My Daily Constitution Vol. I: A Natural Law Perspective

By Richard J. Rolwing

Subtitled: A NATURAL LAW PERSPECTIVE, 365 essays, each 365 words, on Uncle Sams birthright, genealogy, and orientation, OR the Constitutions philosophical and historical presuppositions and implications, OR Philosophy for Dummies.
Many modern historians and thinkers describe western history as a progressive movement toward freedom--freedom from religious and rational morality. For them Uncle Sam rides the current crest of this wave. The American government is said to be agnostic about religion and indifferent about philosophy. There is no universal anthropology behind political judgements, no rational psychology behind political institutions, no history behind arguments, no epistemology behind communications, no metaphysics behind American independence, no ethics behind our Constitution, no moral authority behind our laws, and no logic behind their interpretation. In fact, there are no bonds to anything past, especially since there are no foundations either temporal or ontological for any convictions whatsoever.

This view grossly distorts Uncle Sams basic orientation, and the distortion is really an attempted abortion, because many moderns have a phobia about that orientation, which is Natural Law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 2, 2001
• ISBN: 9781453565766

Richard J. Rolwing

Richard J. Rolwing, a retired theologian, taught philosophy, world religions, Christianity, and politics at small colleges and large universities. He was a supermarket manager, arbitrator, insurance agent, mortgage broker, stockbroker, registered financial planner, and executive VP for several corporations, which drilled oil/gas wells, marketed business equipment internationally, and bought and operated a gold mine in California. He has rehabbed dozens of homes all over his city, spoken before business groups all over his state, and lectured before professional groups all over the nation. He has published four volumes on the philosophy behind the US Constitution. A recent work was Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose.

Book preview

January 1

It’s the Principle of the Thing, Stupid.

In 1842 Judge Mellen Chamberlain, at the time only twenty-one, interviewed a Captain Preston, a ninety-one-year-old veteran of the Battle of Concord in 1775.

Did you take up arms against intolerable oppression? Chamberlain asked. Oppressions? replied the old man, I didn’t feel them.

What, you were not oppressed by the Stamp Act? I never saw one of those stamps. I certainly never paid a penny for one of them.

Well, what about the tea tax? I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.

Then I suppose you had been reading Harington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty? Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.

Well, then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight? Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should¹

During the early 1770s as England kept tightening screws and intensifying efforts to enforce its will, Americans on the whole were not concerned. It made Samuel Adams cry, It is to be feared that the people will be so accustomed to bondage as to forget they were ever free.²

The eventually rebellious Americans claimed all the rights for which Englishmen had fought since Magna Carta. They saw themselves as conservative, not radicals. They made no claim they had snatched some new basic truths out of the sky, or discovered them under some golden tablets hid by Moroni.

They sought to save the summed up past. "Make no mistake; the American Revolution was not fought to obtain freedom, but to preserve the liberties that Americans already had as colonials," and which they knew Englishmen enjoyed and believed all men deserved.³

It was a matter of principle. It was one of will, but, in the form of law, it was primarily one of reason, or right. ‘Who shall rule?’ was important, but primary was ‘what rule?’ The king had become arbitrary, imperious.

January 2

Secular Mythology

The biggest problem our nation suffers is religion, the religious right, trying to impose its fanaticism on the rest of us. Citizens who introduce religious convictions into politics are battering at the wall of separation which the Constitution built between them.

Religion has always been the opposite and enemy of freedom. Our ancestors fled England and Europe to get away from religion controlling politics. They embraced the European Enlightenment that overthrew the medieval credulity that had brought about the Dark ages that had obliterated the classic wisdom of Greece and Rome. The Renaissance rediscovered it, the Reformation made it accessible, and the Enlightenment created science with it.

Yet as some states still have some KKK, so, unfortunately, our nation still has these religious throwbacks. If freedom means first of all freedom from religion, we have not yet fully become free in America.

