Why should a layperson write about a legal document? Because it is an important one, and while nearly all opinions that concern the law are penned by people with legal training, the American Constitution concerns all of us. It sets the rules by which all the laws that constrain the daily lives of Americans are deemed to be valid or not and, in so doing, it influences the legal philosophy of the rest of the world. It is important that ordinary citizens understand its most egregious flaws. Lawyers will find all the minor ones.

In any library of civilisation, the American Constitution and Bill of Rights will perforce have an honoured place. It changed the world in the same year (1789) as that other life changing event, The French Revolution, was beginning. With beautiful serendipity it brought together, as its authors, an extraordinary group of political and intellectual giants. As it, slowly, permeated the world’s consciousness, legions of idealists must have been electrified, even by the first three words of its preamble: “We the People”. It spoke to the very hearts and souls of humans of a newly imagined free existence. Getting the thirteen States, then involved, to ratify the final version would have required almost superhuman political skill and diplomacy. Through the centuries, its voice, the Supreme Court, has provided us with many titans of legal thought and expression. In general, it has served its nation, and other nations, well.

But! But! Regretfully there are a lot of Buts! The first being that it was written more than two hundred and forty years ago in a world that is now almost unimaginable. A world that was generally ruled by the caprice of Kings, Queens and Emperors. Slavery was perceived to be a normal part of life along with anti-Semitism, wars and ubiquitous life-threatening diseases. In reality, it was the life that Hobbes described as nasty, brutish and short. Although the Constitution exploded as the first open attempt to put the people in control of their own society and was deemed extraordinarily radical for its time, it was, and is, a captive of its own period’s norms. Married women and children were but chattels, trapped within the total power of their husbands, with no vote, no protection, no property and no means of appeal. Slavery was accepted and the slaves who escaped to a non-slave State had to be returned to their so-called owners. The original owners of the land (referred to in the document itself as ‘Indians’) were just an aside, and men who did not own property had no hand in the electoral process. Some of its period related flaws still ensnare us today with misguided attempts to ensure a wealthy, white Christian control of everything.

It’s antiquity alone leads to some undesirable results. Even the fact that the abolishment of slavery, the rights of women and children, and the rights of people of any colour other than White were added as an afterthought creates a disturbing suspicion of the order and validity of the moral values within it.

Some of its more contentious clauses deserve our scrutiny.

The First Amendment includes in its text that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…or of abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…’ (emphasis added). This prohibition is one of the most important, and most prized, provisions in the entire document. But free speech can become criminal when, for example, it is used to incite hatred or Revolution or it is slanderous. Prohibiting laws toward an establishment of religion does not mean freedom to set up a religion that requires for example, human sacrifice. This is covered by the criminal laws. In the same way, the right to freedom of speech should not protect the freedom of anonymous speech which is capable of causing grievous damage to the rights of other individuals: their right to privacy, to dignity, to their good name, to their very safety. If such damage is caused by anonymous free speech, there is no recourse for the victim. Such anonymous free speech is, at best, an act of abject cowardliness.

The Second Amendment, in particular, is somewhat obtuse because of age and poor drafting. It states that ‘A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’. Modern rulings on this right seem to wilfully ignore the Militia section of this amendment, although it is the stated purpose of the right to bear arms. The meaning and rules of such a Militia are clearly laid out in Section 8 of the Constitution itself. This Section empowers Congress to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions. It reserved to the States the authority of appointing the officers and the training of the Militia ‘according to the discipline prescribed by Congress’ (emphasis added). This Militia bears no resemblance whatsoever to present day individual louts wandering the streets carrying assault rifles as a macho extension of their supposed sexual prowess. There is no invasion threatened today that can be dealt with by citizens with private guns and, as gun owners are the only ones currently threatening and leading insurrections, perhaps they exist to put themselves down? Leaving aside the arcane language of the Amendment, it is glaringly obvious that the private ownership of guns in the twenty-first century has no relationship to the concept of liberty.

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment ends with the words… ‘Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws (emphasis added). How then is it not criminal to forcibly separate refugee children from their parents without even a pretence of due process?

