AR&IO: the Mediocrity of the American Constitution.
27 March 2019 [link youtube]
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Where else are you gonna see Solon, Cesare Beccaria and 韓非子all in the same video? Okay, I admit, in this video, you're going to see the Chinese characters for 純素 a lot more than you're gonna see 韓非子, but still…
Youtube Automatic Transcription
many Americans feel that their country
is extraordinary because their Constitution is extraordinary any Constitution would seem extraordinary to you if you have only read the one people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know you and Americans are indeed encouraged from their early childhood to read the Constitution in a kind of poetic isolation where each verse of this strange poem is open to a very modern very abstract interpretation where it has been abstracted from the particular historical circumstances of its writing the intellectual background that provided the author's what they saw as their available options and putting together a constitution from various precedents and influences the American Constitution is not presented as being closely comparable to other cross currents that were then ongoing in European civilization and culture it's not presented as something very similar to and intellectually derivative of the work of the Baron de Montesquieu it's not presented as something closely comparable to and derivative of the work of Cesare Beccaria author I'd like to talk about most of all in this video and of course the sense of American uniqueness would start to diminish not only if you saw the Constitution in that context but if you started engaging in the comparative study of constitutions in the plural putting the United States Constitution next to the experiments that went on in other countries around the world in the century that followed after or other constitutions around the world as they exist today in the 21st century America would seem slightly less special but degrees it's also true that all of us live with a sort of denial about the huge cultural gap that differentiates us in our assumptions from the authors of that Constitution I think most Americans do grow up with a few anecdotes about their founding fathers shooting each other in duels Melissa did you did you learn about that in school did you ever get a funny anecdote about this or that president United States or members of Congress in the Senate in those days fighting each other in duels was that part of the yeah part of the spice of life it's America well it's it's a pretty fundamental assumption that it was your civic right as a gentleman and the word gentleman has a lot of untranslatable significance in the English language that it was your right as a gentleman to settle your disputes through a duel by fighting to the death and this is something I've read discussed in many sources some formal and informal I remember one book that was a formal study of the history of dueling and that books thesis was that the United States was a little bit old-fashioned at the time of the writing Constitution it was maybe 50 years behind the trend in countries like England and France but all the major European countries England France Italy Russia they all emerged from a medieval culture of dueling at their own pace whether slowly or quickly they came into this more modern sense that if you murdered someone it was a crime whether or not that person consented to have a fight to death with you but at the time the writing Constitution perhaps much more alien than the assumptions that surrounded slavery much more alien than the assumptions that surrounded genocide of indigenous people war conquest and enslavement of indigenous people perhaps most alien of all was this assumption that I think all of the right to the authors of the Constitution participated in this assumption I think a hundred percent of them shared proved me wrong if you guys know someone might email and email me in an exception to the rule it's possible I think a hundred percent of them shared in the culture of the duel so I'm opening this video by suggesting to you than Americans today in 2019 the American public is not merely passively ignorant of the intellectual legacy of the Baron de Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria they're actively ignorant of this it's a self-selected intentional blindness because they prefer to see their own constitution as a kind of perfect abstract poem which it is not it is instead the deeply flawed product of very peculiar cultural circumstances and those circumstances are so peculiar that they include the outrageous assumption that men ought to be able to murder one another in a duel that parents ought to be able to circumcise their own children cutting off part of their penis that human beings ought to be able to enslave other human beings to hunt and capture indigenous people there within the United States America and put them into slavery many other forms of slavery besides just the importation of people of African ancestry of slaves and indeed this brings me back to what inspired this video the intellectual legacy of cesare beccaria is all over the American Constitution [Music] again you can send me an email if you can name a single author of the Constitution who ever disclaimed that they were not influenced by Cesare Beccaria or who said that they were opposed to his legal philosophy this was an unbelievably influential source for about a hundred and fifty years after its publication and one of the reasons why it was so influential in contrast to books today is that it's sort of written in brief expostulations that invite further debate it's the sort of text that people would sit and read aloud in short passages in a drawing room or a salon and remember it's not just that people were illiterate in the past glasses were very expensive to read through lenses and the majority people on earth I think still today a very large percentage of people can't really read or can't read well without wearing glasses so one person would read aloud and other people would sit around and comment and discuss it's much forgotten today in the same way that people used to play music together with instruments because they didn't have other forms of entertainment people used to read together and comment on and discuss what they were reading and this resulted in different styles of book becoming popular even at the dawn of the newspaper that was one of the most commonly seen sites where people reading out the short stories from the newspaper reading them aloud to gathered people in a tea house and a coffeehouse bar or what-have-you the social element of reading aloud has largely disappeared from reading and likewise