That’s the story of western culture according to its prevalent historians. John Herman Randall’s The Making of the Modern Mind says, They discovered (in antiquity) a great authority for their break with the medieval spirit, and out of the conflict of authorities eventually rose freedom … All this meant, of course a revolt from the Christian ethic … in place of obedience to the will of God, freedom and responsibility under reason; in place of faith … the fearless quest of the intellect.⁴

Robert Whittemore’s Makers of the American Mind says, The long night of faith was over; the new day of reason had arrived; a decent respect for the rights of man and the opinions of mankind now replace reliance on religious authority …⁵

And Allan Bloom’s Confronting the Constitution, says [The Founders’] task was to establish the framework within which the natural rights announced in the Declaration of Independence would be protected … Their authority was founded not on tradition or revelation but on nature grasped by reason. This was a new beginning …⁶

You cannot count similar authors and texts. And it’s one big myth. Sadly, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Setung, Ho Chi Min and Pol Pot swallowed it whole. Uncle Sam still gags.

January 3

Uncle Sham

Many modern liberals presume that the only good citizen/supporter of a Constitution like ours must be post-religious, a philosophical skeptic, ethical agnostic, and cultural relativist. He can’t be convinced that he possesses any truth. At most he asks questions. He does not give answers.

A good citizen must be uncertain about everything because Uncle Sam is. At least Uncle Sam never said he knew anything for sure. Our Constitution adopted no religion, philosophy, ethic, or culture. It was utterly silent about such. It presumed no one knows for sure. Truth must be inaccessible, if it exists. Why else are there so many opposing opinions?

So our Constitution forbade any group with convictions beyond science to impose its views on others. Uncle Sam tells his nephews, You are welcome to your private fantasies, myths, and speculations, but they can never be important enough for the government to take seriously. You are welcome, however, to our public community precisely by imitating the Constitution, keeping your religious, philosophical, ethical, and cultural views to yourself.

From one perspective, liberals sound like a college freshman completely confused by a first course in philosophy. So many opinions, I give up!

From another perspective, they identify governmental restraint as governmental confusion; mistake respect, prudence, and tact, for disdain, despair, and dismissal; and misread silent reserve as ignorance.

From a third perspective they utterly ignore our Declaration of Independence, which unequivocally took absolute positions which were philosophical, ethical, cultural, and religious, and not just political. In this document Uncle Sam certainly knew his own mind, and did not hesitate to express it. He declared he was even willing to fight for his convictions. To the death! And he would kill, too, if anyone implicitly denied his convictions by treating him as if they were wrong.

Our Constitution and laws are structured with the intention of maintaining respect for those foundational convictions. Government will not require citizens to intellectually or verbally embrace those convictions. Citizens need only to respect them in practice. Uncle Sam’s own respect for those convictions, both intellectual and volitional, is best expressed by such restraint, but not only.

January 4

Foundation/Backbone

In 1808 Benjamin Rush, disappointed by America’s changing into what he called a bedollared nation, told John Adams of the pain he felt upon remembering all his exertions in the cause of liberty. Sometimes, he remarked, I wish I could erase my name from the Declaration of Independence.

Adams instantly rebuked his friend. You and I, in the Revolution, acted from principle. We did our duty, as we then believed, according to our best information, judgment and consciences. Shall we now repent this? God forbid! No! If a banishment to Cayenne or to Botany Bay, or even the guillotine, were to be the necessary consequences of it to us, we ought not to repent. Repent? This is impossible. How can a man repent of his virtues?⁷

It is difficult to imagine a stronger affirmation of a conviction. It is impossible to imagine some super position that would trump acting from principle. Adams has no doubts that virtues are not vices, and mankind can discern the difference.

Willingness to give your life does not imply you must be acting on principle. Drug dealers risk their lives daily.

What God forbids in human conduct God damns. This certainly seems implied. Adams is not just hoping a summer family reunion will see no rain.

Adams’ response could scarcely be more categorical, unequivocal, unqualified, certain, and absolute. The decision of separating was more momentous than constituting a federal nation eleven years later. There was no life/death risk to that. That particular constitution required no profound moral embrace then and there by signers heroic. No philosophical or ethical principle was at stake. Duty did not demand ratification.

Admittedly, Adams told Rush in 1811, I always considered (the Declaration) a theatrical show, … Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that … and all the glory of it.⁸

The deed preceded the Declaration. But the Declaration justified the deed forevermore, whether the deed succeeded or not. Jefferson’s metaphysical and moral principles explained Adams’ appeal to principle, duty, and conscience.

Disdain for those principles is by no means treasonous. It is intellectual, moral betrayal, though.

