Learning the Constitution: The Value of and Danger in Abstractions

A gaggle of great men writing a document that would bind a country together--not to mention maintain slavery, set women aside as lesser beings, and mire the legislative process in procedural Hell.

My previous post began with an oddly naive question from a friend about the power of a constitution. “Why,” he asked, “didn't the Egyptians have the sense to write a stronger constitution that would prevent extraordinary seizures of power by the president?” The question is, of course, nonsensical, as I explained in my post. A constitution is no divine decree issued from on high, but simply a body of imperfect laws to which governmental actors nominally bind themselves in pursuit of legitimacy.

But what piqued my interest today was the fact that my friend had such an un-nuanced view of the matter at all. Many more Americans, too, carry with them such uncritical, black-and-white abstractions of the way government functions--to say nothing of the rest of the world. Where does such thinking come from?

Serendipitously, my current reading offers some insight on the subject. Which some might consider odd as that reading is Clausewitz’s On War. Already showing itself to be a true, if somewhat dated classic, On War delves far deeper into the human condition than its name might suggest. The author takes considerable interest in the pedagogy of the subject and ultimately determines that true learning comes not from a simple presentations of rules and precepts from which never to deviate, but in empowering the student to build his own understanding by providing a foundation of knowledge.

Clausewitz was hardly alone in this idea and, were I more versed in Enlightenment-era philosophy, I could probably cite a few dozen other thinkers reaching much the same conclusion. The concept of teaching critical thinking has been present and applied at least since I entered school. Even provided a sufficiently competent teacher, the problem lies in the student’s mental engagement in the subject.

Let’s jump back to my friend for a moment. Raised in the same school system as I, he received essentially the same educational opportunities and foundations of knowledge. In Freshman year of high school, he learned, like me, the fundamentals of the United States government: three branches; checks and balances; constitution, yada yada yada.

That’s all well and good. What we learned were abstractions of significantly more complex topics, but such is necessary for inattentive 14-year olds. A child learns cars guzzle gas to go fast; a teenager learns that gas is burned in the engine to create small explosions to power pistons that turn the wheels; the aspiring automotive engineer learns far more.

Abstractions exist to be more fully fleshed-out as the intellect develops. Or would be, if the particularly inattentive or incapable had not forgotten what little they remembered after a barely-passing grade. This is not meant to slight anyone’s intelligence: I myself have shown all too meager talent for mathematics or the arts. Different people are better suited to different pursuits.

The problem occurs when the ill-informed fail to recognize their admissible ignorance toward a particular subject or, worse, hold adamantly to a half-baked idea as indisputable fact. Far simpler to teach a person something of which they know nothing than to correct a long-entrenched misconception. While this may be frustrating for a tutor in mathematics, it is outright dangerous when it comes to politics.

Take the idea of a “constitution”. A constitution (or equivalent) is an essential component to any liberal democracy for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here. Young American students, especially, hear much emphasis on the power of their country’s constitution. But how many fail to learn where that power comes from and what limits it has? They learn of it not as a malleable document but as a timeless symbol, and so succumb to all kinds of magical thinking dangerous to the very democracy their constitution pins together.