The Purpose of a Constitution

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Remember?

What do we mean when we “swear an oath of loyalty to a constitution?”. Today we are all asking. Because a President has asked the government to swear oaths to him. Obviously, that is wrong. But it doesn’t tell us very much. What is right? That is the bigger question, isn’t it?

As we often do, we have missed the forest for the trees.

A constitution is just paper. This is heresy to you, I know. You think yours is sacrosanct. It’s not. Nations update and alter and renew their constitutions all the time. In fact, one major reason Europe is now much more successful than the US is that in World War II’s aftermath, its constitutions were largely rewritten — in much more sophisticated and advanced ways than the aging American constitution, that allow for greater forms of democracy, like proportional representation. But I digress.

A constitution is a set of means. Not ends. It delineates rules, or rights, which are then enacted, or brought to life, by institutions. A constitution says: the people have the right to due process. And so there are courts. To safety. And so there is police. To a free press. So there is media. All these are just means. But what are the ends?

The moral ends of constitutions often aren’t in constitutions. That is, a constitution doesn’t often contain the purpose of a constitution. Constitutions in that sense are just plans, technical documents, not visions. To find the ends, the purpose of a constitution, we must look toward the spirit of a people, a nation, the foundational creed of a society.

The ends of the US Constitution are in the famous lines from the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. In fact, the Declaration goes so far as to say that they are “inherent and inalienable rights” that all people have, which are the foundation of the “public good”.

Just rest on that for a moment. Now.

That much is history, isn’t it? The Declaration was issued on Independence Day, July 4, 1776. The Constitution was written in 1787. So the Declaration laid the soil for the Constitution. And thus, when we “swear an oath” to the US Constitution, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights, the public good, the ends — not just the means — we are really devoting ourselves to.

Now we are seeing clearly. So we can ask, instead of merely condemning: “They are wrong to swear oaths to a person, not the constitution!”. Yes. So what? The real question is: have those who have sworn oaths to the constitution understood the purpose of their oath at all?

Let’s take those three ends one by one: life, liberty, and happiness.

Life. It’s the most fundamental human right of all. We all deserve to live. Don’t we? The founding fathers knew life is the line that separates democracy from tyranny, and that is why they put it first. Now how are our leaders doing on that score? They’re scoring zero. Generations of leaders have denied Americans real healthcare. Life is an end, an “inherent and inalienable right”, that isn’t recognized at all anymore as one.

Happiness. What we know about happiness is very simple. To achieve the economists’ narrow happiness takes $70k, or about twice median income, a year. And yet in this economy, incomes have stagnated for our adult lives. And that is just satisfaction, all that economists can measure. True happiness isn’t just satisfaction (here, let me kill your family and give you free Ferraris forever). Real happiness is inner stillness, peace, love. We can visibly see that it’s lacking in America now. Just look at opioid overdose numbers. Happy people don’t have to resort to that, do they? So again, the end, the “inherent and inalienable right” the constitution aims for has been lost, forgotten, abandoned.

Liberty. In a narrow way, you could say: life and happiness have been sacrificed for the extreme pursuit of “liberty”. But even that is incorrect. America has a childlike and immature notion of freedom. As its political scientists say, without really thinking about it, “negative freedom”, or “freedom from”. Yet nowhere in the Constitution or Declaration does it that is what liberty is. Why not?

Because it’s a foolish idea, one of the most foolish imaginable. I’ll prove it to you with a simple example. You’d agree that antiobiotics are one of the great discoveries in human history, wouldn’t you? They’ve probably saved your life, and definitely the life of a loved one, more than once. Now. How did they get discovered? Not in America. But in London. At St Mary’s Hospital. It’s unlikely that antibiotics could ever have been discovered in America. Why? America had “freedom from”. Things like public hospitals. Yet quite obviously a person with penicillin is freer than one without, aren’t they?

Therefore, “freedom from” and “freedom to” aren’t opposites at all. My “freedom to” live thanks to antibiotics is just my “freedom from” death. The whole idea of opposing freedoms in this way crumbles at the slightest thought. It’s taken me just one paragraph to disprove it thoroughly.

Now. Any reasonable person, even a child, would say that pencillin has vastly expanded human freedom. And thus, any reasonable person would say that freedom isn’t just “freedom from”, but a range of freedoms, including the freedom to, the freedom of, freedom with, the freedom in. Us, you, here, now. Of, with, to. Love, rebel, defy, imagine, create, forgive, know, suffer, fall, rise. Freedom — genuine freedom — is a much more subtle and beautiful idea than the simplistic, immature notion of “freedom from” taxes.

So on this score too, America has failed. To reach the end its own constitution aims at.

Amid the punditry and the hysteria, the sophistry and corruption, American has lost sight of the basic truths. Of its own history, of politics, of the purpose of it all.

Constitutions are just documents about means. What ends do the means aspire to? That is the question. When we swear an oath to a constitution, it is those ends that we are devoting our lives, thoughts, actions to. American leaders swear oaths. But they do not think about the ends of those words carefully, only the means. They do not see the weight of their own history. And they certainly do not see the world around them laughing sadly at them fumbling in the dark.

We say: “no one should swear an oath to a man!”. And we feel smug that we are right. But our rightness is itself wrong. It is not nearly enough. The question of politics is not about what is bad. But what is genuinely good. That is what politics is about: the good. Not just the bad.

And that is why constitutions were written, isn’t it?

Umair