January 5

Strictures Structure

No doubt the act of separation from Britain was the primary meaning of the Declaration of Independence. The justification for the act was secondary. And the philosophical assertions which justified the political and legal justifications may have been tertiary. The act itself the majority of colonists embraced even before, and without, reading the text.

On July 3rd, 1776, John Adams wrote his wife Abigail, Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men. The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illumination, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore. ⁹

It has been, and continues to be. No law requires it to be. Later law only decrees it a national holiday. And what was tertiary soon became primary. When the Declaration is recalled, read, quoted, referred to, what is usually explicitly recited is only the eight philosophical assertions, beginning with: We hold these truths . .

There never would have been a Constitution without the Declaration. There never could have been. The Declaration was the condition of the possibility for our Constitution. The act of separation first made our Confederation, and secondly our Federation, possible. It also made them necessary if the act of separation, the independence, of each state was to be maintained.

The Declaration’s political and legal justifications certainly helped negatively shape our Constitution. Its structures prevented the Federal government from duplicating England’s unreasonable willfulness toward subjects.

The Constitutional debates hardly refer to the Declaration’s philosophy. But the latter’s strictures fenced the Constitution’s structures. What alone was disputed was how best to form a government based on it as taken for granted and presupposed.

January 6

Divorce

The Declaration of Independence is poetry. The Constitution is mere prose. That is their effect, at least on any audience. Reading the first stirs you up; reading the second puts you to sleep.

The Declaration has a loftiness of vision combined with an earthiness of detail. The Constitution, at least until you reach the Amendments, is flat, level-headed, abstract and emotionless.

The Declaration has four parts, the Preamble or purpose, the philosophy of government, the list of charges against the king, and the actual declaration. The Constitution has a Preamble/purpose, a list of articles structuring the forms and functions of a process, a group of amendments limiting the functions, and a paragraph stating the day, month, and year the document was done or finalized.

The Constitution expresses no ontology of government, power, authority, right, law, or justice. That had preceded the Constitution in the Declaration. It had won the day and was not in any dispute. The Constitutional framers presupposed the Declaration’s philosophy as well as its political and legal achievement of separation. That is evident precisely in the silence of the Constitution—it felt no need whatsoever to justify itself. Been there, done that.

The separation to independence the framers had successfully defended with a war. But even before Britain’s surrender expressed its acceptance, the Declaration had proclaimed the colonies were not only separate now in fact, but they were so by right: these … are, and of Right ought to be … free (from) and independent (of) England.

Defiance and rhetoric, duty and deliverance, battle and victory-—they race the blood. Now the military became civilian. Now their job was excavating, pouring concrete, carpentry, plumbing, wiring, and painting.

Bachelors seldom do such. No matter how silent someone building his own house may be, we presume he has (married) a wife; he’s a husband, not just a man.

You can disconnect this building and isolate his act of building it from his prior romance and wedding. But it guts the structure, as a divorce would the family.

So does disconnecting the Constitution from the Declaration. Only lawyers ever try.

January 7

Symphony

Fifty years afterwards, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson felt that signing the Declaration of Independence was the most important act of their lives. ¹⁰

Jefferson stipulated three acts to be carved on his tombstone. The first one was his authorship of the Declaration. Ten days before his death he expressed his belief that the Declaration will eventually inspire men over the entire planet to burst the(ir) chains and assume the blessings and security of self-government …

In his last years, after they both became ex-presidents, he wrote John Adams, I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance … The flames kindled on July 4, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism. On the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.¹¹

If the states had never constructed a federal constitution but stayed merely confederated in a league, relations between them would probably have further disintegrated. Centuries-old world conflicts would have been duplicated on this continent by states as big as European nations. Texas would have stayed its own country. No doubt much of the American west would have, too. And there is no clear evidence that most states would have become as free within as they were independent without.

The point is that the act of separating, and the state of separation, from the British empire only made the American constitution possible, not necessary. What made it probable, evolutionary, in fact, what made it nearly inevitable, was not the act but its explanation. That justfied the act legally, politically, ethically, and philosophically.

For a thousand years of English history groups of elites had often withdrawn allegiance from kings and replaced them. The colonists could easily have set up their own monarchy. Alexander Hamilton often sounded as if he wanted one. So it was not just separation that rang a bell heard round the world.

It was indisputably that bell’s music and its melody, which in the Constitution became a symphony.

January 8

Truth?

