The Long Clasp (Post 13)

Part III — THE RESPONSE

First Principles and Identity

            One of our (humanity’s) gravest faults is our tendency to focus on the two poles and to ignore or discredit the states between.  All too often, to arrive at a true judgment or assessment of a situation or a person requires understanding the effect of the “heat” and the “cold”.

            The genius of the Nation’s Framers acknowledged the evidence of the ages and of their own experiences.  The human person falls short of any ideal.  Imprisoned in flesh it acquires every experience, every perception, every bit of knowledge through its senses, through what it feels.  The human brain ceaselessly strains to literally comprehend, to hold together, all its disparate stimuli in effort to make sense of it all.  Our senses, our physical bodies, our brains are alike, but not identical.  Our experiences differ in infinite permutation of possibility.  Our capacities to make sense of it all differ to a like degree.
            Who of us is right?  What is right?  Well, that alluvial stream of thought scours a multi-channeled delta into the epistemological sea.  But in the societal context—the context of individual humans living together in one-another’s society—the channel to navigate considers the following:  Who among us is, or ought to be, more entitled than the other to determine what your brain comprehends of your body’s lived experiences.
            The English settlers of North America had only their native wit and experience, and the limited provisions they could carry with them across the ocean, with which to  organize a society in a foreign, forbidding land.  They faced challenges unknown in their homeland.  Existential survival could not be presumed.  Aid, comfort, security were a distant remembrance.  Their daily tasks were to survive another day, another night.
            The umbilical cord to Mother England was not entirely cut, of course; but that supply line was unreliably intermittent, especially during the beginning years of settlement.   They had to find their own way.  As they daily continued to survive and strengthen, the resupply shipments and the increasing arrival of new colonists catalyzed the results of their successes.
            But their paternal parent, the King and his council and the merchant class and the Parliament, did not notice or acknowledge the growing divergences of attitude developing between those who stayed behind in England and those who had ventured out on their own.  Over the course of 150 years of acting independently, the English settlers in the New World grew naturally impatient and resentful of what they came to regard as peremptory meddling and interference by that parent.  After five or six generations living apart from their parental homeland, they had developed their own ideas about how to manage themselves.  Like maturing teenagers they chafed under the pompous arrogance of overseas decision-makers who regarded it their place to direct how they were to live.  It ought to be easy for us to conceive how they might even have seen themselves as a native population bearing the yoke of an imperial colonial power.
            In fact, Jefferson, with John Dickinson, wrote in 1775 to that power a declaration demanding to know where, supposing that the Almighty had so designed matters as to authorize to one people complete control and property-overlordship of another, it was written that that authority rested in the British Parliament.  These are mad thoughts, that stir up feelings for independence and freedom from bondage.  More than that, they lead to a notion that all humans by right are entitled to mark their own destiny, that all humans are born to choose for themselves how to live in their own circumstances.
            And so it transpired that, by Jefferson’s document of July 4, 1776, the United Colonies of North America declared to monarch and parliament and the world at large their decision to separate themselves from English governance, to establish themselves as free and independent States able to govern themselves according to their own circumstances.  This pronouncement led, not surprisingly, to war.

            After the war had ended, the reality became undeniable that what they had established under their Articles of Confederation did not meet their needs for effective general governance, a coordinating government at the national level.  Thus convened another body of political leaders to devise a new Constitution.  This document designed into its fabric a number of principles.  Some of those principles had previously been articulated; some were newly named; some became evident from the actual design itself.
            Chief among the previously articulated principles was the astonishing  idea that all humans are born as political equals, neither master nor servant, who retain collectively amongst themselves as individuals the sole authority to invest just powers of governance upon certain ones of them to keep secure the unalienable rights of them all.  Newly named was that the underlying purposes of this particular constitutional government were to form a more perfect Union, to establish Justice, to ensure domestic Tranquillity, to provide for the common Defense, to promote the common Welfare, and to secure the Blessings of Liberty for the present and all future generations of the People of the United States of America.  Wrought into the design itself was the evidence of the ages, that all humans are fallible and corruptible.
            Each foundational principle necessarily expresses certain axiomatic corollaries:
1)  If it be accepted that all persons are born as political equals, neither master nor servant, it follows that as for any one person so it must be for every single one.
     If it be so for every person, it follows that political authority resides with the People collectively.  Should political equality and authority be denied to any, it follows that political status is unequal, some having greater and some lesser.  If some can have greater political status, then might a few or perhaps only one claim the entirety of political power and authority to the exclusion of all others.
2)  If the underlying purpose of this government be to ensure union, justice, tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty for all, then it follows that neither the majority nor any portion of the people can settle on policies “adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
3)  If it be true that all people are fallible and corruptible, then it follows that wherever discretionary power is to be ceded, countervailing checks on the abuse or misuse of that power need to be created.
4)  If it be true that political power and authority in this country reside in the People, it follows that the whole People constitute the one Nation of the United  States, apart from the particular individuals who staff the government at any one time.  It further follows that our allegiance and loyalty ought to lie with the Nation, with ourselves, each other, not with any one politician or office-holder of the institutions of the government; and with the principles that support the supremacy of the People of USAmerica to pursue their paths of life, liberty, and happiness.