Purpose and Context, Law for Sustainability
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Left, Thomas Moran (American Painter, 1837-1926, considered part of the Hudson School, which depicted America’s natural beauty. Right, all too frequent event today. Images free to share from Pixabay and Pixnio.
Biden’s farewell address warned Americans of a coming oligarchy.
A pro-fossil fuel, anti-regulatory administration takes office January 20.
How can environmental citizens be effective in resisting the dismantling? If people are reminded of the basic principles of democracy and the value of the structures of government that have been developed for us, will they return to caring about real democracy? James Madison said men are not angels and worked to come up with something that would balance interests. Could we get enough people to care again about what he was trying to do?
H.W. Brands in the recent Founding Partisans describes Madison’s choice of principles, with “the great object…to combat the evil” (of parties). (Paraphrasing), we could:
1. Establish “a political equality among all”
2. Withhold “unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.”
3. Reduce “extreme wealth” (without violating the rights of property, by the “silent operation of laws”) and Raise “extreme indigence towards a state of comfort”.
4. Abstain “from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expense of another.
5. Make “one party a check on the other, so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented nor their views accommodated”. (Quotations are from Brands, not the original).
Honoring the “original intent” of the founders supports liberal as well as conservative ideas. Madison would be characterized as crazy left wing by today’s Calumniator in Chief.
Among the many misleading simplifications of history, discussed by David Hackett Fischer in Historian’s Fallacies, (1970), is the “Whiggish” idea of history: that there is a tendency towards social progress. Other ideas of upward progress have involved God or the idea that man ascended, rather than descended, from the apes. But in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, a 1919 book by two grandsons of John Quincy Adams, that idea of inevitable progress was disputed. Henry Adams dwells instead on the new physical understanding of the world, the law of entropy: that life on earth would run down if the sun ceased pouring energy into us.
Democratic systems will decay if we don’t put energy into them. It is not “A Machine That Would Go Of Itself”.[i] We are its sun and support for the moral principles of mutual self-governance is its energy. Some of them are built into our system and can be revived by popular will. Some need new sophistication – such as how we balance the right to make money with the requirement to not destroy life on earth. If we retreat, or too many get in line to bow to power,[ii] the input of moral energy to the system will be weakened and we as a society will not be organized to defend ourselves against the blindness of profit-motivation.
America has a great story about the value of the person, that government is for people, which includes letting them make money. But it cannot, unless the Constitution is indeed a “suicide pact”,[iii] include doing that without necessary limits. The strength of this idea is why so many who refuse to recognize it have poured money and energy into resisting this natural evolution.
Our story is an alternative to dysfunctional history if we recover and restore our ideals. If we do, then our problems become failures to achieve our ideals.
For some, the story of America First! (as if there needs to be a hierarchy) requires drilling more oil and resisting responsibility to others (anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-regulation, anti-immigrant, anti-woke, anti-DEI, etc.). But these are truly acts of ecocide and social suicide, possible only through willful blindness. An anti-environmental agenda today is demonstrably a plan for burning more major cities, killing off more natural life, poisoning us even more.
The mission of defending, reviving, upholding, restoring, and continuing to construct a sensibly cooperative society is potentially unifying. A social organization involved in transforming itself to better operate is not unrealistic. How we make food and shelter ourselves, how we move around and keep warm or cool, how we produce and share ideas, concerns us all and we could all have input into it. Environmentalists and many others working in the public interest sector have seen such cooperation frequently. Future generations will look back at us and say, with so many examples of how to live and get along, why did so many ignore the available means to have clean skies, safe streets, healthy homes, vibrant ecologies, satisfying lives?
Many of dark mode are uttering catastrophic prophecies, and the news keeps reinforcing the impression that human civilization is unraveling. But though the democratic system has degraded, pouring citizen energy into it can revive it.
An environmental citizen must live with both extremes of hope. Daily observing our failures to care for ourselves or other life forms breeds pessimism. But daily attempting to find solutions, to prevent or redress harms, to transform how we live so we escape self-destruction, requires and spreads optimism. It is not the optimism of predicting success. It is the optimism of effort, the optimism of doers. Call it perseverance, but in order to persevere one must have a vision that pulls one forward, and that is produced by knowing what you hope for. Swimming in the ocean of hopeful thoughts can lead to disappointment that most of them will never be realized in our lifetimes. But swimming in that ocean is how you find the ones we can use to good effect right now.
We must not stop uttering and heeding the darkest predictions. These provide the motivation to act. But it is also necessary now, more than ever, to articulate again the ideals we need: these basic concepts of equal right that must be upheld and understood; those ideas and methods for peaceful co-existence that provide the only possibility for stability and prosperity.
The story of primitive competition, winner-taking-all, making those who disagree with you your enemy, dishonors the capacity we have been given to meet the moment and work out how people can live together in the modern world. Ruthless competition doesn't get us there. The universal principles of democracy are our chance for a bearable future. We badly need now for people to appreciate beyond measure our heritage of the idea of government by, for and of the people. Not just liberty but survival depends on what story we listen to and tell.