Abraham Lincoln never had any second thoughts about the verity of the philosophy of the Declaration. Speaking in Independence Hall, on Washington’s birthday in 1861, he said, "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

"I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted the Declaration of Independence.

"I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence.

"I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.¹²

Professor Carl Becker’s extensive analysis of the Declaration, which he labeled a study in the history of political ideas, concluded, To ask whether the natural-rights philosophy of the Declaration is true or false is essentially a meaningless question¹³ The founders thought it was true, invoked it as meaningful, and it worked. It certainly was true for them.

Any historian of ideas who is only that can’t distinguish true from false convictions. But any historian who claims the distinction is meaningless is acting as more than a historian, specificlly, as a skeptical philosopher and religious non-believer. Elsewhere Becker wrote that modern science makes it quite impossible for us to regard man as the child of God for whom the earth was created as a temporary habitation. Rather we must regard him as little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world … by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn … replac(ing) the conception of existence as a divinely composed and purposeful drama with … a blindly running flux of disintegrating energy.¹⁴ Our Constitution? A passing wind.

January 9

Basis

In his Puritanism and Democracy, Ralph Barton Perry said, The Declaration of Independence … was a philosophical creed designed to justify the action of men who had taken the law into their own hands. It is at one and the same time a justification of rebellion and a statement of those common principles on which was to be founded a new state. It is as though men should say: ‘This is what government and law are for. Judged by this standard, the existing authority has forfeited its claim to obedience. This is at the same time the ground on which to erect a new authority which shall in the future be obeyed as commending itself to our reason and conscience.¹⁵

"Many erudite tomes have been written about the meaning of ‘laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They have been called ‘fundamental laws,’ ‘ancient laws,’ ‘the laws of reason,’ ‘the laws of God,’ ‘the rights of man,’ and ‘natural rights.’ Professor Perry gives this definition as the one that Jefferson probably had in mind:

Rational or natural law is neither a mere description of matters of fact, nor a mere definition of the ideal. It is both: it is the law of what ought to be in a world in which things are, normally, what they ought to be. The term natural," as used here is honorific as opposed to that more modern sense of the term, in which it connotes what is base and rudimentary.

Natural law is primitive only in the sense of being prior to civil and religious institutions. It is metaphysical, as affirming the essence of man; moral, as defining the right and good; rational, in the double sense of being apprehended by reason and applied to rational beings.¹⁶

Yes, many erudite tomes have been written about natural law, tracking it through Greece, Rome, and all western history. Sadly, most historians of early American history never understood that natural law tradition. Consequently, most tomes about the Constitution cannot appreciate its philosophical basis, which the Declaration summarizes.

January 10

Standing

The Declaration of Independence did not just make an original confederation of the states, and then a final constituted federation, meaningfully possible, morally justifiable, politically feasible, and internationally legal. It itself was an unparalleled impulse or propulsion toward that more perfect union. Both as act and as assertion, with its thrust and its reception, its conviction produced a conception, as it generated a new being among nations.

William Whipple wrote to John Langdon on July 8th, This Declaration has had a glorious effect—has made these colonies all alive. Joseph Barton of Delaware wrote his cousin, It gives a great turn to the minds of our people declaring our independence. Now we know what to depend on. From New Jersey, Jonathan Elmer wrote, With the independence of the American states a new era in politics has commenced.

Samuel Adams wrote in a letter, Our Declaration has given Vigor to the Spirits of the people. Tristam Dalton wrote from Massachusetts, We have put on the harness, and I trust it will not be put off until we see our land a land of security and freedom—the wonder of the other hemisphere—the asylum of all who pant for deliverance from bondage.

Benjamin Rush wrote, The Declaration has produced a new era … The Militia of Pennsylvania seem to be actuated with a spirit more than Roman… . I think the Declaration will produce union and new exertions in England in the same ratio that they have done in this country… . The influence of the Declaration upon the senate and the field is inconceivable… . Nothing but the signing and recognizing of the Declaration preserved the Congress from dissolution in December 1776, when Howe marched to the Delaware …¹⁷

Now if the Revolutionary War was about anything, it was to defend the act of separation, establish the Declaration of its justification, and forever prolong the condition and flourishing of independence.

All our ancestors who gave their lives and limbs in that war did so primarily for independence and for the convictions justifying it. They were actual; political union was potential, a means to maintain independence. Surely the precise point of all their sacrifices cannot be irrelevant to our Constitution’s interpretation.

