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Constitutional Law
Part 2: “What Were They Thinking?”
Digression: “A History of Government in 6 Revolutions: From the Paleolithic to Philadelphia”
114. Inventing God and Law: Pious Frauds
Title: Part H: Pious Frauds
Panel 1: Average Joe (as a talking head) floats over a stylized ancient walled city.
JOE:
The great blessing of institutions is that they are permanent.
-=-
Panel 2: With a BLORT, a dump truck covers the walled city with concrete. Joe continues as a talking head.
JOE:
But the great curse of institutions is that they are permanent.
Inertia sets in, and they fail to adapt to new realities. Institutions can even hold society back, as they grow increasingly irrelevant… out of touch… unaccountable…
…and even unjust!
-=-
Panel 3: The city congeals under its coating of concrete. In the foreground, The State grabs her throat as she chokes on concrete that has crawled up her torso to cover one arm and the side of her head. Her coated arm is held out to stop it, but her little finger has broken off and falls into the next panel.
JOE (offscreen):
Some even call this phenomenon “institutional inertia.”
But I prefer to think of it as INSTITUTIONAL ARTHRITIS.
Left untreated, it tends to harden, constrict, and choke its own society to death!
-=-
Panel 4: The concrete-covered city erupts with magma like a volcano, ejecting angry people with pitchforks and torches and spears and swords and protest signs.
JOE (offscreen):
Or else societal pressure gets so intense that it bursts forth in bloody revolt!
ANGRY PERSON:
Burn it all down!
-=-
Panel 5: A group of ancient bureaucrats sit in a dark, lamplit room, writing in scrolls. The center bureaucrat has a pointed white beard, and looks at the reader with irritation. The bureaucrat to the right is fat, has a bushy beard, and smiles as he gestures dismissively.
JOE (offscreen):
To prevent such catastrophe, astute leaders often sought to reform their institutions.
That meant facing opposition from within the institutions themselves.
A “deep state” of priests, elites, and bureaucratic officials could always be counted on to actively resist implementing any reforms.
IRRITATED BUREAUCRAT:
Trust us: We’ve been doing things the right way for a long time.
Changing it would be wrong.
JOE (offscreen):
The only way to get them to support innovations was to satisfy them that the gods themselves wanted these reforms.
FAT BUREAUCRAT:
You don’t have the gods’ express approval?
Oh dear.
Your “reform” is doomed to fail.
-=-
Title: Part H: Pious Frauds (cont’d)
Panel 6: A middle-eastern man gazes into a Magic 8-Ball. The ball’s answer, just barely readable, is “Don’t bet on it.”
NARRATION:
In the ancient and classical world, there were two tried-and-true methods for demonstrating divine approval.
The First was to consult an oracle, or do some divination, and hope that the gods said “yes.”
-=-
Panel 7: An upset bearded man holds his head in shocked dismay upon seeing a written document that someone is pointing to.
NARRATION:
But if you wanted certainty?
Then you’d commission an “ancient” sacred text: a tablet or scroll revealing that the gods didn’t just approve, they’d wanted it your way all along!
MAN:
Goatdroppings!
We’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!
-=-
Panel 8: A view of the Earth, with the Middle East at the center of the view.
NARRATION:
“Ancient” was key—in the pre-modern world, antiquity carried enormous authority.
ANCIENT VOICE 1:
Besides, what works best, lasts longest!
ANCIENT VOICE 2:
Who can deny the wisdom of our ancestors?
ANCIENT VOICE 3:
And the older the source, the fewer errors in transmission!
ANCIENT VOICE 4:
It’s only you “modern” people who think “newer” means “better.”
-=-
Panel 9: The interior of an ancient throne room. A king is seated on a throne whose armrests are the wings of beasts with a Mesopotamian man’s bearded and crowned head, and the body of a four-footed beast with a tail. The king’s feet rest on a shiny golden chest labeled “The King’s Things.”
NARRATION:
So, ideally, you’d discover your tablet or scroll in an ancient holy place—perhaps at the feet of a god.
(Just as kings typically kept important documents in a box at their feet.)
-=-
Panel 10: Text box.
NARRATION:
This sort of thing was more common than many realize.
In fact, you might have a difficult time identifying dynasties that didn’t employ such “pious frauds” at one point or another!
-=-
Panel 11: Josiah stands before the temple of Jerusalem, holding out an unfurled scroll as he gestures to the temple’s golden doors. To one side, an enormous metal bowl rests on the backs of many metal oxen. To the other side, steps mount to the top of a gigantic altar.
NARRATION:
Long story short: Josiah pulled the same stunt…
…and it worked.
The part about Institutional Arthritis was honestly pretty eye-opening. Like, given our world history it definitely makes sense.
