Living Tomorrow in Yesterday's Past

Trey Smith

But what’s really wrong, at the foundation of this pyramid of bad practices, is the whole notion of constitutionalism itself. Somehow we’ve gotten it into our heads that we as a twenty-first century contemporary society are only permitted to do what the Constitution of the late eighteenth century permits us to do. I, for one, don’t see the wisdom in that at all, and I say that for a number of good reasons.

To begin with, it is a fool’s errand to believe that we can ascertain the intentions of the Founders on a huge raft of contemporary issues which – like radar itself, would have been completely off their screens in the pre-industrial, let alone pre-post-industrial, agrarian society in which they lived. Even the Founders themselves – the very people who wrote the document in question – began debating about what the Constitution permits immediately after ratification, notably the 1790 row between Hamilton and Madison over whether a federal bank was permitted.

That particular debate – between two key authors of the Constitution a mere one year after it was ratified – suggests a second problem with the notion of constitutionalism as the foundational mechanism for policy-making. Namely, that the document is written in vague enough language in many places so as to permit multiple interpretations on given questions, each sometimes equally valid.
~ from The Constitution Is Just Parchment, Get Over It by David Michael Green ~

I often have thought that discussions about various interpretations of the US Constitution are not so much unlike the same exercises we see with the Christian Bible. Every church and/or denomination has their own way of reading that religious tome and various adherents spend a great deal of their time and energy telling everyone else that the way they interpret various themes and doctrines is the way the authors (many of whom are unknown) meant for the same to be understood.

As Green aptly points out, trying to ascertain what someone genuinely meant when they wrote something hundreds or thousands of years ago is a fool's errand. Heck, there are times when I write a post on this blog and, in reading one or more comments, I quickly surmise that one or more respondents has missed -- partially or entirely -- the chief point I'm trying to make! If readers of this blog miss the gist of words written only moments previously, how great are the chances that words written long ago will be misconstrued or misinterpreted?

This may seem like an odd subject to tackle for a blog that spends so much of its time highlighting ancient Chinese texts! We don't share them because they offer ironclad truths; it's more that we utilize them as springboards for our own current thinking and philosophizing.

As much as I like to read the Tao Te Ching or Zhuangzi, each one was written by one or more authors who died thousands of years ago. What each specifically meant died with them. While I certainly do share what I think they might have meant, my main thrust is what I think, in terms of their thoughts and writings, today.

As Scott often shares, what the three of us do here is to write to ourselves and we open a window to allow you, the reader, to view this process. Our best hope is that this process of self-education and self-realization might spur you to do the same on your own terms.