January 11

Trump

The Constitution’s greatest weakness was its compromise with slavery. Free black men with property were citizens with full vote in some states, but slave-owning was not outlawed.

Then in the next century, the Declaration’s philosophy of natural law and human rights became no longer accepted as obvious, as commonplace. The self-evident truths, many said, were naive, utopian, merely revolutionary rhetoric, old and threadbare, unrealistic, contrary to positive law, impossible, more nonsense than common sense, and, besides, they were basically rejected by our genuine law—the Constitution(‘s compromise).

Northern states put free and equal phrases in their constitutions. Southern states constitutions spoke of freemen being equal. In the thirty years before the Civil War, political leaders generally ridiculed the Declaration’s principles as glittering generalities and foolish fallacies.

John C. Calhoun called them mere impractical abstractions based on a purely hypothetical state of nature that never did or could exist. He mistakenly presumed Jefferson was purely Lockean. Since neither Locke nor Jefferson fully understood those principles, they were, admittedly, vulnerable to criticism.

It was the Abolitionists who clung to the Declaration and waved its creed to prove there was a ‘higher law’ than the positive law of the Constitution. ¹⁸

The Declaration trumped the Constitution. Eventually, of course, that trump provoked the Civil War and produced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which, the nation now saw, truly (fully) applied the Declaration’s higher law to reform and perfect the positive law of the Constitution.

A deficiency in the Constitution’s fidelity to the Declaration was repaired. Those Amendments did not have to contradict, only fulfill, the Constitution.

Calhoun had wanted to make slavery the basis of the republic, and recognized his chief obstacle was the Declaration’s preamble. That preamble was what elected Lincoln.

A Constitutional Amendment could similarly extend legal recognition of full humanity to unborn babies and outlaw abortion. It would not contradict the Constitution, only recent Supreme Court interpretations.

Without the Declaration’s trump, government could promote the general welfare by deciding that the retarded or disabled, even the unproductive elderly, are better off dead.

January 12

A Blessing

The practice of slavery in most respects in this country was immoral. Established by our colonial forefathers, most of whom were nominally Christian, it was an institution for which Uncle Sam must forever be ashamed. He embraced it in his adolescence when a young man’s ideals and ambitions can and should be so very high and mighty. Instead, America grew up twisted and got started wrong, terribly wrong.

Yet slavery’s very evil strangely blessed Uncle Sam. In the century after our Revolution, the philosophical creed of the Declaration, which framed our Constitution, was criticized, ridiculed, discarded, and forgotten. Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche shot down the sky-god. But slavery never let the Declaration go. It was slavery that brought Uncle Sam to fully realize for the first time the total meaning of his own words and the world-shaking revolutionary implication of his metaphysical convictions.

Carl Becker says, In the Declaration the foundation of the United States is indissolubly associated with a theory of politics, a philosophy of human rights, which is valid, if at all, not for (free) Americans only, but for all men ¹⁹

But most supporters of the Declaration and Constitution supported them as actions, like the Revolution. The theory was secondary to the results achieved. Words could predict and remember, but they didn’t do anything. Only the new constitutions of most states of the next century referred to the Declaration’s philosophy as the foundation of government. After all, after the revolution was won, to talk about natural rights of all men could be embarrassing. Slavery was all around and possibly contradicted them, even though most considered slavery as just one of many forms of indentured labor, the lowest form because it was permanent, not temporary.

But slavery couldn’t be discussed merely on the level of the Constitution. The Constitution failed us originally and couldn’t preserve the Union. A ‘Covenant from Hell,’ Abolitionists even called it. They appealed to the higher natural law of the Declaration prior to our positive law. Resurrecting and relying on the Declaration, they saved our Constitution.

January 13

Nature

"The verdict of history constrained men to approve of the independence of the United States, or at least to accept it as an accomplished fact; the accomplished fact conferred upon the Declaration a distinction, a fame, which could not be ignored, and gave to its philosophy of human rights the support of a concrete historical example.

