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Several days ago I listed to an Uncommon Knowledge interview titled “Is the Constitution Out of Date?”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 So I was surprised when his premise was that the Constitution is outdated.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.

Tradition vs. Progress

Traditions can be good or bad. Progress is typically called good, but when it’s misapplied to what is actually regression, it’s bad.

Progressivism needs some definition, because the word progress in it is misapplied. In short, it’s the version of socialism adopted by Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Hillary Clinton, and many of today’s socialists who know better than to use the word socialism, which has provably failed everywhere it has been implemented.

There’s a connection to Darwinism in progressivism; it posits that culture always moves in a forward direction, ever closer to perfection. This assumption ignores some rather huge examples to the contrary like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or the disappearance of Mayan culture. Or Detroit, Michigan.

Progress requires going in the right direction. And there’s no way to know if a direction is right when everything being tried is supposed to be new, untried, and ignorant of history.

The Imaginative Conservative had a piece by Joseph Pearce that describes the type of bigotry that is progressivism:

If, for example, we were to visit a village in a remote corner of Africa and were to witness children playing with crudely crafted toys and presumed from our observations that these Africans must be inferior to Americans because American children have iPods and smart-phones we would rightly be accused of racism. Yet this is exactly what “progressivists” do when observing cultures separated by time instead of space. The past is deemed to be inferior and can be treated with scorn or, which is perhaps worse, with patronising condescension.

Pearce goes on to imagine what an experience Plato would have visiting our time. He would take a couple of days to master some of the technology and dress. And then it wouldn’t take long to notice some modern failures:

Plato
image from here

The Philosopher would soon come to the inescapable conclusion that this strange race of “progressives” were in fact barbarians who adorned themselves with the baubles of technology but had no concept whatever of the meaning of life or the nature of reality. Feeling his exile from civilization intensely he would long for the profundities of the Lyceum.

In contrast, when we honor those who have gone before, and stand upon what they have learned, then we have actual social progress. That’s what we enjoy when we cover most of the math and science we get before college—and much of what we study in college as well. We don’t have to start from scratch. Pythagoras did some of the work. And Euclid. And Newton.

Pearce quotes the wise G. K. Chesterton on the value of tradition:

Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.[i]

Traditions can be changed—when we learn something previously unknown and provably true. But throwing out truth because it’s old is foolish and ignorant.

This concept of tradition reminds me of the word conservative, which is another word that can be either good or bad, depending on what you’re conserving. If we’re conserving a dysfunctional status quo out of fear of change, then being conservative may be a bad thing.

But when we conservatives talk about what we conserve, we’re talking about preserving—or often in our day restoring—freedom, prosperity, and civilization. (I wrote about what we conserve in October and February.)

In the political sphere, we need a representative government strictly limited to its proper role of protecting our life, liberty, and property. Government doesn’t grant our rights; those come from God. And good government protects and guarantees our God-given rights. Among these are freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, the right to armed self-defense, freedom to work and engage in commerce, freedom from illegal searches and seizures, and freedom to see to the education and upbringing of our own children.

We have a US Constitution designed to protect our God-given rights. If we conserve/restore our Constitution, we get more political freedom than most of the world’s historic and present-day cultures have ever known.

In the economic sphere, we need a system that allows us to work and earn wealth, and then decide for ourselves how to spend it. Government doesn’t make the economy work. We need government to safeguard property (including intellectual property, such as with patents and copyrights), protect against monopoly, standardize money for ease of exchange, and otherwise get out of the way of the free market.

Government ought to have nothing to do with charity, since government isn’t capable of emotional care and can only coerce, by forcibly taking from some and giving to others—what we call theft, which the people empowering the government have no power to grant.

Of course, since the poor are always with us, we do need a way to care for the truly needy. But it must be voluntary. So people who are prosperous enough must willingly give to those in need.

We have had the best economy in the world. If we conserve/restore our free market, we return to prosperity.

In the social sphere, we conserve some very old ideas, hearkening back at least to the Ten Commandments. In summary, we need a critical mass of righteous people—people who love and honor God, family, life, truth, and property.

We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to raise children than under the care of their own married mother and father.

We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to distribute wealth than the right to our earned property combined with an ethic of charitable giving.

