I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation.
When we consider the founders of our nation – Jefferson, Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others – we have before us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political leaders. They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. They were fluent in the English language. They wrote their own speeches. They were realistic and practical, and at the same time motivated by high principles. They were not checking the pollsters on what to think this week. They knew what to think. They were comfortable with long-term thinking, planning even further ahead than the next election. They were self-sufficient, not requiring careers as politicians or lobbyists to make a living. They were able to bring out the best in us. They were interested in and, at least two of them, fluent in science. They attempted to set a course for the United States into the far future – not so much by establishing laws as by setting limits on what kinds of laws could be passed.
The Constitution and its Bill of Rights have done remarkably well, constituting, despite human weaknesses, a machine able, more often than not, to correct its own trajectory.
At that time, there were only about two and a half million citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred times more. So if there were ten people of the calibre of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jeffersons today.
Where are they?
One reason the Constitution is a daring and courageous document is that it allows for continuing change, even of the form of government itself, if the people so wish. Because no one is wise enough to foresee which ideas may answer urgent societal needs -even if they’re counterintuitive and have been troubling in the past – this document tries to guarantee the fullest and freest expression of views.
There is, of course, a price. Most of us are for freedom of expression when there’s a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We’re not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there. But within certain narrowly circumscribed limits – Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous example was causing panic by falsely crying ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre – great liberties are permitted in America:
• Gun collectors are free to use portraits of the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, or the Director of the FBI for target practice; outraged civic-minded citizens are free to burn in effigy the President of the United States.
• Even if they mock Judaeo-Christian-Islamic values, even if they ridicule everything most of us hold dear, devil-worshippers (if there are any) are entitled to practise their religion, so long as they break no constitutionally valid law.
• A purported scientific article or popular book asserting the ‘superiority’ of one race over another may not be censored by the government, no matter how pernicious it is; the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
• Individuals may, if they wish, praise the lives and politics of such undisputed mass murderers as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. Even detestable opinions have a right to be heard.
• Individuals or groups are free to argue that a Jewish or Masonic conspiracy is taking over the world, or that the Federal government is in league with the Devil.
The system founded by Jefferson, Madison and their colleagues offers means of expression to those who do not understand its origins and wish to replace it by something very different. For example, Tom Clark, Attorney General and therefore chief law enforcement officer of the United States, in 1948 offered this suggestion: ‘Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.’ But if there is one key and characteristic US ideology, it is that there are no mandatory and no forbidden ideologies. Some more recent 1990s cases: John Brockhoeft, in jail for bombing an abortion clinic in Cincinnati, wrote, in a ‘pro-life’ newsletter:
I’m a very narrow-minded, intolerant, reactionary, Bible-thumping fundamentalist … a zealot and fanatic . . . The reason the United States was once a great nation, besides being blessed by God, is because she was founded on truth, justice, and narrow-mindedness.
Randall Terry, founder of ‘Operation Rescue’, an organization that blockades abortion clinics, told a congregation in August 1993:
Let a wave of intolerance wash over you . . . Yes, hate is good . . . Our goal is a Christian nation . . . We are called by God to conquer this country . . . We don’t want pluralism.
The expression of such views is protected, and properly so, under the Bill of Rights, even if those protected would abolish the Bill of Rights if they got the chance. The protection for the rest of us is to use that same Bill of Rights to get across to every citizen the indispensability of the Bill of Rights.
What means to protect themselves against human fallibility, what error-protection machinery do these alternative doctrines and institutions offer? An infallible leader? Race? Nationalism? Wholesale disengagement from civilization, except for explosives and automatic weapons? How can they be sure – especially in the darkness of the twentieth century? Don’t they need candles?
In his celebrated little book, On Liberty, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is ‘a peculiar evil’. If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the ‘opportunity of exchanging error for truth’; and if it’s wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in ‘its collision with error’. If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.
Mill also wrote, ‘If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame.’ Jefferson made the same point even more strongly: ‘If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’ In a letter to Madison, he continued the thought: ‘A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.’
When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen. For example, Hugo Black, in his youth, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan; he later became a Supreme Court justice and was one of the leaders in the historic Supreme Court decisions, partly based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, that affirmed the civil rights of all Americans: it was said that when he was a young man, he dressed up in white robes and scared black folks; when he got older, he dressed up in black robes and scared white folks.
In matters of criminal justice, the Bill of Rights recognizes the temptation that may be felt by pblice, prosecutors and the judiciary to intimidate witnesses and expedite punishment. The criminal-justice system is fallible: innocent people might be punished for crimes they did not commit; governments are perfectly capable of framing those who, for reasons unconnected with the purported crime, they do not like. So the Bill of Rights protects defendants. A kind of cost-benefit analysis is made. The guilty may on occasion be set free so that the innocent will not be punished. This is not only a moral virtue; it also inhibits the misuse of the criminal-justice system to suppress unpopular opinions or despised minorities. It is part of the error-correction machinery.
New ideas, invention and creativity in general, always spearhead a kind of freedom, a breaking out from hobbling constraints. Freedom is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of science which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain a totalitarian state and be technologically competitive. At the same time, science – or rather its delicate mix of openness and scepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate – is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society.
Once you questioned the religious insistence on the prevailing view that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, why should you accept the repeated and confident assertions by religious leaders that God sent kings to rule over us? In the seventeenth century, it was easy to whip English and Colonial juries into a frenzy over this impiety or that heresy. They were willing to torture people to death for their beliefs. By the late eighteenth century, they weren’t so sure.