There they were, and there they remained—stubborn fact married to uncompromising theory; bound for life; jogging along in discord or in harmony as might happen; an inspiration or a scandal to half the world, but in any case impossible to be ignored, with difficulty to be accepted or rejected the one without the other.²⁰

The primary purpose of the Declaration was to convince a candid world that the colonies had a moral and legal right to separate from Great Britain, and constitute their own government, federated or only confederated.²¹

Colonists recognized finally that relying on their rights as British subjects was insufficient. Besides, King George had declared in December, 1775, that Britain would no longer protect them as subjects. The Declaration appealed to a higher universal law, a super-historical, moral right that overrides the arbitrary rule of any governmental tyranny anywhere, any time, over any man.

When the Abolitionists used the Declaration to trump the Constitution, calling slavery a damnable crime against human nature, Southerners tried to trump it with a better philosophy of natural law. The Constitution’s compromise was not sufficient. By the great majority, both north and south, Abolitionists were despised as fanatics and feared as incendiaries calling for revolution. They relativized Union as a means, as did the Declaration.²²

Southerners argued that slavery was a natural development of human history viewed along evolutionary lines, anticipating Darwin’s later survival of the fittest and Hitler’s later ‘history’ as natural revelation. Nature became history which became progress promoted and protected by Providence. It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that other animals should prey upon each other. ²³

Finally, still somewhat ashamed, Southerners trumped even their natural law by claiming the Bible both permitted and authorized slavery. Protestant, they rejected Catholic tradition opposing slavery.²⁴

January 14

Context

For interpreting the Constitution, certainly the immediate historical context is the Declaration of Independence.

Moses Coit Tyler’s Literary History of the American Revolution says, "What, then, was Jefferson to do? Was he to regard himself as a mere literary essayist, set to produce before the world a sort of prize dissertation—a calm, analytic judicial treatise on history and politics with a particular application to Anglo-American affairs—one essential merit of which would be its originality as a contribution to historical and political literature?

"Was he not, rather to regard himself as, for the time being, the very mouthpiece and prophet of the people whom he represented, and, as such, required to bring together and to set in order, in their name, not what was new, but what was old; to gather up into his own soul, as much as possible, whatever was then also in their souls—their very thoughts and passions, their ideas of constitutional law, their interpretations of fact, their opinions as to men and as to events in all that ugly quarrel; their notions of justice, of civic dignity, of human rights; finally their memories of wrongs which seemed to them intolerable, especially of wrong inflicted upon them during those twelve years by the hands of insolent and brutal men, in the name of the King, and by his apparent command?

"Moreover, as the nature of the task … made it necessary that he should thus state, as the reasons for their intended act, those very considerations both as to fact and as to opinion which had actually operated upon their minds, so did it require him to do so, to some extent, in the very language which the people themselves, in their more formal and deliberate utterances, had all along been using… .

While the Declaration lacks originality … it is individualized by the character and the genius of its author. Jefferson gathered up the thoughts and emotions and even the characteristic phrases of the people for whom he wrote, and … mustered them into that triumphant procession wherein … they will go marching on to the world’s end.

January 15

Carl Becker’s Paraphrase

"We are not subject to Parliament. We are a free people, whose ancestors, in accord with the natural right of all men, emigrated to the wilds of America, and there established at the hazard of their lives and fortunes new societies, with forms of government suitable to their conditions and agreeable to their ideas.

"We have our own legislatures to govern us, just as our British brethren have theirs. The British Parliament has no authority over us, any more than our legislatures have authority over them. We do not mention the Parliament in our Declaration because we are not declaring independence of an authority to which we have never been subject.

"We are declaring ourselves independent of the king, because it is to the king only that we have ever been subject; and in dissolving our connection with the king we separate from the British empire, because it is only through the king that we have ever had any connection with it. This connection we voluntarily entered into by submitting ourselves to the sovereign head.

"Subjects of the king we have professed ourselves to be, and loyal subjects, … as a free people we acknowledged allegiance to him personally, thereby freely assuming its obligations. But this allegiance to the king, while it obligates us to support the empire in so far as we can in the manner we find convenient, gives him no right of compulsion over us.

"If we separate from the empire, it is because the king has attempted to exert such compulsion, and by repeated acts of usurpation has exhibited a determination to subject us to his arbitrary power. In declaring our independence of the king, and … the … empire, we are not breaking off a complicated set of intimate relationships, sanctioned by positive law and long established custom; on the contrary, we are only withdrawing … voluntary allegiance to a personal sovereign.