the social element of playing music has largely disappeared from music as digital forms of music have become cheap and ubiquitous and other forms of entertainment now exist to to distract us now there was a controversy there was a controversy caused by Kanye West questioning why in the American Constitution slavery is protected for people committed to prison now why indeed I can also ask why do Americans engage these two paints why do they ask these questions without ever pressing forward for answers there is an answer there's an incredibly obvious answer and the answer is Cesare Beccaria the answer is all of these guys read the philosophy of law set down by Cesare Beccaria Macario wasn't a legislator proposing particular laws as I say his style of writing is more exposed to Latorre inviting debate but he really set out a sort of meta law sort of meta legislation within which the the authors of the Constitution filled in the details now the Barone de Montesquieu another incredibly important influence a topic for another video and Cesare Beccaria he actually argued against torture and he also argued against the death penalty and this made him seem incredibly enlightened incredibly progressive incredibly positive for his era and of course this is misleading ultimately we have a sort of radical incommensurate II between our expectations and interest today in the 21st century and the assumptions that are written into the American Constitution and this is precisely why Americans don't really want to know what's in their constitution in the same sense that meat eaters want to buy hotdogs and live in a kind of ignorance about what's really in the hotdogs they don't want to see what happens in the factory they don't want to see what's in the slaughterhouse there's a pleasing allusion to the wholeness of the hotdog as one finished unit Americans don't really want to see where their Constitution came from either perhaps because if they did know those things it would force them to question and ultimately reject the authority of the authors of their constitution as people who were in some ways just wrong um and in other ways frankly evil so Cesare Beccaria in this context set down as a very positive thing from his perspective the idea of slavery as a punishment rather than torture rather than execution he really thought it was a very good thing to have slaves as punishments for serious crimes and it is not written into the Constitution accidentally or due to vague wording those men who wrote the Constitution some of them positive believed in the enslavement of Africans but they absolutely believed in what do you ever say carceral slavery or slavery as a form of incarceration I don't know how how better to put it penal slavery that's the term I'm looking for okay now likewise if we were to ask the question today as almost every day of the year there are questions circulating about why the ownership of guns is protected in the United States Constitution in the peculiar way that it is and today the whole left wing will jump up and say ah technically the Constitution doesn't quite say that Tecla it's a little bit vague or unclear to what extent that passage the Constitution is talking about the rights of individual people to own guns and to what extent it started with the rights of the states of local governments don't or even the say the local city authorities telling us to what extent is it saying one of the other well if you wanted to know the answer just like getting to the bottom of these other issues what would you look into you'd look into the writing of chess kripacharya it's the depressing truth and guess what just as all these men who participated in writing the Constitution participated in duels participated in dueling they believed in the barbaric laughable cultural practice of men killing each other over a point of Honor so - by the way did supposedly enlightened thinkers like Tolstoy and Turgenev in Russia each of these countries in Europe Russia Italy France they emerged from the culture of the duel at a different rate but Tolstoy and Turgenev over nothing they were going to duel to the death they well they were riding a train together and they had to wait for the train to come to a station where it would stop long enough for them to get out of the Train and shoot each other then get back from the Train and by the time the train got to that station they'd both calm down they decided to cancel the tool well if they'd shot each other I guess the history of Russian literature would have either missing out on Tolstoy or its Organia but one of the other of them would have gotten shot possibly both sometimes both men would would die in a duel whether they were fought with with swords knives or or with guns so you want to tell me that the authors of the Constitution participating in this gruesome awful culture of honor killings there's a loaded term of duels to the death you want to tell me they didn't believe in private personal gun ownership well what does what does cesare beccaria they're sourcebook their philosophy of meta legislation what does what does it say well he opens his passage saying that there are all these absurd laws that people propose in the time that we live people propose laws that are just as observed as trying to make fire illegal because people are afraid of being burnt people who want to make water illegal because of the fear of drowning along with absurd laws of this kind he includes in the same category the concept of a lawd forbid people from wearing arms wearing arms here means carrying a gun possibly carrying a sword because these laws would disarm only those who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity and the most important of the code will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions the violation of which is so easy and of so little comparative importance he asks again the style of this you can see he's not really presenting facts or evidence he's raising these questions and then the readers at this time quite possibly reading this aloud would engage in discussion does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty so dear to mankind and to the wise legislature question yeah you really see why this style of writing had to die with the 18th century it just just didn't make it into the 19th century let alone the 20th and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty it certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse and of the assailants better and rather encourages than prevents murder as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons so to be clear at the end there what he's suggesting is that if you deprive people of their right to carry guns or to carry arms then