We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to decide when life is worth preserving than gratefully valuing all human life and leaving God to decide when death should come. Abortion—which kills more black babies than are born, as designed by the eugenics movement—is savage. Killing the aged, infirm, or burdensome is callous. Any time we decide some innocent lives are inferior, we’ve fallen out of civilization into savagery.

Progressivism doesn’t lead to progress; the name itself is a lie. Tradition, on the other hand, may be worth conserving. The default, when we don’t know, ought to be keeping the tradition. When we have the principles to measure whether traditions lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization, such as with our US Constitution, we can wisely choose to conserve.

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[i] G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. 1, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 251.

Trump's Agenda

Guest post by Political Sphere

Buck Sexton, a Blaze radio personality, recently held a # TeamBuckPoll to gain an understanding of how his listeners viewed Trump. He offered 5 options: (a) I would vote for Trump, no question; (b) Thinking about it, we will see; (c) Not my guy, but happy he is in the race; (d) He is a clown, I wish he would go away; or (e) I have my own take on this. The rough results were that somewhere between 35-40% of his listeners answered c, with the remainder split about equally between all of the other answers.

My answer is e. The reality is that Trump is worse than a clown, and it is dangerous to continue to have him in the race, either the primary or the general election.

Everyone needs to ask why Trump would run. Trump touts the slogan that he is running to “make America great again.”  Trump explained himself, in the first Republican debate claiming he is able to get whatever he wants by making campaign donations. For example, he required the Clintons to attend his daughter’s wedding. So Trump would be much more able to “make America great again” if he would cease to run. If Trump were to remain outside of the White House, he could continue to “buy and sell politicians,” giving him significantly greater power over the direction of the country.

But he must have some motivation for running. My speculation is that the Tea Party-style candidates, such as Ted Cruz and Scott Walker and Rand Paul, refuse to do his bidding. Instead they stick to their values, regardless of how much money is given to their campaign. The only way to stop them, then, would be to ensure that the Tea Party vote is neutralized. Only then would he be able to continue to conduct business as usual, “buying and selling politicians.”

The “straight talk” and “anti-pc” rhetoric are the reasons so many good people do seem to like him, or at least appreciate the fact that he is in the race. Instead, all I see is a caricature of a Tea Party conservative, an SNL skit version of us. I see an elite New York progressive making fun of my beliefs by contorting them.

It’s an act. A few examples:

At his presidential announcement, Trump stated “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best, … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us[sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Most of the illegal immigrants I have met are generally good people. We do not enforce the border laws; thus, just like the speed limit, it is consistently ignored even by good people. Yes, there are plenty of bad people with lots of problems also coming over, and we do need to enforce our borders in order to keep this country’s culture great. However, Trump goes to the extreme, setting up the discussion on the immigration problem as an us v. them thing.

More recently,Trump discussed the situation in Iraq. Trump’s solution boils down to “We take over the oil, which we should have done in the first place.” This assumes that the Iraq war really is and always was a “war for oil,” just as liberal progressives have always believed. Yes, ISIS has managed to take some of the oil fields in Iraq, but the vast majority of Iraqi oil remains out of the reach of ISIS, in the southeast of Iraq, closer to Basra, and in the Kurdish controlled area in the northeast of Iraq.

Finally, at the debate, Trump was unable to explain why and when he became a Republican, a conservative. Trump was willing to say that he went to the Republican convention in 1988. But that was after the improvement during the previous eight years under Reagan, when only the most die hard blue dog Democrats were willing to remain in the Democratic Party and back Dukakis. So, while he was nominally a Republican briefly, Trump left the Republican Party in 1999, considering a run as the candidate for the Reform Party, with positions trending more toward the political left, but ultimately switching to the Democrat Party. Trump did not switch back until 2011, in time to consider a presidential bid as a Republican at that time. It seems that he is merely an opportunist, not a conservative.

A Picture of the house Trump sought to take through
eminent domain. Picture from The Daily Mail.

