Independence Day
On July 4, the US celebrates its most important patriotic holiday, Independence Day, the anniversary of the adoption of the United States Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.
The Declaration not only created a new country, but it started the trend of dissolution of European colonial empires. A steady series of countries started breaking away from their colonial masters around 1810: Serbia, Colombia, Venezuela, Norway, Argentina, and Chile declared independence by 1820, with many more to follow. Most of the European colonial empires reached their maximum territorial extent in the early 20th century.
It’s too bad that the Declaration contains references to God, in the introduction (“the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”), the preamble, and the conclusion (“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence...”). These allusions to a divine creator started us off on the path of insufficiently insulating our government from the direct influence of religion.
Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s primary author was a deist, a believer in a creator whose presence could be confirmed by reason. He did not subscribe to any organized religion, though he admired Jesus as a moral teacher. Such a belief was fairly radical at the time. In a letter to John Adams, he talked about the design he saw everywhere and concluded that, “it is impossible ... for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion...” In my opinion, this was a reasonable conclusion at the time, before Darwin and the big-bang theory showed that biological design and the structure of the universe at large could be explained in scientific terms.
The preamble’s statement that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” is the most important, and most-quoted, sentence in the Declaration. It’s too bad that it alludes to the Creator.
Other than separating the thirteen colonies from Britain, the Declaration of Independence has no legal effect. The preamble does not, for example, create a legal right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration is mostly an indictment of British rule, a list of British injustices toward the colonies that were sufficiently inequitable to justify the US’ secession from the British Empire. It does not define the character of this country, a task that was left to the US Constitution.
US Constitution
It would make more sense to celebrate the adoption of the US Constitution than the Declaration of Independence. The world’s first written, codified, constitution, it set the tone for the country, and established its federal government and overall legal framework. It was drafted at a constitutional convention in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, and went into effect following its ratification by state legislatures in 1789.
The first French constitution was adopted two years later. It was prefaced with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was drafted primarily by the Marquis to Lafayette, with the help of Thomas Jefferson, who had been appointed by the US government as a minister to France. Jefferson hoped that the US constitution would include a bill of rights like France’s, but he was in France during the US constitutional convention, and couldn’t strongly influence the outcome.
The biggest defect in the US Constitution is that it is so difficult to amend. In my book Earthling (pp. 172-175), I point out that the US Constitution has not kept up with the times. For political reasons, it has become impossible to amend. There are important issues of public policy, such as abortion and firearms, that the US Supreme Court is deciding in ways that the majority of voters disagree with. They decide based on their interpretation of the US Constitution using a variety of legal theories. But the interpretations are shaky when the constitution says nothing on the topic, e.g. for abortion. This is not the way the US should be deciding important public-policy questions. The country would be more democratic if we could amend the US Constitution to remove these barriers to laws supported by the majority.
France has had 14 constitutions since 1791, and has amended the latest one, which was adopted in 1958, 24 times. As a result, it is much more able than the US to keep its constitution in line with current conditions.
Political polarization in the US makes it impossible to amend the constitution. Polarization also prevents us from enacting statutes to change public policy in areas where the Constitution allows it, such as a statute guaranteeing a right to abortion. According to polls, such a statute would be approved by a majority of US voters.
Because of this polarization and the difficulty of amending the US Constitution, the country is in a political straitjacket, unable to take action to deal with current problems. And we’re in a critical time. The US is the country that has emitted the most greenhouse gases, so the US has primary responsibility for leading the world in solving the climate crisis, the greatest crisis that humanity has ever faced. And China is gradually overtaking the US as the world’s dominant country; it’s important that we manage that transition well.
Jefferson’s criticism that the US Constitution lacked a bill of rights was remedied by the addition of the Bill of Rights, 10 amendments, approved by Congress in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791. It’s unfortunate that the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights are negative rights—they prohibit the government from interfering with free speech, for example, but don’t guarantee the right of free speech. They do not prevent private parties such as employers from suppressing their employees’ free speech. This contrasts with France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which guarantees positive rights, such as the right of assembly, and the right of free speech.
And the First Amendment has insufficient protections from religion. Jefferson advocated for a “wall of separation between Church and State,” but the First Amendment prohibits only “the establishment of religion” (i.e. a state religion) and requires the government to allow “the free exercise” of religion. This text has not been sufficient to prevent prayer in the schools or the placement of the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms.
The French Constitution evolved over the centuries to include the concept of laicité, which is essentially Jefferson’s wall of separation between Church and State. It’s a much stronger prohibition of religious influence in government affairs than we have in this country. It can be hard to draw the lines, though, because individuals’ religious beliefs influence their positions on public issues, and some people manifest their religion through their appearance. Some Muslim schoolgirls in France, for example, want to wear head scarves to school, but some controversial French laws have prohibited this. In public settings, the French state wants to bar religious symbols in order for its people to be citizens of France first and foremost.
In Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction Foundation series, a scientist named Hari Seldon developed a method of accurately predicting the future course of history. He set up a foundation at the edge of the Empire to preserve knowledge through the dark age he predicted after the fall of the Empire. But a mutant known as the Mule, born hundreds of years after Seldon died, had the power to change others’ emotions, which he used strategically to disrupt Seldon’s plan. The Mule couldn’t have been predicted by Seldon, so the course of events diverged from Seldon’s plans and predictions.
James Madison and the other framers of the US Constitution were in Hari Seldon’s position: trying to develop a constitution that would set the new country on a good path to the distant future. They couldn’t have predicted many of today’s public-policy issues on which their constitution still has a huge influence. In retrospect, we can see they made some important mistakes.
We can’t blame them. Instead, we should fix the problems they created. But we seem to have lost the “can-do” attitude we had in this country after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. World War II provided the US with a second set of founding myths. The Declaration of Independence announced our birth; World War II brought us to maturity as a major player on the world stage. If we’re to continue in that role, we need to find a way to get beyond our partisan bickering, and fix our government so it acts in accordance with the will of the majority and the needs of the US.