There is no longer a belief, nor a wisp of embarrassment, that the most gifted and learned judges should be appointed to the Supreme Court to interpret the law as best and as honestly as they can. Now they are blatantly chosen on their previous record on issues that favour one side, or the other, of the partisan divide. Some of them then spend their time developing the most convoluted reasoning to come to their desired result. Others pore over the words of the Founders, even to the extent of checking the meaning of relevant words in the eighteenth century (an attitude which elevates the Founders to the level of Prophets writing a Gospel to be valid for eternity). Missing entirely is any understanding of the intensely political nature of the entire constitutional venture. The initial draft may have been written idealistically but, to achieve its essential purpose of creating the Union, the paramount need was to persuade all thirteen states then existing to ratify the document. To achieve this all delegates, including the drafters, were obliged to swallow some bitter pills (including the Electoral College and two Senators per State). To justify this, they would have needed local benefits for their own states, political pork if you like, to assuage their own constituents. The initial Bill of Rights probably included much of this need.

For a democracy like America to be at peace with itself, respect for law is an essential ingredient. In effect, this means that, even when a decision is arrived at that some do not agree with, it can be reluctantly accepted if the decision is made on a good faith determination of the law and not on any extraneous dogma. That respect is faltering because of vile partisan squabbling for control through law. The modern Court has shown a cavalier attitude to the spirit of the Constitution itself. In striking down part of the Voting Rights Act they were fully aware that the rogue states involved would wield their new found freedom to disenfranchise many of their own black voters. In the famous case about a baker’s refusal to make a cake celebrating gay marriage, they did not take the opportunity to rule on anti-discrimination protections under the Constitution but sent a message that the Court was in favour of religious bigotry. In the Citizens United case, they released a veritable torrent of money into the political system (where it does not belong) on the spurious grounds that Corporations have the same rights as individuals. There are too many such rulings for honest people to feel at ease.

The Republican Party, particularly during the Trump era, has set out, openly, to pack all courts with conservative judges, seeing this as a way to control society when the Presidency is no longer in their hands. Given the makeup of American society this is a very high-risk strategy, not so much for them as for the very rule of law. However, the idea of having a very conservative Court ruling a moderately liberal society is but a pipe dream. The combined power of the Presidency, Congress and the People, would be far too great. It is most unlikely that any Court would even make the attempt.

The Constitution, despite the reverence we all hold it in, is out of date. Perhaps the pithiest explanation of this was Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, pointing out that as a gay, black woman, she was not even a person in the original document. Tradition and admiration are no substitute for decent, clear law. So, write a new one. It would be worthwhile, even if extremely challenging but enormously cathartic. Is it beyond its time? – yes. Is it possible – yes, but only if America is still a can-do society? A large part, including the most revered sections on freedom of speech, religion and universal suffrage, can be retained. The remaining issues would be the most contentious but, arguing them openly in Citizens’ conventions would enable a far better focus on the future and, counter intuitively, allow the Republican Party to reset their decent conservative values after the nightmare of the past few years. Increased clarity about the spirit of and intentions behind the new provisions would also challenge members of the judiciary who have been blatantly using their interpretative powers to progress their own ideological positions. A new American Constitution could be as electrifying for the world as the old one was in its heyday.

Dateline: November 2120

Note: The authors, Sienna Mboya and Amélie Paralogos are both great grandchildren of Frank and Rosemarie Kennan, the originators of this blog based on their Library of Civilisation.

An enormous amount of history has been written about the decade starting in 2020 but, in our opinion, not nearly enough attention has been given to that single momentous year and those immediately preceding it. This post is an attempt to redress that gap in the study of the origins of our own Brave New World.

2020 did not start as a year that was going to be any different to the three preceding years. For those years, the world was already in chaos. It was known universally that we faced two existential threats: human induced climate change and loss of biodiversity. Despite the understanding that there was very little time left for the hope of redressing these twin catastrophes, many of those who could take action denied the very existence of both. In the years immediately preceding 2020 the world was also immersed in two, unrecognised, seemingly alternate universes. The first of these was an intense fixation on an economic society: this was a condition that had been building since the Industrial Revolution. This caused a slow, but accelerating, drift away from a society that tried to alleviate the difficulties faced by everyday members, into one that more or less adored mammon. The apparent purpose of humanity was to produce and consume. Anything that interfered with that ideal, such as unions, believers in social justice, and climate realists, were seen as disloyal to progress. The media, conservative and liberal, gave immense amounts of space over to business and the stock market. The whole dystopian reality was probably best summed up by Margaret Thatcher from her perch as Prime Minister of Great Britain when she happily proclaimed that “greed is good”. At times, it seemed that society consisted entirely of Chambers of Commerce.

