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Monday, September 21, 2020

The US Constitution

We started watching the second season of Stranger, a Korean crime series on Netflix, and it's taken a left turn off into Constitutional law. Along with some petty crime (that might turn out to be murder), corruption, cover ups and a whole bunch of political infighting, we also have the police fighting the prosecutor's office over who has the authority to issue warrants. Seems if was changed in the 1980 constitution that was written after the military coup, or at least in this story it was.

This got me thinking about how our own constitution came to be. I know the 'founding fathers' got together and hashed it out, but where did they get the ideas? I'm thinking a 'classical' education may have something to do with that. I wonder what kind of constitution people would come up with today. Could we do any better? I kind of like the one we've got, it seems to have served us pretty well so far.

Which makes me wonder just what a 'classical education' is. I imagine it means reading some old books, but do you really get any more out of reading the originals in their archaic language than you would get out of reading a modern summary? Of course there is always the question of whether the summary is true to the original, but then how do you know the original is the one you should read? Someone else might suggest a different book by a different author, one that has a completely different view of people and the world. If you are diligent and a critical thinker, you will probably be able to sort it out. But what if you trust your instructors and they feed you a bunch of hogwash, will you be able to sort it out?



1 comment:

xoxoxoBruce said...

Since the men creating the constitution had been living mostly under the English whose system was largely shaped by the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. They also had royalty mixed in which was a source of aggravation to the colonies. Starting with the English system and tempered with John Locke's writings on the consent of the governed. Jefferson was impressed with George Mason of Virginia's Declaration of Rights. The basic outline written, a lot of changes were made at the request(demand) of various factions. The setters in Rhode Island were Baptists, Jews, Quakers and other denominations. They demanded a separation of church and state to avoid the shit that made them leave Europe or they weren’t on board. Other areas had concerns which resulted in the Bill of Rights in order to get everyone to grow huge testicles to go to war against the most powerful nation in the history of the world.