Recently, I experienced no small measure of disappointment when an article that I submitted to a little known \u201cconservative\u201d website was rejected.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t the rejection, however, from which my dissatisfaction stemmed but, rather, the reason for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You see, I challenged the conventional bi-partisan orthodoxy that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are compatible by arguing that each represents a political philosophical temperament that is actually antithetical to the other.\u00a0 This thesis the editor found \u201cdeeply disturbing.\u201d The Declaration provides \u201cthe principled framework\u201d for the laws delineated in our Constitution, he insisted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is Republican Party boilerplate, pure and simple.\u00a0 It is also a specimen of the crassest fideism.<\/p>\n
\u201cFideism\u201d is a term characteristically used in connection with religious belief.\u00a0 Like any other school of thought, it admits of many variations, some of which, in my judgment, are quite defensible.\u00a0 At bottom, though, fideism is the position that God can be known only through faith.\u00a0 In its more extreme varieties, this faith must be \u201cblind\u201d\u2014that is, entirely dislodged from all rationality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The notion that the Declaration and the Constitution belong to the same politics is an article, not just of faith, but of blind <\/em>faith.\u00a0 Only from an ignorance, whether willful or otherwise, of intellectual history generally and the history of political philosophy in particular could anyone believe it.<\/p>\n The Declaration itself, on the other hand, is an exhibition, not of fideism, but of that disposition with which it has historically been at odds: rationalism.\u00a0 The<\/em> quintessential Enlightenment rationalist document, the Declaration embodies the unabashed moral universalism against which conservatism originally emerged as a distinctive tradition of ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n The rationalist\u2019s account of morality is inseparable from his account of reason.\u00a0 Morality consists of principles <\/em>that are either innate or, as the Declaration characterizes them, \u201cself-evident.\u201d\u00a0 That is, these principles are a priori<\/em>\u2014prior to all experience.\u00a0 What this means is that, in transcending all tradition, culture, and, in short, history, the principles of morality are as independent of the contingencies of place and time as the rationality which alone has access to them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n These understandings of reason and morality conspire together to produce a certain style of politics that the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott once called \u201cthe politics of faith.\u201d\u00a0 The politics of faith is the politics of the visionary, and there is no document in the annals of human history that visionaries of all sorts have been more eager to exploit than the Declaration.\u00a0 With its robust affirmation of \u201cunalienable rights\u201d\u2014rights of which all <\/em>human beings are in possession\u2014the Declaration inspires the pursuit of perfection, not just for this society or that, but for everyone everywhere.\u00a0 Such rights can never be seen as being anything like perfectly secured, and most of the world\u2019s human inhabitants live under conditions that Americans can only view as an affront to human dignity as the Declaration construes it.\u00a0 So, the American government\u2014which is allegedly the first and only government to have been erected upon these rights\u2014has the unique obligation to insure that they are perfected for both its own citizens and the citizens of every other country throughout the world. This, obviously, is an obligation toward the fulfillment of which the United States government will be working forever.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n The Constitution, in glaring contrast, is a constitution, not for the bearers of rights the world over, but a particular people living in a particular place and at a particular time.\u00a0 It specifies no grandiose aims to be pursued, no purpose beyond itself.\u00a0 Far from licensing a robust, interventionist or activist government, the Constitution is concerned first and foremost with constraining that government by dividing it against itself.\u00a0 It knows of no \u201cunalienable rights\u201d or \u201cself-evident truths.\u201d It acknowledges rights, but only indirectly, for such rights are the flip side of the obligations that it specified: the right to free speech, for example, is nothing but government\u2019s obligation to refrain from interfering with citizens\u2019 exercise of free, and to prevent others from doing the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n To use Oakeshott\u2019s terminology, if the Declaration exemplifies the politics of faith, the Constitution signifies \u201cthe politics of skepticism.\u201d\u00a0 That the latter expresses a skepticism regarding large concentrations of power is obvious given that it is designed to prevent this.\u00a0 I would prefer to say that the politics the Constitution renders possible is a politics of humility.<\/em><\/p>\n But regardless of how we choose to describe the differences between the Declaration and the Constitution, there can be no denying that they indeed belong to fundamentally distinct styles of politics.<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently, I experienced no small measure of disappointment when an article that I submitted to a little known \u201cconservative\u201d website was rejected.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t the rejection, however, from which my dissatisfaction stemmed but, rather, the reason for it.\u00a0 You see, I challenged the conventional bi-partisan orthodoxy that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n