It even helps show why such arthritis can appear in present day – unlike in antiquity, we can’t go “actually there’s a religious text that says X”. Our pool of knowledge and history shows us what went on, so it’s harder to sneak something in that way.
Which means that current institutions are basically beholden to the values they set up years ago. If, say, the Catholic Church wanted to go “trans rights”, they’d need to basically reform it themselves, and the religion is so widespread that convincing all of its practitioners to change their mind would be a difficult task.
You make some good points! We’re going to be seeing more and more examples of “institutional arthritis” from here on, and different ways people have dealt with it (or failed to deal with it). A lot of Constitutional Law deals with movements for institutional change, so it’s going to be good to know where we came from when we get there.
I think it’s interesting to see how different current religions handle those sorts of changes, and a lot of it depends on the institutional structures they’ve set up themselves. Catholicism has a pope who is considered infallible, so if the cardinals do elect a pope who wants change, they are allowed to claim direct instruction from God. But they also have 2000 years of history.
Then the Mormon church is in a different situation. Their leader can also make change thanks to his direct connections with heaven, but the religion is also so much younger. The early days of Mormonism had other witnesses. We can read newspapers about what Joseph Smith was up to around the time he found his golden plates, making it harder for church leaders to ret-con anything inconvenient.
Another thing that makes the Catholic Church more flexible is that it doesn’t take the Bible literally. Its scriptures are considered to be very symbolic and allegorical, requiring educated interpretation to discover the deeper meaning and underlying principles. That’s a large part of what the Catholic Church considers its function: to figure out from the scriptures and its own traditions what God wants people to do and understand. In contrast to scriptures like the Book of Mormon and the Koran, the Bible is not a prophetic transcription of the direct word of God, but is a collection of writings that the Church itself selected and arranged. Unlike evangelical Protestant faiths, the Catholic Church says you can’t understand the Bible just by reading it at face value, and it’s not the only source of doctrine. All of this gives Catholicism a lot of room to evolve with changing times and accept new scientific discoveries as true, and even adapt its institutions and practices, all while preserving its essential beliefs and institutions. And you could write several books on how the different forms of present-day Judaism deal with change.
But we’re just comparing the Abrahamic religions, whose faith is essentially handed down from on high in some form of received scripture. That is the exception in world religions, not the rule. I’d love it if someone who knows more about non-Abrahamic religions could chime in on how some of them adapt or undergo institutional change!
Disclaimer: Amateur religion geek here, should not be confused for an actual practitioner.
In many to most cases, doctrine follows the standards of the community rather than the other way around, so institutional change comes as people…simply start practicing differently. As you noted, there’s no unifying authority (Catholicism), literal document (evangelical Protestantism), or established science of authentication and interpretation (Islam), so everyone can interpret the holy books as they see fit and decide which books they’re going to work from. For example, if you’re a Buddhist woman, and you don’t like what the Pali canon says about having to be reborn as a man before achieving enlightenment, you can decide that the Lotus Sutra got it right and that all beings have the potential to achieve Buddhahood. So as society changes and the Buddhist community moves on, so does Buddhism.
(Obviously, saying anything unifying about Buddhism is a massive oversimplification of a topic you could do an entire college degree on, same with any other religion.)
The ancient text look like Sanskrit. Did Josiah predate the Hebrew script as we know it today?
I feel like new interpretations of the constitution are the ancient document trick of today.
“You can ban gay sex, and the constitution always said so.” Lawrence v Texas
“Gay marriage and gay relations are protected, and the constitution always said so, even before Lawrence.” Obergfell v Hodges
“14A protects abortion and always has.” Roe v Wade
“Nothing in the constitution protects abortion. Roe was wrong.” Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization
How insightful! I’ve never considered the interpretation of the Constitution by justices to be akin to interpreting scripture by religious authorities, but as I think about it more and more, the two certainly share some parallels.
Say, does that mean our Supreme Court Justices also consult a Magic 8-Ball to determine their rulings? Say it ain’t so, RGB, say it ain’t so!
That ancient text is indeed Sanskrit! But don’t read any significance into my choice of script, I was just having fun and showing that this is a thing that went on all over the world, not just in the Fertile Crescent.
As for the role of judges, I agree with Stephen that your observation is very insightful. I think you both might be pleased when the comic gets back to the present day and draws some connections between the role of the courts and some institutions we think we don’t have any more.
Crap, I made a fool of myself on the Internet. At least I’m in good company. Lawrence v Texas struck down sodomy laws. I was thinking of Bowers v Hardwick.
Nah, fools are the ones who double down when they’ve made a mistake.
No, wait, that’s not fools, that’s
[choose your punchline from the following:
a) cops.
b) cult members.
c) politicians.
d) kids these days.
e) other:_______.]
f) stock analysts
g) Fox News anchors
Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
-Irving Fisher, 16 October 1929