starting at about 13:40):

You might say, “Well, we’ve gotten beyond that. We’re America. We can handle this.” Today is the day after the election. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading an editorial that comes straight out of The Washington Times. Here is what it says.

“The most disturbing issue of the election was how President Obama managed to win re-election in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan by talking about the highly unpopular bailout of General Motors, by taking billions of dollars in hard-earned money from taxpayers during a deep recession and giving it to a couple of huge companies, Obama managed to buy the votes he needed to eke out a re-election.”

“Taxpayers remain on the hook to the tune of $25 billion.”

That’s just the reporting, but here is what happened behind it, according to this author.

“This is the Achilles heel of a democracy. Politicians simply tax those who do not support them and give the money to those who do or give the money to those they would like to have support them. It is the end of the line. Game over.”

That’s a pretty bleak after-election sentiment, but it would not have surprised Plato, and it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers. So, among other things, the recent election should cause us to think very hard constitutionally about what kind of framework of government the Founding Fathers set up so that elections can’t be bought with other people’s money.

If it’s that kind of democracy, which is the kind that Plato describes, we’re in trouble.

So, we aren’t—or shouldn’t be—a democracy. Our Founding Fathers knew better. They purposely set up a government to avoid tyranny of the majority, which is easily swayed by lies, money, or enticements.

The progressive arguments are only worth considering if human nature has changed since our founding—or since Plato. Progressives seem to have a bias against anything that isn’t contemporary, which is a closed-mindedness that pretty well disproves their assertions.

Progressive arguments against the Constitution aren’t new; they’ve been around at least since the late 1800s to early 1900s, from the onset of the “progressive” movement. In other words, opposition to the Constitution has been claiming it is outmoded for about as long as the Constitution existed without that argument against it.

It is probably true that opposition to freedom has been claiming the Constitution was somehow inadequate since day 1.

Yet, unlike most of the constitutions in the world, ours continues. And to those who appreciate the skilled precision with which it was written, it is as timely today as it was in 1787.

As I was considering how to refute the claims of Terry Moe, the next morning I came across a piece with the title “No, the ConstitutionIsn’t Outdated,” by John York for the Daily Signal. My first thought was that York must be refuting the same interview I had seen. He isn’t; he just happens to refute Moe’s claims, because they are the standard attempts to denigrate our Constitution by those who would like us to have less freedom.

York lays out the basic argument and refutes it:

As Richard Stengel, former president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, wrote in a splashy 2011 article in Time Magazine:

Here are a few things the Framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.

Stengel’s list is instructive as it gives the reader a sense of the changes liberals think our Constitution does not adequately account for. Take for instance: “airplanes, the atom, the internal combustion engine, and antibiotics.” These all represent technological or scientific innovations unknown to the Founders that, purportedly, have some relevance to structuring a government.

Some scientific and technological changes do require that we think carefully about the Founders’ intent when they were writing the Constitution. For instance, new technologies allow police to peer into homes without physically entering them, intercept an email or a text message, or track your car from their computer back at the precinct. Whether these things constitute a search or seizure of citizens’ “houses, papers, and effects” under the Fourth Amendment is an important question the Founders do not answer for us directly.

But by no means are we merely left to guess how the Constitution speaks to these modern conditions. Through the Founders’ own writings contained in the Federalist Papers, notes on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention and correspondence, thoughtful judges and legal scholars get a clear sense of the spirit behind the words on the page.

Given the Founders’ concern that government would use warrantless searches to harass and condemn political dissidents, it is hard to imagine James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would approve of warrantless wiretaps, drone flyovers, and email dragnets conducted by federal agencies.

Much of the rest of York’s piece deals with social/cultural issues. And he reassures on that front as well:

While the Constitution was not meant to steer the development of American culture in every sense, the Founders did think a free society demanded certain qualities of character among the citizenry: habits of self-governance, respect for the rights of others, and reverence for the law. But within those brackets is allowed some latitude for culture to develop organically and locally without the heavy hand of government at the helm.