Trump’s progressivism is further borne out by the one issue he remains consistent on: eminent domain. Trump has repeatedly used eminent domain to develop his own projects. The article I link to describes how Trump used eminent domain in Atlantic City to try evicting an elderly woman from her home of 30 years, just so he could have a new parking lot for limousines. It also describes how Trump tried to take a storefront, that Russian immigrants had just purchased for $500,000 to start a pawn shop, for a fraction of its value: $174,000. When Kelo v. New London, 545 US 469 (2005) was decided, Trump did not denounce it, like many on both the right and left. Instead Trump explained that he believed it was not only a legally correct decision, but that it was good that the government could take property from some private owners to transfer to well connected developers. This is the crony capitalism that the Tea Party denounces, backed by the candidate currently leading in the polls.

Even if I am wrong, and Trump is completely honest in his beliefs and has truly become a conservative, I personally would still much rather have most of the other candidates, who can not only spout off the political positions that we conservatives want to hear, but can even communicate the rationale behind those positions and the flaws in the progressive position.

I am not convinced that Trump can present logical reasoning that will ensure that he will make the correct decision regardless of what issues plague this country after the election is over. I could not vote for him if he were the candidate in the general election and do not believe he benefits the party in any way by being in the race.

Dewey

Several days ago a friend of mine, gone back to school for a PhD, was working on a paper related to educational theory. She had to choose a subject from back a ways in time, so she chose John Dewey. I mentioned that I wasn’t a fan of Dewey, so she asked why (there had to be a critical part of the paper anyway). So I looked through what I had and came across a piece I wrote, in 2006, for a homeschooling newsletter. Bits and pieces of it have shown up in my other writings. [You can go to my Education Collection from July 2013.]

Anyway, I thought I’d adapt that 2006 piece for a post here. It’s a good reminder never to give power over what you value most—like the education of your children—to some “expert” or bureaucrat who doesn’t know your child the way you do.

_______________________________

John Dewey could be, whether we know it or not, the biggest reason many of us homeschool.

Let’s go back to the beginning of public education, an experiment that began with a crusade by Horace Mann. Mann believed in shifting the responsibility of educating children from parents (who had done it pretty successfully in America since the days the Pilgrims landed, and many generations and cultures prior) to the state. His “progressive” concepts allowed no room for God. Mann said, “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…. The common schools… shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men” ( Klicka, The Right Choice—Home Schooling, p. 32).

During the industrial revolution, public schools were built up in cities, where there were many immigrants and people working in factories, and there seemed to be a need for the public to provide education where families apparently couldn’t. So, within a generation or two, Horace Mann’s ideas were flooding the nation.

Then along comes John Dewey. (Yes, he is the one who created the Dewey decimal system.) He took Horace Mann’s ideas, and made them worse. I’m about to quote a chunk of material from our history book God’s Hand in the Building of America, Volume 1, by Glenn & Julianne Kimber, starting at p. 269. They quote from an article by Cleon Skousen, whom you might know as the author of The 5000-Year Leap and The Naked Communist. (I’ll reference as they do.)

In 1916, John Dewey published his book Democracy and Education, in which he advocated an entirely new, revolutionary approach to child training. The American schools have never been the same since.

John Dewey called his brainchild “progressive education” but even liberal educators such as Robert M. Hutchins called his whole conception regressive education.

Dewey received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins where G. Stanley Hall, a disciple of the German socialist philosopher, Wilhelm Wundt, indoctrinated him with the vision of a welfare state with the schools serving as the change agent to bring it about in our generation.

Democracy in Education turned out to be a planned pattern of anarchy in education. Something called “self-realization” became the goal instead of “learning.” Nothing but the most casual reference was made to English grammar, ancient history, US history, geography, the classics of Western civilization, or even the basic sciences. School was to be just fun, with each student doing his own thing in a climate of permissive, unstructured confusion.

Contemporary educators of national stature treated Dewey with respectful demeanor but expressed professional horror when they saw what Dewey was promoting as “progressive education.” Robert M. Hutchins declared: “His book is a noble, generous effort to solve…social problems through the education system. Unfortunately, the methods he proposed could not solve these problems; they would merely destroy the education system” (Great Western Books, vol. 1, p. 15).

In practice, Dewey practically threw traditional “book learning” out the window. Dr. Hutchins wrote: “The disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view, education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone” (Ibid., preface; pp. xii, xiii).

Dewey looked upon the schools as a wonderful opportunity to indoctrinate the American youth in the virtues of a glorious age where private property, the free market, open competition and profits would all be eliminated. He visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and, instead of recognizing the wasteland of revolutionary desolation and the widespread destruction of human values, he blissfully described it all as “a popular culture impregnated with esthetic quality” (John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia, [New York; 1932], p. 44).