The second imagined alternate universe related to the more modern development of social media. It was one of the world’s greatest achievements but, in its early years, those who were its masters seemed totally unaware of the destructive forces that it made available to the most unscrupulous of humans. Dialectics and algorithms allowed such gangsters to access, and crudely analyse, the vast troves of personal information available about each individual on a plethora of social media. They then bent the stories that chosen targets were receiving, to exaggerate whatever particular hatred or superstition they suffered from. It seems almost inconceivable from our vantage point a hundred years later that people, including experts, thought that the information on their social media accounts was secure from prying eyes and misuse. Nor does it seem to have crossed anyone’s mind that the democratic ideal of free speech did not include the abomination of anonymous free speech. What happened was that the practitioners of dialectics were able to identify the various extreme constituencies within their own democracies and drown their ability to think by swamping them with persuasive lies, conspiracy theories and biased beliefs that matched each individual’s faulty knowledge or logic. Using such doubtful strategies they could create a winning election strategy. This reversed the aged pattern of democracy so that instead of electing leaders, we gave power to people without any leadership skills who then had to spend all of their time kowtowing to some element of their astonishingly disparate followers. In effect this led to mob rule: an evil that was firmly believed to belong to the distant past. Chaos ensued. In order to maintain the electoral cohesion of such a ragtag group, vis, Alt- Right, racists, misogynists, sexists, fundamental Christians, Ayn Rand disciples, QAnon unfortunates and a thousand other zany creeds, logic had to be abandoned and a whole series of two word, non-answers had to be invented, such as “Fake News”, “Deep State” and “Liberal Lies”. Entire political systems became farcical pantomimes with assorted Queens of Hearts in the lead roles.

The clowns seemed to be varied in their approach to power but they all held the underlying idea, on almost every level, that the past was superior to the present. Trump in America was blunt with his slogan to make America Great Again, without of course, specifying when that Great America existed exactly. Both Russia and Britain hankered after their times of empire. Modi and Erdogan and some Mideastern leaders pined for a true religious Theocracy, while Netanyahu wanted to possess a Biblical geographic state but with no votes for the indigenous population. Bolsonaro and others just wanted to imitate Trump. Europe had its own clowns but they were hampered in their ambitions because the very people who had voted them into office were totally opposed to leaving the European Union with its insistence on rule of law. It was in the midst of this cacophony of unreason that the 2020 pandemic landed and brought with it an unimaginable collection of fears, both real and fanciful. The fear of death or illness, of economic ruin, of social anarchy and of God’s wrath. For nearly two years it did bring carnage, both in bereavement and in mental health. The curtailment of ordinary life, and the sadness this brought with it, were so all encompassing that it was many years before those who had suffered through it could recognise that it had also brought with it an extraordinary, and timely, acceleration in human civilisation. The first pillar of these aforementioned alternate universes to collapse was signalled by the dethronement of Trump – we chose the word carefully. As the scandals hidden by his power and his collection of lackeys began to surface, Congress had to provide extra car parks for whistleblowers trying, belatedly, to rescue their reputations. Only William Barr was unrepentant as he had the surety of knowing that he had been doing God’s will. Whilst America was convulsed with the knowledge that so many of them had been taken as gullible innocents, other related events were playing out across the globe. Nobody had truly understood the influence that tin pot dictators could wield on the simple basis of being a friend of, and having access to, the American President. With his fall, the world breathed a sigh of relief and everything changed. Putin fell within two years as he became anathema to everyday Americans (although there is a valid argument that his collapse was as much to do with the loss of oil and gas revenues as renewables became the norm). In Britain the leader Cummings, a virus like creature, was finished when the technology corporations took a look at our new world and decided that the damage done by operating a major part of their business in a low regulated, off-shore, money laundering island, would have far too great a negative impact on their reputations. With the collapse of that mirage, Cummings had to go
(for the pedants, we are aware that the constitutional leader was Johnson, but this was in name only. In reality he was more an incompetent court jester).

The stormy ending of crude populism in much of the world allowed the smooth advance of the more important social change. The pandemic had allowed, even forced, a great number of the world’s population to examine their societies and their own place in them. The great majority realised that a civilisation that exalted the profit motive above all other ambitions, wishes, moralities and futures, was not taking care of ordinary citizens. This led to what we now call the enlightened Enlightenment. Amongst other achievements this saved our planet, increased our love of science, culture, justice, education and empathy. When the pandemic struck, the first thing that these ordinary people realised was that populist leaders were so totally bereft of ideas for combating the virus that they imitated King Canute in telling the tide to stop coming in or, as an alternative, trying to foist the blame onto some enemy or other. Interspersed were miracle cures and statistics that scientists had never heard of. It was a time of sadness and madness but, nonetheless, it led ineluctably to the most momentous change in human society since the invention of agriculture.

