A work of genius

In the previous post, where we discussed the Constitution as law, we of necessity also discussed the basis for its legitimacy. We asserted that its ratification by the legislatures representing the people of the original States made it binding on those States and their people.  The people and territorial legislatures of additional States admitted to the Union also acknowledged the legitimacy of the Constitution, by their application to be admitted as States.  We asserted that the Constitution is also a covenant binding on us, the descendants of the Founder’s generation, by virtue of our being raised from helplessness to maturity by parents who were protected by, and bound to uphold, the Constitution. This binding of the Constitution on future generations is rendered tolerable by the capacity of the Constitution to be peacefully amended through regular political processes prescribed by the Constitution itself.

We also noted that, in the minds of many Americans, the Constitution is seen as a work framed under the hand of God. This makes the Constitution sacred to many religiously inclined Americans, and this sense of sacredness helps check the power of amendment by making the amending of the Constitution a sacred undertaking, not to be done lightly. This sense of the sacred is further reinforced by what some observers have described as the civil religion of the United States. But what of Americans who are agnostic or atheistic, or whose religious beliefs find foreign the notion of an inspired Constitution?

Before seeking an answer to that question, we will revisit the quote from John Adams:

But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in the rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

This quote has sometimes been used to support the notion that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. But while we are sympathetic with those who seek to imbue the Constitution with greater transcendence, we believe they do themselves no favors by narrowing the scope of that transcendence to a particular faith. Adams himself was a complex man and his religious views were equally complex. He became a Unitarian late in his life,  and was critical of historical and institutional Christianity, though there is evidence he continued to view Jesus of Nazareth as a miracle worker and Redeemer.

But there is no doubt Adams wrote the passage quoted, and it is equally in error for nontheists to dismiss it. Transcendence is a broad concept and can be shaped into a very big tent, giving shelter not only to most Abrahamic faith traditions, but to everything from nature religions to some forms of secular humanism. This is reflected in the civil religion of the United States, which is a syncretic nonsectarian theism that employs the language of Deism and was once fairly faithfully reflected in the practices of the Boy Scouts of America.  The American civil religion includes such things as the symbolism of the Great Seal of the United States (“Novo ordo seclorum“; “Annuit coeptis” and the All-Seeing Eye); the Pledge of Allegiance; the swearing of oaths or affirmations by officeholders, witnesses, and jurors; and the ceremony regarding the flag and around such sacred ground as Lincoln’s and Washington’s Memorials, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Vietnam memorial, and the national cemeteries. George Washington did much to inspire and cultivate this civil religion: The best evidence is that he was in private conscience and belief a fairly conventional Anglican Christian,  but he deliberately chose the language of Deism in his public utterances on the theory that it was bland enough to be acceptable to Jew and Gentile alike.

Our point should be clear. We believe that the American constitutional experiment is more likely be blessed with continuing success if more of its citizens imbue the document with transcendence, and we believe this sense of transcendence needs to arise from as broad a base of faith traditions as possible. Our experience is that a sense of the transcendent exists even among nontheists, and our country will benefit from making room in the tent for as many as possible. We think of the secular humanist, Isaac Asimov, who included the following dialogue in one of his works of science fiction:

Chen said, “Dr. Seldon, you disturb the peace of the Emperor’s realm. None of the quadrillions living now among all the stars of the Galaxy will be living a century from now. Why, then, should we concern ourselves with events of three centuries distance?” “I shall not be alive half a decade hence,” said Seldon, “and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, ‘humanity.’”

That Asimov felt a deep emotional attachment to the Constitution is even more plain from his novella, The Stars, Like Dust. Yet Asimov, while not actively hostile to religion, was nonetheless an atheist. This gives us hope that a broad cross-section of Americans can continue to imbue the Constitution with transcendence.

There still remains a hard core of atheists and agnostics who categorically reject the transcendent. On what foundation is their loyalty to the Constitution to be built? For the committed skeptic, for whom it is axiomatic that nothing is sacred and nothing is transcendent, there is not much hope. Such may be persuaded to support the Constitution out of pragmatism, but such support will always be qualified and conditional. However, we hope to win the minds and hearts of many nontheistic readers by an appeal to the Constitution as an intellectual achievement.  Nor will this view of the Constitution as a work of genius be detrimental to its reputation with theists, whose minds need to be persuaded as much as their hearts.

The authors of the Constitution were men of remarkable learning and intellect. James Madison Jr., who is often described as the father of the Constitution, had long experience in politics, having served in the Virginia House of Delegates and the Continental Congress during and after the Revolutionary War. He was the oldest of twelve children, with all the psychological implications. He was tutored by the Scotsman, Donald Robertson, and became proficient in mathematics, geography, and modern and classical languages, particularly Latin. The study of mathematics or language serves admirably to separate the truly intellectually gifted from the poseur; either you can work the proof or translate the passage, or you can’t. Madison later studied under Reverend Thomas Martin in preparation for a  successful career at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, completing its three-year bachelor’s program in just two years.  The course emphasized classical languages, theology, and the works of the Enlightenment, and after completing his degree, and rather than going into law or the ministry, Madison stayed on to study Hebrew and political philosophy with the college president, John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was an advocate of Scottish common sense realism, and was himself a signer of the Declaration of Independence and lost both a son and much of his fortune the Revolutionary War.