it's only going to cause more murder because you know the victims of murder or theft or robbery will be disarmed whereas the criminals will not be so this excuse in less florid language is still with us to this day in the USA this debate never ended in 2019 and this really was the guiding philosophy behind the United States of America in its bizarre social experiment of setting up a quote-unquote constitutional republic not a democracy a constitutional republic of gun carrying slave owners who would fight each other to the death over a point of Honor and who participated in a fundamentally aristocratic set of values philosophy of state and government that is completely repugnant to us to this day I think if we go back now and study the Baron de Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria the whole legal philosophy of that era and we read the American Constitution in that context and if we even just compare it to other constitutions at the time let alone constitutions of modern European states like Portugal and Germany that you know wrote new constitutions in the 20th century I don't think anyone could come to the conclusion that the American Constitution is some kind of unimpeachable masterpiece on the contrary it was an experiment and by definition an experiment is something you undertake with the outcomes being unknown and unknowable and in many these ways that experiment has now failed and the American people want to ignore the first principles that lurk beneath the particular wording of their constitution precisely because they're terrified to discover that those first principles may be bad and repugnant and wrong laws ultimately are just words written on pieces of paper by fallible men and women and this whole tradition began with so long in Athens and Solon made the fateful mistake of writing laws in poetry that was inspirational and vague to hear but that was open to interpretation and reinterpretation and that is why all of the authors at the time including even Aristotle say that so Long's Constitution that his intellectual legacy did not work in some ways I feel like the Western world burdened with this notion of a poetic and vague and inspiring Constitution from so modern a that ancient Athens we're still catching up with where China was 2,300 years ago with the Han phatso were still catching up with examining the most fundamental principles what he is to have rule of law what is the role of the public what is the role of the elites that controls so much in our society I think those are questions we've been sleepwalking along side their questions we just haven't wanted to ask because frankly if we ask them it would lead us to all kinds of uncomfortable answers like how is it we came up with these excuses for separation of church and state that ensure that religious families are going to cut off parts of the penises of their male children forever and ever and ever that circumcision never gets challenged that religious authority is in fact protected and propounded and perpetuated for how many centuries forever why does the Constitution have this stuff of the progress of science what is the meaning of democracy the meaning of democracy cannot be living your life in a perpetual state of intellectual indebtedness to a class of slave-owning gun toting duel fighting aristocratic bigots from centuries ago men whom today you would not agree with on any issue whatsoever not even the meaning of something as simple as the separation of church and state I mean people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know
is extraordinary because their Constitution is extraordinary any Constitution would seem extraordinary to you if you have only read the one people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know you and Americans are indeed encouraged from their early childhood to read the Constitution in a kind of poetic isolation where each verse of this strange poem is open to a very modern very abstract interpretation where it has been abstracted from the particular historical circumstances of its writing the intellectual background that provided the author's what they saw as their available options and putting together a constitution from various precedents and influences the American Constitution is not presented as being closely comparable to other cross currents that were then ongoing in European civilization and culture it's not presented as something very similar to and intellectually derivative of the work of the Baron de Montesquieu it's not presented as something closely comparable to and derivative of the work of Cesare Beccaria author I'd like to talk about most of all in this video and of course the sense of American uniqueness would start to diminish not only if you saw the Constitution in that context but if you started engaging in the comparative study of constitutions in the plural putting the United States Constitution next to the experiments that went on in other countries around the world in the century that followed after or other constitutions around the world as they exist today in the 21st century America would seem slightly less special but degrees it's also true that all of us live with a sort of denial about the huge cultural gap that differentiates us in our assumptions from the authors of that Constitution I think most Americans do grow up with a few anecdotes about their founding fathers shooting each other in duels Melissa did you did you learn about that in school did you ever get a funny anecdote about this or that president United States or members of Congress in the Senate in those days fighting each other in duels was that part of the yeah part of the spice of life it's America well it's it's a pretty fundamental assumption that it was your civic right as a gentleman and the word gentleman has a lot of untranslatable significance in the English language that it was your right as a gentleman to settle your disputes through a duel by fighting to the death and this is something I've read discussed in many sources some formal and informal I remember one book that was a formal study of the history of dueling and that books thesis was that the United States was a little bit old-fashioned at the time of the writing Constitution it was maybe 50 years behind the trend in countries like England and France but all the major European countries England France Italy Russia they all emerged from a medieval culture of dueling at their own pace whether slowly or quickly they came into this more modern sense that if you murdered someone it was a crime whether or not that person consented to have a fight to death with you but at the time the writing Constitution perhaps much more alien than the assumptions that