… this renunciation we justify, not in virtue of our rights as British subjects, but in virtue of those natural rights of which we, in company with all men, are inalienably possessed²⁵

Illegal? Unrighteous?

January 16

Presidential Primary

Presidential campaigner Pat Buchanan (1996) colorfully said that if King George III had forbidden study of the Bible in colonial schools, the immediate American response would have been, Lock and load!

But there was no royal Department of Education then, and there were almost no tax-supported schools controlled by political officers, colonial or royal. Schools were private enterprises.

Buchanan overlooks the fact that a century or so later as state or public schools multiplied, they were staffed and used by the majority leadership of Protestant Christianity. In pre-ecumenical times, teachers, administrators, and pupils were often hostile and contemptuous of Catholic and Jewish pupils, not to mention irreligious heathens.

Initially Catholics appealed to the courts complaining about the use of only Protestant Bibles. Then Jews began suing over the use of Christian Bibles. Finally Madeline Murray, America’s notorious atheist, sued over having any Bible or religion even mentioned.

Only a judiciary with an anti-religious bigotry could have ever been responsible for American public schools not reading or teaching about the Bible. Buchanan is right when he says it makes no sense that public schools can’t study the Bible as well as the Constitution, for the Bible shaped all western history, positively and negatively.

The Bible could be studied as any other literary text, letting scholars and students debate within and among themselves on interpretations. In fact, this occurs in many universities and even high schools that were never intimidated by Supreme Court bias.

But candidate Alan Keyes, while also deeply conservative, criticizes his fellow Catholic Buchanan for leaving out the third document. It is the Declaration of Independence, he argues, that summarizes the biblical tradition and gives it a peculiarly American form. It is that document that enabled the Constitutional First Amendment to embrace all religions, churches, and the nonreligious.

Keyes argues that Christian conservatives will never unite our nation appealing to only one portion’s principles, the Bible. They should appeal to the entire nation’s principles, the Declaration and the Constitution. If appeal to those fail, then America has little future. All American debate should start with the Declaration.

January 17

Absolutism

Even though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have done much good in human history, they also have been responsible for much evil.

The book of Joshua says the Jews originally took their land of Israel by invasion, conquest, and genocide, with their God justifying it. More than one war was instigated by leaders claiming religious inspiration.

In their historical inclosed ghettoes, Jewish religious leaders traditionally used the sword to enforce religious rules. Christians adopted Constantine and for more than a millennium used the power of the sword to impose their faith, at least upon their own members, and their rules upon non-Christians. Islam may not have spread altogether by force as non-Muslim historians often claimed, but Muslim nations did build empires by the sword, and Koranic belief has often been used to justify force against unbelievers and non-observant Muslims.

If these religions worship the same God, His business card, while quite impressive, must be significantly smudged, bent, and wrinkled. Consequently, many moderns fear people who believe in absolutes (dogmas) and question their fitness for democracy.

Hans Kelsen, probably the most important legal positivist of our century, laid the foundation for … the ‘orthodoxy of openness.’ Following Kant, "Kelsen said things in themselves are beyond the pale of human experience, and that reality is only relative to the knowing subject. As such, there can be no awareness of absolute reality, no absolute norms.

"Kelsen believed that where you admitted absolutes, you were inexorably led to … ‘political absolutism,’ to autocracy. The true foundation for democracy … was the humble admission that all that can be known are relative values. This, Kelsen believed, would enable us to avoid the tyranny to which he thought the ideas of Aquinas and other natural law thinkers would lead us.

However, Kelsen misread Aquinas [who] was firm in his rejection of absolutist government… . While Kelsen is forced to admit that laws of totalitarian regimes are valid [simply] because duly enacted, Aquinas insists that unjust laws are not valid.²⁶

Our Declaration of Independence both affirms absolute truths and negates political absolutism. The Constitution of our Independence presumes both positions.

January 18

Godless?

Some Christians like to call the United Nations a Godless organization because its charter does not mention God. For many years Uncle Sam, trying to keep it going, let Communists and friends often use it outrageously. Its deliberate misuse was godless.

But the U.S. Constitution is no more explicitly religious than the UN Charter. The Constitution does, in the last paragraph, refer to its date as the year of our Lord, 1776. Otherwise, the document is no more ‘godly’ than a business contract. The signers signify the unanimous consent of their 13 states to a set of instructions. They agree to set up a central government and run it in specified ways with definite limits.

