In a discussion about flag desecration, definition is required. One must define what is meant by 'revered' or 'holy 'and one must define what is meant by 'profane'. And one must define the processes by which a 'sacred' thing is made 'profane;' how a sacred thing is desecrated. That is the intent of this work.
Reverence is the sense one develops in contemplating the Constitution. It is a document with a political purpose that is informed by the best practices of English Law, keen observation of history, and the best ideas about political philosophy that were being produced by the framers’ contemporaries. Only a handfull of political documents in the history of man have proven so forward-thinking, so influencial, or so durable.
One notion, for example, was the idea of separation of powers. This was not a new notion to Anglophone law. The Magna Carta was the first document in this tradition to reserve rights of members of the society in the face of monarchical power. Consistent with its lead Parliament was formed to check the power of the king and it became the legislative branch of the government. ( It is interesting to note that the very term for the institution derives from the French word parle, to speak. Thus the Parliament is an institution of free speech, and a very old one. ) The institution proved extremely effective at eliminating costly adventures at the whim of a monarch. Only projects that had broad support on the part of the educated classes had much hope of success. Thus the actions of the monarch came to represent acts that had wide support, usually acts that improved general welfare. This view of things dramatically oversimplifies six or eight hundred years of English history, but the point is that the English have, almost for their whole history, had a monarch whose powers were severely limited in comparison to those of continental European nations. And it is a tradition all Anglophone people point to with some pride.
Voltaire and other Frenchmen had observed the strengths associated with England’s relatively weaker monachy. And they admired these strengths. It was Montesquieu, a man who had studied the classics and political history, who wrote the magnum opus Constitution. In it he separated the powers of the government into three branches; the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.
The legislative branch makes laws. The executive branch enforces laws. The judicial branch tries infractions. To those who have lived under such system forever, it may seem to be ingenious in approximately the way gravity is ingenious, namely, it has been with us and it works in a particular way, and we are used to it. But when the framers of the Constitution read Montesquieu, they were so enamored of his concept that they copied its ideas very faithfully into America's Constitution. And they named both the work and the naval craft after Montesquieu's work. They understood the distinctions between the several governmental functions, and they understood the need for independence. They had read or experienced enough cases where the failure to divide powers appropriately between governmental institutions had led to great mischief or caused great harm.
On our side of history, its workings seem to be sometimes advantageous and sometimes disadvantageous. And so long as all people in the land feel this way at some times but not at other times in response to actions of one branch of government or another, it is reasonable to believe that the system is working in a way that approximates fairness. Fairness is both a requisite generative cause of democracy and a necessary goal. When this virtue fails to be expressed by a popular government, rule of law necessarily grows both suppressive and oppressive. And democracy fails.
The peculiar way that powers are divided among the branches of government is conceived to avoid the suppressive and oppressive corruptions that arise from concentrations of power. For instance, when a king is a legislator he can pass laws that tax people or punish particular groups in arbitrary ways. When he is the head of the judiciary as well as the executive he can charge people on sedition and have them convicted and beheaded for treason if they say a word against his policies or practices or beliefs. Such arbitrary exercises of power, though no longer common in either England or France at the time of the Revolution, were not far removed from memory, nor were they far removed from possibility given the existing systems at the time.
So the Constitution is informed by a powerfully deep sense of history. The most important practial assumption that informs the Constitution, the one that motivates its fundamental organization and accounts for most of its major provisions was stated most succinctly by a late ninteenth century British historian, Lord Acton “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Although his words are just over a century old, it is clear that this has been an idea in Anglophone law for almost a millennium. To their credit, the framers if America's Constitution understood both the strengths and the weaknesses of the English system; and they did what they could to incorporate the strengths and eliminate the weaknesses.
One of the weaknesses of the British system was the fact that the courts were part of the executive. This, the framers reasoned, made it impossible for them to be impartial in cases that had political overtones. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of prominent Britons had, by then, been thrown in dungeons or kept in towers for purely political reasons, charged with sedition and, if tried, found guilty by the very institution that falsely charged them. Such cases make a mockery of the court and its supposed objectivity. The august court in such a system becomes a sham. Under the American system, the court could be quite independent of the executive. This would ensure that purely political prosecutions without basis in fact would not be successful except in cases where the executive went to the trouble of fabricating evidence. And there is not yet a sense in America that this is happening very extensively.
The Constitution sets up a governmental system in which power is carefully divided. And this division of power tends to limit the extent and kind of abuses the government might level against its citizens. While it was unprecedented at the time of its writing for an official governmental document to guarantee these things, many of the practices did have some currency.