Madison returned home to tutor his younger siblings. During this time, he educated himself deeply in the law, though never entering the bar; he considered himself a student of the law but not a lawyer. He also made an extended study of historical democracies in conscious preparation for the Constitutional Convention. During the Convention itself, he was held in high esteem, one of his fellow delegates noting that “in the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention … he always comes forward as the best informed man of any point in debate.” His single greatest contribution to the Constitution was probably his insight that a large republic could be more stable than a small one, because so many competing interests would check the tendency for minorities to be abused by majority rule.

Unlike Madison, who was born into a prosperous and respected Virginia planter family, Alexander Hamilton was born in the Leeward Islands to a mother who was then living with a man not her husband, and who died when Hamilton was about 13 years old. He was left destitute when his mother’s first husband seized the entire estate, and again when a cousin who had taken him in committed suicide and left his entire estate to his mistress and her children. Hamilton worked as a clerk at an import-export firm and proved capable enough to be left in charge for months while the owner was at sea.

Hamilton was a ferocious autodidact. His sensational account of a hurricane that struck the islands was published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, and attracted enough attention that community leaders arranged for his education in New York City. He began his formal education at the Elizabethtown Academy under William Livingston, later governor of New Jersey, who was another signer of the Declaration of Independence and whose home was looted by the British during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton continued his education at King’s College, now Columbia University, but the Revolution began before he could graduate. He continued his studies on his own and was admitted to the bar.

John Jay, like Madison, was born into privilege, but in the North rather than Virginia, and he was a committed abolitionist. (This ought to be remembered by those who promulgate the myth that the Constitution was about protecting slavery.) Apart from three years under Anglican priest Pierre Stoupe, he was home-schooled by his mother, and entered King’s College at the age of 14. He was a law clerk under Benjamin Kissam before being admitted to the bar, and is generally regarded as a conservative, seeking reconciliation with Parliament until the burning of Norfolk drove him into the patriot cause. He was a lifelong opponent of mob rule and approached the American Revolution from the perspective that traditional English rights were being denied to Americans.

Benjamin Franklin was elderly and ailing by the time of the Convention, and his contributions were probably not of critical importance. However, he illustrates the intellectual quality of many of the earlier Founders. A slaveowner turned abolitionist, he had an international reputation as a scientist and inventor, and is less known among historians of science for “discovering electricity” with his apocryphal kite than for discovering the existence of positive and negative electrical charge; authoring some of the first writings on population demographics; naming and characterizing the Gulf Stream; promulgating Huygen’s wave theory of light; investigating cooling by evaporation; and experimenting with the effects of oil on surface tension of water. His was a restless and powerful intellect.

Unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution saw a need for savants.

George Washington, president of the Constitutional Convention, is remembered less for his intellectual accomplishments than for his strength of character.  He did not receive the formal education that was given to his half-brothers from his father’s previous marriage, but he had some genuine skill at mathematics and land surveying. He was capable of writing with force and precision, though his writing tended to be rather dry. He embarked on a military career that was followed by a marriage to a planter’s widow, which left little time for further education. He was reputed to be the richest man in America when the Continental Congress appointed him commander of the Continental Army.

Washington was nonetheless the essential man of the American Revolution, holding together his army through the defeats at Long Island, riposting at Trenton and Princeton, and holding his army together again through the crucible of Valley Forge. He became the Cincinnatus of the new republic, voluntarily surrendering his power as soon as the British had recognized American independence, and declining to become its king. We agree with George III, who, when told of Washington’s choice, pronounced him the greatest man in the world.

These men approached the crafting of a Constitution from the perspective that there is such a thing as human nature, that it can be understood through a close study of history and the classical writings, and that government works best when it is adapted to the realities of human nature. Their depth of knowledge puts most of us to shame. If you had to look up “Cincinnatus” or did not recognize the allusion to La République n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu, then you need not be ashamed for yourself, but you should be ashamed of the state of education in this country. History is too important to be subsumed under “social studies” or taught by instructors whose real business is coaching football.

To all this, the skeptic may reply, “The argument that we should worship the Constitution because it was written by a bunch of really smart guys leaves me cold.”  We are not calling for worship of the Constitution; we are calling for taking it seriously. Imbuing it with transcendence is only one approach to that (and we acknowledge that it is possible to imbue it with transcendence without taking it seriously, an observation to which we will return in a future post.)  We are arguing for the kind of intellectual humility that acknowledges that we might not have been able to do better, and that we should be careful of trying to fix that which is not broken.

What of the hardest of skeptics, to whom all appeals to transcendence are risible, and all the works of the human mind are subject to unrelenting criticism, because it’s all going to ultimately perish in the heat death of the Universe anyway? The Constitution is incapable of governing a nation of nihilists. Indeed, we believe there is nothing that can govern a nation of nihilists but naked force.  Fortunately, humans are not nihilists by nature, but seek meaning in their existence, as was so movingly expressed by Victor Frankl. But there is some benefit to having a hard core of skeptics in a constitutional republic. They force us to defend the Constitution, and by so doing, they may make us see some real flaw in need of amendment; or, at the very least, to appreciate better what we are defending. The trick is to not let ourselves be corroded by their cynicism.