Suffering in lockdown, people had time to consider the return to a normal life that they were expected to ardently wish for. The inferior healthcare, housing, and education that their poverty made inevitable, the stress from long commutes and substandard child care and all of this combined with the ubiquitous and truly farcical disparity in wealth. Even more importantly, from our point of view in their future, they had time to look at the overall system of society with opened eyes. What they saw was that it was not designed to improve the general good but was specifically designed to help those already riding some pig’s back. Dreaming of their children’s future, and experiencing the early wrath of climate change, they began to understand the glutinous appetites of the commercial community. Most of the entities involved are now forgotten, but with a few exceptions: the brutal hypocrisy of the extractive industries, feeding vulture like on an already wounded earth; the great engineering companies, Boeing and Volkswagen, who eschewed their skills for the sake of a few more dollars; and the enormous pharmaceutical conglomerate of The Sacklers for whom a great fortune doing good was not enough, so they became drug dealers. At the
same time, too many farmers were stealing the rhythm of their land and their stock for no motive other than economic gain.

It was fifty years into the last century before those who had lived through that fateful year of 2020 grasped that, despite their suffering, they were honoured to have experienced one of the most fateful years of human history. Without that year we would probably not be here to write this essay. More importantly, without the events of that cataclysmic year, we would not now be optimistic about our ongoing battle against climate degradation. 2020 will always be remembered as the year of birth of our new Renaissance and of our new Enlightenment.

Don’t shy away because this blog is about religion, and specifically about Christianity. If you are a Christian be assured that it will not be an attack on your spirituality. I have enough curiosity left to become agitated when good scientists, even some great ones, discard some of their valuable time trying to prove or disprove the unprovable, to wit, the existence of God. Presumably it is religious dogma that drives them to such windmill chasing but a belief in God is a valid and reasonable position. Very few Christians believe that our solar system is earth centric or that the earth is six or seven thousand years old.

So, imagining ourselves to be devout Christians, we believe certain truths to be the basis of our faith: that Christ was the Son of God; that he became human and died a dreadful death to redeem us; that he resurrected on the third day after death; and that while he was alive he preached a message telling us how to live a decent life so that we could be assured of being saved.

Assuming all of this to be true, such events are beyond any phenomena that we know of, leaving even Big Bang and Quantum Mechanics as minor puzzles. By its very nature such an event cannot have a human history. But that supposed history is one of the reasons that we Christians are told to study, learn and obey the Old Testament. Yet, when Jesus came to redeem us, at such a terrible cost to himself, we already had the teachings of the Bible and by themselves they were patently not enough to save us.

The second reason justifying the study of the Old Testament is because of the royal descent of Jesus. Mary, His mother, is identified as a direct descendant of King David, the great Jewish King of Israel. However, Mary arrived some two thousand years after David (80 plus generations) and, as you know, your direct ancestors double each generation i.e. two parents, four grandparents and so on. This means that everybody in the Middle East, in Mary’s time, was a direct descendant of David many times over. The most extraordinary example of this misunderstanding of simple arithmetic came from the Bishop of Paris when, during the internment of Napoleon on Elba, he managed to include in his sermon to the aristocratic congregation in Notre Dame the immortal sentence that ‘Not only was Jesus Christ the Son of God but, equally, He came from an excellent family’.

The third, highly suspect, reason offered for such studies of the Old Testament is the use of the oxymoron of Judeo — Christian Civilisation, which manages to suggest that both histories are somewhat superior and joined at the hip. This has the advantage of allowing us to support the current irascible government in Israel whilst conveniently forgetting our extraordinarily horrendous treatment of Jews during the entire Christian Era.

As there does not seem to be a valid reason why we as Christians should be paying so much attention to the Old Testament, the suspicion must be that it is for the purpose of control. As a testament it is as exciting as a violent thriller. Blood and gore in abundance, a chosen people, famine, plague and fire heaped upon nations, concubines, lions, people turned into pillars of salt, and overseeing it all, a wrathful God shouting from the heavens. Much more colorful than the gentle stories and admonitions of the Saviour of the New Testament. There is even evidence that the suspicion of control is valid. When William Tyndall, in Henry VIII’s time, was rash enough to translate the New Testament into English he was hung and burnt for having the gall to make Christ’s message available to those who had no Latin. Reducing control of His message was, indubitably, a Capital crime!