If he were using Spherical Model terms, he might have said that the culturally civilized ability to rule ourselves is a necessary prerequisite to freedom and prosperity. It’s close to what James Madison meant in Federalist 51, which York also quotes:

From Federalist 51, image from here

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

I agree with York’s final conclusion, that

human nature is still as fallible as it was 229 years ago. Thankfully, our nation was blessed with a generation of men who had insight to perceive the essential character of man vis-à-vis government and the wisdom to craft institutions rooted in those unchanging realities.

I thank God for the miracle of our Constitution, and the men who were prepared to write it. I pray that we can honor God by appreciating and restoring that miracle.

Enlightenment

Hillsdale College has a growing list of free college-level classes online. Right now I’m into History 102, American Heritage, and lesson three is “Enlightenment and Natural Rights.” The lecturer is Hillsdale history professor Terrence Moore. He shares with us stories of the life of Benjamin Franklin as a kind of exemplification of the American Enlightenment.

Benjamin Franklin
image from Wikipedia

Ben Franklin’s life is always enlightening to learn about. I enjoyed the biography The Real Benjamin Franklin[i] some years ago. He was a marvel of creative thought and energy, as well as good humor. So the review of Franklin was interesting in itself. But there were connections made in the lecture that I think are worth looking at, especially in our day.

This is from the introduction:

Franklin was important in creating the American character and also the American ideas of self-government. And Franklin always started at the bottom, from the bottom up, you might say. He would form a library based on his friends’ needing books. He would conduct scientific experiments just with his friends that ended up being profoundly important in the history of electricity. Franklin never thought for a minute to write London for a grant to help him buy his jars and his kite and his key. Franklin never thought about writing London to deliver a bunch of books for free for these poor colonists. He scraped together what books he had with his friends, and that became a library. And they didn’t need an overarching directive from London telling them what to do.

If you look at the list of things that Franklin created, that in some cases had never been created before, even in London, you see that a native genius with a lot of freedom and with belief in oneself and one’s capacities of self-government can lead to great things.

We see some particularly American virtues in Franklin. He wasn’t content to be stuck in anything he didn’t enjoy. On a second or third try at apprenticeship, he learned the printing trade. When, at 17 years of age, he disagreed with his master (who was his older brother), he left Boston and showed up in Philadelphia. And worked his way up from the bottom—always confident that he could succeed.

He saw things that could be improved, and did something about them. He wasn’t a loner; he studied with other young tradesmen who also didn’t get to go to college, covering everything a college could have given them. When he had a good idea, he recruited others to his view, using the media and his own persuasive skill.

He grew, and learned, and flourished, and improved. And so did Philadelphia. And so did the American colonies. As Professor Moore says,

The larger point I wish to make is that Franklin’s many activities in Philadelphia were a microcosm of what was then taking place throughout the colonies, what we might call an apprenticeship in self-government. In fact, this apprenticeship of colonial Americans had been going on for some time. But in its later stages, as seen in the life of Franklin, the apprentice was beginning to surpass the skills of the master. The improvements and growth taking place in American civil society, unrecognized and unwelcomed by the mother country, would prepare the colonists to declare independence and go on to create a more perfect union.

Among Franklin’s scientific studies included what we now call demographics. He observed the growth rate of the colonies, as compared to the mother country, and realized that eventually there would be more Englishmen in the colonies than in Britain. He wasn’t, at that point, a revolutionary; he hoped there would be Englishmen smart enough to recognize the situation, and who would see the value of a mostly self-governing transatlantic empire.

But there were reasons that wouldn’t happen, mainly having to do with Britain’s, and all of Europe’s, premise of aristocracy.

It was assumed that men and women of birth were superior to those of humbler origin. The American colonies were populated overwhelmingly by men and women who did not have a social edge in their home countries, by younger sons of gentlemen, by the lesser gentry, by the various religious refugees, by what were called the middling sort of merchants and other professionals, and by artificers and servants.

Americans had the ability to rise—as high as their efforts and ingenuity could take them.