It would have been ridiculous for the states to have written a constitution contradictory to the principles which, they had claimed in the Declaration of Independence, gave them the right to create one. There is no contradiction; they are quite compatible.

But neither was there explicit reference. The Declaration’s philosophy and ethics were the basis for claiming rights that limit governments. They were the implicit background, context, and justification of a new constitution that did in fact claim rights which limited government.

A religious American can conclude far easier that God blessed our claim and act of separation, than that God shaped or blessed our Constitution. While the Declaration explicitly relies on God, the Constitution is silent.

The Constitution’s authors/signers do not appeal to the Supreme Judge of the World, or to Nature’s God, as its ultimate authority, nor do they express any reliance upon divine providence to ultimately assure its enduring success. It was not like constitutions of some of the states which had an established church, religion, and God, and were explicitly religious, godly in proclaimed intent and word.

It is not impossible, but it is difficult, to claim that the Constitution is Godly in action, if not in word. For it omitted forbidding slavery, and did worse by not restraining empire, domestic and foreign. It failed to fully apply morally acceptable law to black and red people.

In origin it was not immaculately conceived, but in goal it was well meant, leaving itself open to redemption.

January 19

Old Hat

Today we are the living constitutors of our Constitution. We hold it up, put it forth, lay it down, as our fundamental law, the form of our institutional structure. We support it, will it, push it, enforce it, and try to preserve and promote it.

We aren’t the same as our founders. We have many religions and anti-religions, many philosophies and many skepticisms, many ideologies and many scientific myths. We have doubts, questions, and multiple disagreements.

But our founders did not constitute this polity by imitating Descartes. They did not start by putting all things into doubt. No one does, or even can, of course, but many thinkers have tried, or convinced themselves they did. No, our fathers did not go to battle flying a white flag.

They held and proclaimed those basic propositions, truths asserted by the Declaration of Independence, as a patrimony. They did not pretend to have discovered them. They were a heritage from history, through whose dark and bloody pages there runs like a silver thread the tradition of civility ²⁷

Too much history is taught only as bad example. The past is presented as what we rejoice to be free from. History has been progress. Never forgetfulness. Too much philosophy is taught, in order to provoke student thought, only as radically questioning everything to begin with, and never affirming anything to end with. Only the insane think they can create totally anew. Only fanatics try. Only idiots hope to discover, express, and realize in some permanent form, what humanity has never dreamed of, or suspected, or known before, even implicitly. For inside every Newton is an Einstein coming.

Finally, after thousands of years (of failure) we supposedly understand the universe (Sagan), life (Darwin), sex (Freud), economics (Marx), and philosophy (Derrida), even though our past failures indicated success was impossible.

Where is wisdom? With thinkers who optimistically repudiate history or who thankfully treasure its peaks as permanently precious?

Uncle Sam’s heritage is always reclaimable, as it always was, and always will be. It was no ephemeral ‘flash in the pan.’ Such truth endures.

January 20

Source

The states reached a national consensus even before the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The first Continental Congress in 1774 issued a Declaration of Rights insisting that colonists were entitled to all the liberties of English people. It ordered all trade with England cease if its Coercive Acts were not repealed.

England refused. The second Continental Congress in 1775 set up a provincial army and navy, appointed George Washington commander-in-chief, sent diplomats to Europe, and assumed sovereign power over Indian relations. It was a permanent consensus, a confederation, concerned only with foreign policy, but it led to the tighter consensus, the Constitution, concerned with domestic policy.

It is by that constitutional consensus that this people acquired an identity with a vital form, and an entelechy or finality, a sense of purpose as a collective organized for action in history.²⁸ Of course, the subsequent history of accumulated constitutional law and its judicial application has further distinguished that identity.

A constitutional consensus focuses around the idea of law and encompasses "the whole constellation of ideas that are related to the notion of law, or right (ratio juris), as its premises, its constituent elements, and its consequences. "²⁹

That consensus came to the people and they came to it. They did not fall into it, but arrived at it through deliberation by methods of reasons reflecting on experience and on earlier learned reflections on human experience.³⁰

Behind, in, and with the Declaration they did not just agree on a set of working hypotheses whose value is useful, as pragmatists claim. They weren’t just rationalizing psychological data as behaviorists claim, or anthropological data as racists