When I was a young Catholic, and an altar boy to boot, we had religious instruction six days a week and then Mass on Sundays with further lessons. Added to this were Rosaries, Novenas, Benedictions, parades and Holy Days. It seemed as though the world was fueled by religion. Our Christian Doctrine classes were heavily weighted in favor of the Old Testament, particularly the Ten Commandments and even the study of these was hopelessly biased in favor of the Fifth, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ and the Sixth, ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery’.

The Fifth was not much trouble, although we were taught which minor variations of it, such as intentionally causing injury, were a sin. Most of our studies relating to it were Jesuitical excuses for just wars. This was despite the fact that most wars were driven by imperialism, brute nationalism, racism or just greed. They never did explain how, despite the clarity of the Commandment, legal executions were acceptable. In my (innocent) childhood neither abortion, prostitutes nor child abuse were believed to exist in Ireland, and so were not included in any discussion.

The Sixth however was the bane of our lives. Entire libraries could have been filled with the innumerable ways it could be broken: improper thoughts, lecherous behavior, unapproved company of the opposite sex, masturbation and on and on and on. Anything could be included under the heading of an ‘Occasion of Sin’.

In those teenage years of living with tyrannical hormones, confession was difficult. I used to confess my love for Doris Day. That seemed to meet the requirements of each confessor although that particular love was as pure as a mountain spring. Mostly though, it avoided the need to list the occasions of sin that dogged every minute of life; from the girl three doors down, to the salacious curves of some highly improper trees!

I once had the privilege of listening to a well known actor describing her experience of confession as an Irish schoolgirl. Her most chillingly funny story went something like this:
“Bless me father for I have sinned”.
“What do you want to confess, my child?”
“I was courting father”
Any damage done”.
“Yes father “.
“Above or below the waist”.
“Ooh, above only father”
He gave her penance and absolution but then instead of closing the privacy flap, he leaned forward to the grill and whispered to her, “tell your father I’ll be over for bridge later”.

The New Testament does not really worry about such childish issues, so it is easy to see why the Old Testament was needed for control. Jesus himself reduced all rules to just two Great Commandments, the essence of which can be expressed as: Love the Lord thy God and love thy neighbour. It remains difficult to believe that they were actual commandments, they seem much more like advice.

The first of these commandments is somewhat difficult but it can be interpreted as Jesus simply advising us that a God exists. He did not specify a Jewish, Christian or any other particular God; He just said thy God. That can be read in many different, positive ways. For a nonbeliever it is perfectly rational to accept it as advice to put your soul, your love and honesty into your passion, whether that passion is science or the humanities, from your love of your own garden to the global environment or the entire cosmos itself.

The second can be recognised as the perfect guide to the path of our civilisation. He did not say love thy white, black, female, male, Samaritan or Jewish, rich or poor neighbour. You cannot love your neighbour by treating them unfairly, killing them for a little more power or land or failing to recognise their individual gender or sexual orientation. Nor can you deny them the medical attention they need nor the quality of education they ought to have just because they have no money. Your neighbour is the entirety of humankind, good or bad. Love in this context is not to be taken as our current understanding of human romance, but instead as a lack of hatred and at least an attempt to understand your neighbour’s history and difficulties. Finally, your best effort to forgive. Seemingly simple, it is excruciatingly difficult to follow such advice, yet the right thing to do. It means that as a conservative Christian you may detest the act of abortion but must empathise with the person who performs it. Alternatively, if you are a liberal, you may loathe the deeds of a Trump or a Johnson and even those who, despite knowing exactly what both of them are, continue to enable them for their own nefarious purpose, but you must still empathise with all of them. Ah well! He never said it would be easy.

The Christian faith is similar to all other creeds in that it is divided into thousands of different sects, each one insisting that their particular view of it all is the one true faith. Too often the separations are driven by the Old Testament. But for Christians, it is completely illogical to rely on pre-Christian texts to support that faith, however interesting and wise those texts are. Instead Christians should concentrate on the gentle and loving message of the New Testament. Put energy and truth into your passion and love thy neighbour! Give it socks while you’re at it!