Long before, in 1904, he had joined the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University. He had then teamed up with James Earl Russell, the dean of the Teachers College, who was also a student of Wilhelm Wundt, and together they had worked for a quarter of a century diligently building this branch of Columbia University into the largest institution in the world for the training of teachers. By 1953, about one-third of all the presidents and deans of teacher training schools in America were graduates of Columbia’s Teachers College.

Today we are reaping the tragic results of the pedagogical misery that America inherited from Dewey’s misadventure in experimental education. (W. Clean Skousen, editorial, The Freemen Digest, May 1984). 

Back to my voice again. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird a few years ago, where the young girl, Scout, describes her disappointment with school. Her description of the first day of first grade (no kindergarten back then) was hilarious. Her teacher discovered that she not only knew the alphabet, she could read all the readers and The Mobile Register, which she had learned naturally just by sitting with her father and reading together in the evenings. The teacher said,

“You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage—”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers (p. 22 of my copy).

Apparently John Dewey was to blame. She goes on:

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem [her brother] called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus [her father] and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teacher thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me (p. 37).

The book review that led to my writing this piece was of the book John Dewey & the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning, by Henry T. Edmondson III. Here’s a quote from that review:

Eschewing our existing institutions and what he called the “idolatry of the US Constitution,” Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of “the Great Community,” whose “seer” for him was the polymorphous, promiscuous, egalitarian egotist-aesthete Walt Whitman, who sang both of himself [“Song of Myself” is one of Whitman’s famous works] and of future “democratic vistas” (National Review, April 24, 2006, p. 56-58).

This is later in the review:

Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism…. Dewey slandered a wide range of more conservative or traditionalist education-policy thinkers and critics as “fundamentalists” obsessed with a fruitless, retrograde “quest for certainty” (the title of his 1929 book). In this regard he is the father…of our contemporary “post-modern”deconstructionists, with their attacks on “foundationalism” and “logo-centrism.”

The review mentions a truth-speaking Columbia Teachers College professor named Isaac L. Kandel, who saw through Dewey decades ago in his book The Cult of Uncertainty (1943): “A Jewish immigrant writing in a dark time, Kandel knew that Dewey’s influential denial of history, traditional learning, and moral common sense in teacher training and the schools was a new form of barbarism. We are living with its consequences.” 

The point of all this quoting is this: In six thousand years of human history, children have been brought up and taught by their parents. Turning that responsibility over to the state is a social experiment—an undeniably failing experiment—begun only a little over a century ago. While we homeschoolers may look radical to the people around us who don’t know anything different from the government institutional factory-like schools they grew up with, we are the ones following the traditional pattern.

We don’t need to reproduce schools at home; we’re better off reproducing the homes of our founding fathers. We don’t need to teach “group dynamics” (what some people call socialization); we’re better off teaching our children acceptable family behavior. We don’t need our children taught by professionals; we’re better off having them taught by the parents who have a stake in helping them achieve all they can.

Evolution Is Slower than That

I’ve been hearing a lot lately from Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. I’ve been taking advantage of the free class on the Constitution from Hillsdale, through the Heritage Foundation, with the several classes and last night’s final discussion, presented by Larry Arnn. And then, in addition, Uncommon Knowledge is doing their five-part interview this week with Larry Arnn. 

Part 2 was especially interesting to me. There’s something I have thought to myself for a long time that he articulated, which made me sense I have been right about that all along. 

Larry Arnn (right) interviewed on Uncommon Knowledge

This post isn’t really about evolution so much as it is about the philosophical vacancy of progressivism. When you look at what Woodrow Wilson and other progressives of a century ago, believed about human nature, it is out of synch with the reality we can easily observe. There is a belief like this: Now that we know about evolution, and that we continue to progress, we have therefore evolved beyond where we need to worry about moral laws, because we can make wise decisions based on science. 

I don’t want to deal with the validity of evolution here. I don’t personally know how God went about creating us; it is enough for me that I know He did it. But those who do believe in evolution deal with eons of time. A tiny change happens in, say year one, another tiny change century or two later. These tiny changes build up so that in a few million years you might start to notice change. 