The most remarkable idea enshrined in America’s Constitution, however, is the idea that the Constitution might put certain acts beyond the reach of government. The idea that person had certain inherent rights, rights that were so profound that a government could not touch them, this was a revolutionary idea. The act of placing in the Constitution a list of protected rights - rights protected by the Constitution that no act of Congress acting alone could take - was a revolutionary act. Never in the history of man had a government committed in writing to the limits of its powers in advance of taking power. Even the Magna Carta, which limited the king's powers, was a negotiated document. And never before was the question of the limitations on power a more central question in the formation of a government. For it was only by virtue of the Bill of Rights that the Constitution was approved in a number of influencial State Legislatures.
What was the purpose the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they limited the powers of the government to govern over its own citizens? The concept was that the government’s purpose was to serve a particular set of needs that might be held commonly among people living in society. And that the only way of assuring that government could meet those needs was to seek advised consent of its citizens. Any government that fails to seek advised consent, the framers understood, was by definition not a democratic institution. And the means by which advised consent can be assured included guarantees to free speech, free press, and privacy in a number of personal matters. Furthermore, the government instituted mandatory education so that its citizens might be able to read and write and reason. And in so doing might contribute to - as well as understand -the public discourse about policy. That a government would invite opposing viewpoints as a condition of good government was truly revolutionary then. And it remains both an article of profound strength and one deserving of reverential awe.
The Constitution for its several profoundly wise qualities, is a work that inspires reverence and awe. And reminds one of a perfect and rare gem, the closer one examines it, the more wonderful it gets. It is, arguably, the most revered political document in the world. And the most emulated. When one contemplates the number of ways it takes account of history, anticipates future problems, balances the cost of one error against the cost of the opposite sort, and so on, one comes away from it with a profound sense of awe. One realizes that it was not written by a mad revolutionary in a fit of pique, but that it was written by a philosopher working with a team of competent and level-headed politicians - all of whom knew something of history, politics, philosophy, and law.
my side of the stream made holy, right, good, noble, and just by virtue of my association with it, in contradistinction to your side which is the opposite for lack of it
Boosterism is a natural force among men. In an evolutionary sense, any group that fails to inspire a kind of boosterism among its members becomes doomed, for it must inevitably be subsumed by a more powerful group of people whose power derives at least in part from a cohesiveness lent by boosterism. By definition, then, boosterism is a nescessary evil. It is necessary for the cohesiveness of cooperative groups. And the fundamental assumption upon which it is based, that groups including oneself as a member are better than the other kind of groups. The practical effect of boosterism is irrefutable - it leads to cooperative might, but its philosophical basis is seriously flawed, for it seduces men to stop thinking.
Patriotism is a kind of boosterism at a national level. Patriotism lends a country the force it needs to protect itself against external forces that would enslave its people and plunder its resources. And so there is a sense that it can be a force for good. But the problem implicit to this argument is that humans can not be trusted to make informed decisions about which causes they ought to fight for vs. which they ought not to fight for. The assumption is that a third party - almost always a person who will have nothing to lose from an armed conflict, but who stands to gain much from it - can make an impartial and informed decision on behalf of a million souls who have almost nothing to gain and everything to lose. It is reasonable for reasonable people to question the reasonability of this assumption.
It is necessary at this point to be clear about what we have argued. One argument is for the power of the ideas enshrined in the Constitution - namely separation of powers and the durability of individual rights. We have argued that the strengths of this document inspire an almost holy reverence for its ideas, its ideals, and the powerfully elegant simplicity of its structure and language.
A second argument is that the powereful engine of Democracy runs on the fuel of informed consent. When citizens either do not know or do not care about the arguments used to reach a policy decision , or when they are not given sufficient information to assess policy, their consent is not advised. In such a case governmental power is derived from deception. In such a case governmental action no longer represents the will of the people. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of privacy are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights precisely to achieve informed consent, and ensure a living, breathing, vital Democracy.
A third is that the idea that class membership in the first person does not automatically confer upon a class some inherent superiority, even though it might possibly be in the interest of the class as an institution for each class member to imagine it to be true. It is in the interest of the Baptist Church that its members believe that it is not just good to be Baptist, but vital do be a Baptist. And the reason it is vital is that God really is happier with Baptists than with members of other denominations. It is in the interest of George Steinbrennert that all Yankees fans really believe that they are better than the fans of other teams; for this makes showing up at the games not a simple act of entertainment, but an assertion of membership in an association of superior induhviduals. And such an association will bring more revenue at the ball park. Yet a person who is not one of these class members might be right in questioning whether these classes do, in fact, confer superiority.
