Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Wednesday, August 4, 2021

 Nathan Wahl

Phil Oliver

MALA

08 03 2021

Enlightenment and the constitution of the United States: Changing meaning over time

Enlightenment

According to the Oxford English Dictionary:  The action or process of freeing human understanding from the accepted and customary beliefs sanctioned by traditional, esp. religious, authority, chiefly by rational and scientific inquiry into all aspects of human life, which became a characteristic goal of philosophical writing in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

I can tend to go off on tangents at a whim and the discipline to focus on a single line of thought can sometimes elude me, however, I will try to tie the following thoughts together as we travel back in time and return to today.  Among the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the first systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the first logic, and then there was Copernicus. Copernicus gave us the audacity to argue with the church by simply stating that we lived within a heliocentric universe. This of course is not true as we live in a universe filled with suns other than our own, but this was true of our world at the time as we had no way of seeing the universe as any larger than our planet. Copernicus opened the door to the age of reason. logic is the systematic study of the form of arguments whereas reason is the application of logic to understand and judge something. Reason without logic left humanity wandering.

John Locke stated the end of law is not to abolish or restraint, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created being capable of laws, where there is low law, there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be, where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for who could be free when every other man's humor might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his persons, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is; and they are not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own (Locke.) John Locke is a mentor in enlightenment many of our founding fathers and enlightened thinkers throughout the history of the United States.

George mason  represented Fairfax County in Virginia‘s third revolutionary convention (1775) and in the fifth convention (1776), where he drafted Virginia’s first state constitution and its Declaration of Rights, which is widely considered his greatest accomplishment. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/mason-george-1725-1792/  I would call George Mason a mentor to Thomas Jefferson and Madison as well or at least he was a collaborator in understanding the ideals of enlightenment during the fledgling years at the United States. Mason and Madison or partners in what would become the Bill of Rights for the United States. Thomas Jefferson fires the soul of a new nation with the ideals of enlightenment when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and penned the words quote we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Shannon LaNeir has complex feelings about being descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. “He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn't practice it. He owned people. And now I'm here because of it.” It is safer to have a whole people respectably enlightened, than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance (Jefferson). With these words, we can surmise that Thomas Jefferson was a man who not only studied the idea of an enlightened people he worked to create an ongoing system to give all children the chance at an education.  James Madison brought the disenchanted representatives together from the states suffering under the failure of the Articles of Confederation.  Madison was nicknamed the father of the constitution for his tireless work to bring the disparate factions together. He was a meticulous note-taker.

There are many things to see in the constitution in the light of enlightenment, but the 1st Amendment states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This tells us that there is a separation between church and state. While the public at large is Christian as a rule and Christian ethics are considered the moral standard at the time of the Civil War. A pastor from Pennsylvania asked the treasurer of the United States to add the motto IN GOD WE TRUST to be placed on United States coins largely because of the increased religious sentiment existing during the Civil War. This was done without consideration for those that had a different understanding of the existence of God as anything other than a creation of man. Today you can look at any denomination of US currency and see this motto present.

Does using “In God We Trust” as our motto interfere with the first amendment?

            The 15th Amendment states:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. This is a continuous fight that is happening today as well with the many attacks on voting today.  Stacey Abrams stated: “Voting is a constitutional right in the United States, a right that has been reiterated three separate times via constitutional amendment.” The Constitution allows for correction and augmentation to our laws because our national population is continuously changing and the moral standards are changing as well.

Why should we change our ruling document?

 

Works Cited

"enlightenment, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/62448. Accessed 31 July 2021.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Joseph Carrington Cabell, 13 January 1823: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-3266

Jocke, John. Second Treatise on Government, sec. 57; discussed in Palmer, Realizing Freedom.

Shields, Christopher, "Aristotle", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/aristotle/>.

3 comments:

  1. “Reason without logic left humanity wandering”—but our problem today is worse, we live at a time when the forces of UN-reason have huge influence on public affairs, elections, and discourse generally. We’ve wandered too far from the light.

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    1. “…on July 30, 1956, the President approved a Joint Resolution of the 84th Congress, declaring IN GOD WE TRUST the national motto of the United States. IN GOD WE TRUST was first used on paper money in 1957…” —treasury.gov

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    2. “Why should we change our ruling document?”

      Any truly-living entity MUST be responsive to changing circumstances in its environment, to address the unforeseen exigencies of a dynamically altered world. The authors of our constitution knew that, far better than many of its most ardent defenders today.

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