So here are the progressives making the assumption that so much “progress” has happened in the century or two since our founding that the same rules no longer apply to us; we are beyond the need for limited government as is built into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And evolution contains the idea that the direction is always positive, so you might as well engineer more change, since it can’t be wrong. 

So, they believe evolution is slow—except for humans, and except for now. They believe humans have always been progressing forward, so they miss the possibility of decay that is evident in the failure of every past civilization. And they think they know enough science now that they no longer need morality as a guide. Let me just say, someone who thinks that way is so far behind the bell curve of human thinking that we don’t want them anywhere near power. 

Larry Arnn points out two specific errors Wilson was making: condescension toward the founders, and ignoring human nature. He says this on the first point:  

They [the founders] had to declare an entirely new set of principles by which to govern, and make war on the biggest force on earth. And they named it—the Congress was called the Continental Congress. They hadn’t seen the continent, didn’t until Lewis and Clark came back to report to now President Jefferson in 1805…. So vast acts of imagination. And then they had to figure out a way for the first free government in history to grow across the continent. In other words, they faced enormous complications. And the idea that the complications of the 19^th Century are larger is bunkum. 

I love that a university president is comfortable using the word “bunkum.” Professor Arnn appears unassuming, a little provincial, and talks like he came from maybe a southern middle state instead of an east or left coastal state. It could be easy to underestimate him; I’m sure Woodrow Wilson would. 

The second point, about human nature, is better done in context, but I’ll try to pull out enough. Arnn says that the core thing is what Madison says is written in this fact:  

“We require to be governed because we are not angels, but government must be limited because angels do not govern men.” And so… just as we outside the government require to be governed, those inside the government also require to be governed. And that has to be strictly arranged, because they need and they will have a lot of power. 

He points out that Madison and Jefferson, the founders, set up a government that they could have controlled with all the power they wanted. But they didn’t. Madison “was the maker of the institution that kept the president from being all powerful. So he’s not saying anything against the characters of people who are alive today, except the simple thing that they are human and not angels.”  

There’s a section where Arnn describes what the nature of man is. And it leads beautifully back to the error about evolution. 

Nature… means the thing itself.... It means the cup is a cup; it has cupness about it that makes it a cup, and there’s lots of different cups, but you can see the cupness in all of them. So the nature of a thing is whatever it is specifically. The nature of the human being is to reason, which is the animal that can reason. Now the second thing nature means is beginning growth by which living things come to be. The word nature actually comes from the Latin word for birth…. 

So, when you look at people, it doesn’t actually matter from the point of view of nature whether human beings used to be monkeys. What we know is, when you look at the things in nature that are before us now, this human thing is a very distinctive thing.  

He gives a historic example from the Alabama slave code, about humanness, as opposed to other property, such as hogs: 

There were restrictions on how many slaves could get together, and how long they could stay together, and how long they could be indoors together. And those were generally waived in the case of meeting with a qualified minister. Now they put all kinds of fences around their hogs, and they didn’t make exemptions for the hogs to go meet the minister. But they did the slaves, ‘cause they know what they are. That’s the nature of the man. And the rights of the man are written in the nature of the man, and you cannot mistake it. 

Now here’s Arnn's point about the speed of evolution: 

Remember Woodrow Wilson thinks that things are evolving very fast. You know, ‘cause he’s writing... in about 1880 or about 1890, and the founding is about a hundred years before. And he thinks that all of the fundamental conditions have been repealed by time—in a hundred years. But have they? You can see that they have not. So if you think that evolution is supplying some standard that permits people to do whatever they want to do, that’s only a good idea if they’re not still people. But what if they are? What if the nature of the man persists? What if it’s true that you and I, people of good will who’ve known each other a while, and would be ashamed if we knew about each other that we did something wrong—what if it’s true that neither of us is quite the man that George Washington was? Nature! Something made him really great. Doesn’t happen very often. 

We could sure use another Washington, Jefferson or Madison. Or a Lincoln. Or a Ronald Reagan. Woodrow Wilson, perhaps through arrogance, put decay, not progress, into codified government. We definitely don’t need a weak reincarnation of him in leadership. If there’s a certain evidence that we haven’t “evolved” far enough yet, it is that as a human people we were duped into placing such a person in office in 2008. The founders two centuries ago knew better.