surrounded slavery much more alien than the assumptions that surrounded genocide of indigenous people war conquest and enslavement of indigenous people perhaps most alien of all was this assumption that I think all of the right to the authors of the Constitution participated in this assumption I think a hundred percent of them shared proved me wrong if you guys know someone might email and email me in an exception to the rule it's possible I think a hundred percent of them shared in the culture of the duel so I'm opening this video by suggesting to you than Americans today in 2019 the American public is not merely passively ignorant of the intellectual legacy of the Baron de Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria they're actively ignorant of this it's a self-selected intentional blindness because they prefer to see their own constitution as a kind of perfect abstract poem which it is not it is instead the deeply flawed product of very peculiar cultural circumstances and those circumstances are so peculiar that they include the outrageous assumption that men ought to be able to murder one another in a duel that parents ought to be able to circumcise their own children cutting off part of their penis that human beings ought to be able to enslave other human beings to hunt and capture indigenous people there within the United States America and put them into slavery many other forms of slavery besides just the importation of people of African ancestry of slaves and indeed this brings me back to what inspired this video the intellectual legacy of cesare beccaria is all over the American Constitution [Music] again you can send me an email if you can name a single author of the Constitution who ever disclaimed that they were not influenced by Cesare Beccaria or who said that they were opposed to his legal philosophy this was an unbelievably influential source for about a hundred and fifty years after its publication and one of the reasons why it was so influential in contrast to books today is that it's sort of written in brief expostulations that invite further debate it's the sort of text that people would sit and read aloud in short passages in a drawing room or a salon and remember it's not just that people were illiterate in the past glasses were very expensive to read through lenses and the majority people on earth I think still today a very large percentage of people can't really read or can't read well without wearing glasses so one person would read aloud and other people would sit around and comment and discuss it's much forgotten today in the same way that people used to play music together with instruments because they didn't have other forms of entertainment people used to read together and comment on and discuss what they were reading and this resulted in different styles of book becoming popular even at the dawn of the newspaper that was one of the most commonly seen sites where people reading out the short stories from the newspaper reading them aloud to gathered people in a tea house and a coffeehouse bar or what-have-you the social element of reading aloud has largely disappeared from reading and likewise the social element of playing music has largely disappeared from music as digital forms of music have become cheap and ubiquitous and other forms of entertainment now exist to to distract us now there was a controversy there was a controversy caused by Kanye West questioning why in the American Constitution slavery is protected for people committed to prison now why indeed I can also ask why do Americans engage these two paints why do they ask these questions without ever pressing forward for answers there is an answer there's an incredibly obvious answer and the answer is Cesare Beccaria the answer is all of these guys read the philosophy of law set down by Cesare Beccaria Macario wasn't a legislator proposing particular laws as I say his style of writing is more exposed to Latorre inviting debate but he really set out a sort of meta law sort of meta legislation within which the the authors of the Constitution filled in the details now the Barone de Montesquieu another incredibly important influence a topic for another video and Cesare Beccaria he actually argued against torture and he also argued against the death penalty and this made him seem incredibly enlightened incredibly progressive incredibly positive for his era and of course this is misleading ultimately we have a sort of radical incommensurate II between our expectations and interest today in the 21st century and the assumptions that are written into the American Constitution and this is precisely why Americans don't really want to know what's in their constitution in the same sense that meat eaters want to buy hotdogs and live in a kind of ignorance about what's really in the hotdogs they don't want to see what happens in the factory they don't want to see what's in the slaughterhouse there's a pleasing allusion to the wholeness of the hotdog as one finished unit Americans don't really want to see where their Constitution came from either perhaps because if they did know those things it would force them to question and ultimately reject the authority of the authors of their constitution as people who were in some ways just wrong um and in other ways frankly evil so Cesare Beccaria in this context set down as a very positive thing from his perspective the idea of slavery as a punishment rather than torture rather than execution he really thought it was a very good thing to have slaves as punishments for serious crimes and it is not written into the Constitution accidentally or due to vague wording those men who wrote the Constitution some of them positive believed in the enslavement of Africans but they absolutely believed in what do you ever say carceral slavery or slavery as a form of incarceration I don't know how how better to put it penal slavery that's the term I'm looking for okay now likewise if we were to ask the question today as almost every day of the year there are questions circulating about why the ownership of guns is protected in the United States Constitution in the peculiar way that it is and today the whole left wing will jump up and say ah technically the Constitution doesn't quite say that Tecla it's a little bit vague or unclear to what extent that passage the Constitution is talking about the rights of individual people to own guns and to what extent it started with the rights of the states of local governments don't or even the say the local city authorities telling us to what extent is it saying one of the other well if you wanted to know the answer just like getting to the bottom of these other issues what would you look into you'd look into