In light of these ideas, let us examine what a flag is. A flag is a symbol. What is it that the flag symbolizes? Does it symbolize the people in a country? It is really tempting to believe that it does; to believe that the flag stands for all that I personally believe in; my country, my God, and so on. But it is easy to identify such a sentiment as being one of boosterism. It is a happy notion, but it is not very connected with the actual way things are. Another problem is that the flag, if it represents people, changes meaning as one person dies and another is born. It changes meaning as immigrants flock to this country because they want to be part of the phenomenon that makes the country great in the precise ways in which it is great.
Why do these people come to this country? Is it because they love the flag? No. Is it because they love the people? No. They come for a collection of related reasons. They come for the economic opportunities it offers. And they stay because of the same opportunities and because they see the ideas of the Constitution acted out daily in the conduct of America’s citizens. They observe how rule of law works. They observe how freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution are preserved by the common expectation and weight of practice. They see the power of education to transform peoples' lives. They see how the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution protect ordinary people such as themselves from abuses of power that sometimes characterize the countries from which they flee. Sometimes they cannot return to their countries of origin because they have protested against unjust policies in ways that have drawn attention to the inequity, embarrased men of power, and caused threats of retaliation against their own person. Sometimes they cannot go back because, metaphorically, they burned the flag of a nation whose policies we understand to be flawed.
So a flag does not represent a group of people. What about a land: does the flag represent a land? To argue that the flag represents real estate is a funny idea. A country defines the reach of its powers by boundaries. These boundaries are a convenience whose purpose is to promote peace and end squabbles over property lines. So every country is defined in a geographical sense. But to define a country only in a geographical sense is to ignore its people, its culture, its political system, and even to ignore any improvements man, by his labors. has made to the place. So equating a flag to a geographical spot is a serious error.
Does the flag represent the government of a country? In this sense we are getting closer. For a flag is a symbol of a land, its people, its culture, its history, and its government. And in all official governmental functions the flag is part of some specific function. During America's Civil War flags were carried into battle to represent one side or another. One of the most famous photos from WWII ( though staged ) is of marines planting a flag on Iwo Jima. In such contexts we think of the flag representing the people of a country, but in a de facto way they represent the military power of a country. And the government that disposes that military power.
So there is a sense that what a flag represents is at least partly contextual. When a flag is part of a military action it represents the military might of the country. When it is flown at an inauguration of a new President it stands for the Constitutional ideas of separation of powers, rule of law, of free and fair elections, and fair and restrained exercise of governmental power. When it is flown over a newspaper publisher it represents the guarantee of free speech and free press. When it is flown in the parking lot of a voluntary institution with clear and limited scope to improve civic life or arts, it represents the rights of free association.
One might argue that the flag represents the ideals of the country. That it represents all that is good and none that is bad. And certainly when well meaning people fly the flag because they are proud of it this is what they are thinking. The flag does stand for a number of good things. One of the best things the flag stands for is the ideals about what government ought to be as they are enshrined in the Constitution and in daily civic life in America. And when we imagine that this is all that the flag represents, it is easy to think of it in almost holy or reverent terms.
But the fact is that the flag represents America. It represents the land in its bounty and in its dearth. It represents its people. It represents its government. It represents its Constitution. It represents its laws. It represents the official policies and practices of the current administration.
While it is easy to get choked up about the almost untouchable holiness of the Constitution, few people would use terms of reverence to describe the legislative or executive branches of government. Bierce and Twain had difficulty thinking of governmental authority in reverential terms, and the situation is certainly not much different today. We have already described how it is that humans tend to venerate groups of which they are a part to the exclusion of other groups simply because of class membership. So when the flag represents class membership, it is a symbol of boosterism. And the big problem with boosterism is that it promotes a kind of suspension of critical reason that is vitally crucial in a democracy.
Therefore, when the flag represents boosterism it is actually representing a force that degrades the quality of Democracy. It is actually representing a force that is antithetical to one of the holiest precepts of the Constitution - the idea that governmental power derives from informed consent of the people. When a flag is used to short - circuit the normal processes of discussion and judgement that ought to attend the formulation of public policy it is a symbol of a very corrosive force. As English writer Samuel Johnson put it many decades before the American Revolution: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved