No Constitution Could Save Us

“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

  “A Republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin

The Constitution was never going to save us; not from the inevitability or eventuality of these days before us, but from facing our own responsibility to cherish, defend, and fight for the principles within our Constitution.

The Constitution lacks a certain magic – it lacks the religiosity of the Torah, the New Testament, or the Koran. A document, with ideas as profound as any you might find in any holy text, it was never served by a priestly caste, charged with its preservation and with preserving its’ orthodoxy. Liberty, a secular moral philosophy of the age of enlightenment, of individualism, of reason, and science, was left to be defended, not by any institution, but by the strength of the individuals who subscribed to the ideas that we are born free, that we have rights, and that those rights were bestowed upon us by God (or by nature).

While many have tried to pervert our prevailing religious doctrines, they have not had quite as much success as they’ve had in perverting the principles of liberty in the Western World.

Many of these Constitutional and American principles were derived from the Judeo-Christian ethic as interpreted by the Protestant heretics in their rebellion against the Catholic Church; but later, in some corners of Peter’s Church, it too took hold, and blossomed. Yet, as the pulpits politicized and democratized themselves, the Western religions slowly backed away from the ferocious individualism of the enlightenment. Times changed and the needs of their flock were no longer spiritual and intellectual, but economic and social – and if you do not believe that this change is capable of rotting your religious homes as it has rotted out the core of our Republic, you are woefully mistaken.

As a student of history and of philosophy, I feel a certain intimacy with the rise and fall of what is known as The Enlightenment. The liberty and prosperity, purpose and happiness that poured out of this age of human reason seemed unstoppable. Alas, it always depended upon reason and upon our faith in reason as Mans’ greatest tool for survival. In some part, too, it depended upon our faith in God and the Judeo-Christian idea that God seeks personal relationships with each of us as individuals and that there is no higher moral authority than the relationship between a man and his God.

All this, as you know, is crumbling. A deep rot in our hearts and minds, a recoiling from our moral responsibilities as individuals, a recoiling from that divine source of authority, and a humiliating decline toward the dark age of mobs and mystics, superstition and fantasy, power and the lust for power over our neighbors and countrymen.

Once again we are fearing Nature, fearing ourselves, and fearing what we do not know. We’re fearing climate, terror, debt, and social, political, and economic instability. Cultures are warring with one another. Everyone huddling together to form the loudest mob.

No Constitution could save us from such a decline. We’ve abandoned reason. We’ve abandoned the mind. Again, the herd instinct prevails, searching out tyrants to shepherd the helpless and feckless sheep. Only a great people can be free. Are we still a great people? Can we become a great people again? Or are the Republican and Democrat Parties deliberately bringing in the herds of other nations to serve as a bulwark against the American Individualist? What do you think? I think it’s obvious.