[Franklin] once said that in America, a man becomes known not for who his is—that is, what his name is, or his social pedigree—but by what he can do…. In Britain, to get anything done, no matter how worthy a cause or project, you almost always needed aristocratic patronage. In Philadelphia, as Franklin showed time and time again, all you needed was a good idea, some common sense, and a lot of hard work.

That sounds quintessentially American.

When the lecture started talking about the Enlightenment, I wasn’t sure exactly what that referred to. In Wikipedia, it is, in short: “an era from the 1650s to the 1780s in which cultural and intellectual forces in Western Europe emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than traditional lines of authority.”

The Enlightenment had a different flavor in the American colonies, embodied by Benjamin Franklin. Kind of like Franklin’s self-education, there was an energy, a freshness, and an excitement to use the discovered truths to improve personal human lives. Not so much in Europe:

Whereas enlightened political and moral ideas were being generated by great European thinkers, those in charge of European institutions did not always take these new discoveries of old truths to heart. The Americans did.

Terrence Moore uses a drawing of a neoclassic structure, with the pillars representing parts of thought, to describe the American Enlightenment. Think of the architecture of Thomas Jefferson.

The neoclassicism shows that the American revolutionaries did not consider themselves to be inventing something new, but rather discovering things that had always been true though mankind had not always been able or eager to know them.

In Europe there was more skepticism, even cynicism, and a tendency to throw out essentials of a civil society—mainly religion. That was not so in America. Both continents move toward an increase in science, but we need to define that term, because it’s different from what comes immediately to mind:

We must be careful with this word, since in the 18th Century the term science still meant knowledge in systematic inquiry generally. It was not confined to research in the physical world. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, for example, set out to create a science of man; that is, an account of human and human activity in its social, political, and economic spheres.

This more than anything caught my attention here at the Spherical Model. How about that? What we’re about here is the science of man.

So, science, for Franklin and most educated Americans, studied both human and physical inquiries, as hobbyists, but also offering valuable discoveries. Moore reminds us that the foundation of scientific study was the great Isaac Newton. And that is a key point:

The importance of being Newtonians is that American colonists, and later the founders, thought of the universe as an ordered, balanced cosmos created by a benevolent deity who governed according to fixed and discoverable laws, “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” as Jefferson put it.

How vital Newton’s conception of the physical universe was may not be clear until you realize that the nation’s first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, abandoned the authority of the Constitution by saying it was “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” In other words, the balanced world of Newton, in which natural laws were predictable, and in which men, by implication, could lead lives reasonably, was either a figment or fairytale compared to the survivalist nature of Darwin’s world, wholly indifferent to man’s well-being. Who, then, should remain faithful to a fixed constitution when mankind must continually reinvent himself just to remain alive? That was how the progressives thought, not the founding fathers.

That explains a lot. Progressivism (not to be confused with actual progress) has a hateful prejudice against the past, no matter how true and instructive. So there’s an assumption among them that the Constitution is irrelevant, just because it was created in the past. And they don’t believe in principles, so they throw them out for whatever new thing they want to try.

I remember a science class that introduced Einstein’s relativity. The teacher explained that there are situations in which Einstein’s physics are more accurate than Newtonian physics—such as when approaching the speed of light. But in normal circumstances, Newtonian physics is accurate enough for our typical human purposes. I don’t know enough to know if that is true. But the point is, Einstein’s theories added to, rather than wiping out, Newtonian theories of the physical world. So I’d assert that, if there were truth to Darwin’s theories, they would add to, not wipe out, known and ever useful truths.

So far, this covers only about 2/3 of the lecture. Much of the rest covers the four pillars of the American Enlightenment: religious liberty, political liberty, economic liberty, and moral responsibility. We could spend a full day on each of those; in fact, from time to time we have done so.

For now, it will do to be grateful that our heritage proves so many eternal truths: freedom, combined with self-control and moral responsibility, leads to growth, success, ingenuity, and human thriving. People like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson lived the proof.

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[i] W. Cleon Skousen and M. Richard Maxfield, The Real Benjamin Franklin (Vol. 2 of the American Classic series) © 1982.