[i] Michael Kammen’s 2006 A Machine That Would Go Of Itself examines the history of public concepts about the Constitution (including confusion, ignorance, and disagreement). But Madison’s principles are examples of policy structures that would likely tend to produce generally better results in social organization, if respected and followed.
[ii] For example, “Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice”, Zeynep Tufekci, Op-Ed, NY Times, 1/16/25.
[iii] Famously stated not to be the case by Justice Robert Jackson in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), Justice Arthur Goldberg in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144 (1963), and reportedly by Abraham Lincoln in response to criticism of his suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.
Among the many misleading simplifications of history, discussed by David Hackett Fischer in Historian’s Fallacies, (1970), is the “Whiggish” idea of history: that there is a tendency towards social progress. Other ideas of upward progress have involved God or the idea that man ascended, rather than descended, from the apes. But in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, a 1919 book by two grandsons of John Quincy Adams, that idea of inevitable progress was disputed. Henry Adams dwells instead on the new physical understanding of the world, the law of entropy: that life on earth would run down if the sun ceased pouring energy into us.
Democratic systems will decay if we don’t put energy into them. It is not “A Machine That Would Go Of Itself”.[i] We are its sun and support for the moral principles of mutual self-governance is its energy. Some of them are built into our system and can be revived by popular will. Some need new sophistication – such as how we balance the right to make money with the requirement to not destroy life on earth. If we retreat, or too many get in line to bow to power,[ii] the input of moral energy to the system will be weakened and we as a society will not be organized to defend ourselves against the blindness of profit-motivation.
America has a great story about the value of the person, that government is for people, which includes letting them make money. But it cannot, unless the Constitution is indeed a “suicide pact”,[iii] include doing that without necessary limits. The strength of this idea is why so many who refuse to recognize it have poured money and energy into resisting this natural evolution.
Our story is an alternative to dysfunctional history if we recover and restore our ideals. If we do, then our problems become failures to achieve our ideals.
For some, the story of America First! (as if there needs to be a hierarchy) requires drilling more oil and resisting responsibility to others (anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-regulation, anti-immigrant, anti-woke, anti-DEI, etc.). But these are truly acts of ecocide and social suicide, possible only through willful blindness. An anti-environmental agenda today is demonstrably a plan for burning more major cities, killing off more natural life, poisoning us even more.
The mission of defending, reviving, upholding, restoring, and continuing to construct a sensibly cooperative society is potentially unifying. A social organization involved in transforming itself to better operate is not unrealistic. How we make food and shelter ourselves, how we move around and keep warm or cool, how we produce and share ideas, concerns us all and we could all have input into it. Environmentalists and many others working in the public interest sector have seen such cooperation frequently. Future generations will look back at us and say, with so many examples of how to live and get along, why did so many ignore the available means to have clean skies, safe streets, healthy homes, vibrant ecologies, satisfying lives?
Many of dark mode are uttering catastrophic prophecies, and the news keeps reinforcing the impression that human civilization is unraveling. But though the democratic system has degraded, pouring citizen energy into it can revive it.
An environmental citizen must live with both extremes of hope. Daily observing our failures to care for ourselves or other life forms breeds pessimism. But daily attempting to find solutions, to prevent or redress harms, to transform how we live so we escape self-destruction, requires and spreads optimism. It is not the optimism of predicting success. It is the optimism of effort, the optimism of doers. Call it perseverance, but in order to persevere one must have a vision that pulls one forward, and that is produced by knowing what you hope for. Swimming in the ocean of hopeful thoughts can lead to disappointment that most of them will never be realized in our lifetimes. But swimming in that ocean is how you find the ones we can use to good effect right now.
We must not stop uttering and heeding the darkest predictions. These provide the motivation to act. But it is also necessary now, more than ever, to articulate again the ideals we need: these basic concepts of equal right that must be upheld and understood; those ideas and methods for peaceful co-existence that provide the only possibility for stability and prosperity.
The story of primitive competition, winner-taking-all, making those who disagree with you your enemy, dishonors the capacity we have been given to meet the moment and work out how people can live together in the modern world. Ruthless competition doesn't get us there. The universal principles of democracy are our chance for a bearable future. We badly need now for people to appreciate beyond measure our heritage of the idea of government by, for and of the people. Not just liberty but survival depends on what story we listen to and tell.
[i] Michael Kammen’s 2006 A Machine That Would Go Of Itself examines the history of public concepts about the Constitution (including confusion, ignorance, and disagreement). But Madison’s principles are examples of policy structures that would likely tend to produce generally better results in social organization, if respected and followed.
[ii] For example, “Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice”, Zeynep Tufekci, Op-Ed, NY Times, 1/16/25.
[iii] Famously stated not to be the case by Justice Robert Jackson in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), Justice Arthur Goldberg in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144 (1963), and reportedly by Abraham Lincoln in response to criticism of his suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.
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