the writing of chess kripacharya it's the depressing truth and guess what just as all these men who participated in writing the Constitution participated in duels participated in dueling they believed in the barbaric laughable cultural practice of men killing each other over a point of Honor so - by the way did supposedly enlightened thinkers like Tolstoy and Turgenev in Russia each of these countries in Europe Russia Italy France they emerged from the culture of the duel at a different rate but Tolstoy and Turgenev over nothing they were going to duel to the death they well they were riding a train together and they had to wait for the train to come to a station where it would stop long enough for them to get out of the Train and shoot each other then get back from the Train and by the time the train got to that station they'd both calm down they decided to cancel the tool well if they'd shot each other I guess the history of Russian literature would have either missing out on Tolstoy or its Organia but one of the other of them would have gotten shot possibly both sometimes both men would would die in a duel whether they were fought with with swords knives or or with guns so you want to tell me that the authors of the Constitution participating in this gruesome awful culture of honor killings there's a loaded term of duels to the death you want to tell me they didn't believe in private personal gun ownership well what does what does cesare beccaria they're sourcebook their philosophy of meta legislation what does what does it say well he opens his passage saying that there are all these absurd laws that people propose in the time that we live people propose laws that are just as observed as trying to make fire illegal because people are afraid of being burnt people who want to make water illegal because of the fear of drowning along with absurd laws of this kind he includes in the same category the concept of a lawd forbid people from wearing arms wearing arms here means carrying a gun possibly carrying a sword because these laws would disarm only those who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity and the most important of the code will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions the violation of which is so easy and of so little comparative importance he asks again the style of this you can see he's not really presenting facts or evidence he's raising these questions and then the readers at this time quite possibly reading this aloud would engage in discussion does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty so dear to mankind and to the wise legislature question yeah you really see why this style of writing had to die with the 18th century it just just didn't make it into the 19th century let alone the 20th and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty it certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse and of the assailants better and rather encourages than prevents murder as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons so to be clear at the end there what he's suggesting is that if you deprive people of their right to carry guns or to carry arms then it's only going to cause more murder because you know the victims of murder or theft or robbery will be disarmed whereas the criminals will not be so this excuse in less florid language is still with us to this day in the USA this debate never ended in 2019 and this really was the guiding philosophy behind the United States of America in its bizarre social experiment of setting up a quote-unquote constitutional republic not a democracy a constitutional republic of gun carrying slave owners who would fight each other to the death over a point of Honor and who participated in a fundamentally aristocratic set of values philosophy of state and government that is completely repugnant to us to this day I think if we go back now and study the Baron de Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria the whole legal philosophy of that era and we read the American Constitution in that context and if we even just compare it to other constitutions at the time let alone constitutions of modern European states like Portugal and Germany that you know wrote new constitutions in the 20th century I don't think anyone could come to the conclusion that the American Constitution is some kind of unimpeachable masterpiece on the contrary it was an experiment and by definition an experiment is something you undertake with the outcomes being unknown and unknowable and in many these ways that experiment has now failed and the American people want to ignore the first principles that lurk beneath the particular wording of their constitution precisely because they're terrified to discover that those first principles may be bad and repugnant and wrong laws ultimately are just words written on pieces of paper by fallible men and women and this whole tradition began with so long in Athens and Solon made the fateful mistake of writing laws in poetry that was inspirational and vague to hear but that was open to interpretation and reinterpretation and that is why all of the authors at the time including even Aristotle say that so Long's Constitution that his intellectual legacy did not work in some ways I feel like the Western world burdened with this notion of a poetic and vague and inspiring Constitution from so modern a that ancient Athens we're still catching up with where China was 2,300 years ago with the Han phatso were still catching up with examining the most fundamental principles what he is to have rule of law what is the role of the public what is the role of the elites that controls so much in our society I think those are questions we've been sleepwalking along side their questions we just haven't wanted to ask because frankly if we ask them it would lead us to all kinds of uncomfortable answers like how is it we came up with these excuses for separation of church and state that ensure that religious families are going to cut off parts of the penises of their male children forever and ever and ever that circumcision never gets challenged that religious authority is in fact protected and propounded and perpetuated for how many centuries forever why does the Constitution have this stuff of the progress of science what is the meaning of democracy the meaning of democracy cannot be living your life in a perpetual state of intellectual indebtedness to a class of slave-owning gun toting duel fighting aristocratic bigots from centuries ago men whom today you would not agree with on any issue whatsoever not even the meaning of something as simple as the separation of church and state I mean people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know