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| 2021 publication |
America’s founders—Adams, Washington, Franklin, Madison, and others—all warned that no constitution is worth the paper it is written on if it is not also inscribed in people’s hearts and grounded in public virtue. “Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net,” John Adams said. “Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
Retrospective and Prospective Uses of Reasons Sometimes people use reasons to explain or to justify decisions already taken and beliefs already held. This is a retrospective use of reasons. Sometimes people use reasons as arguments in favor of new decisions or new beliefs. This is a prospective use of reasons.
What makes people fight each other? I was especially intrigued by the processes behind “group-identity” conflicts, which involve a stark distinction between “us” and “them.” This category includes violence that centers on nationalist, ethnic, racial, or other ethnocentric identities.
Together, lots of interactions and feedbacks among the parts of a system produce what complexity scientists call “disproportionate causation.” This means there’s often no clear relationship in the system between the size of a cause and the size of its effect.
Drawing on his research on the psychological effects of the fear of nuclear war, famed US psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton discusses the “psychic numbing” that the threat of climate change can induce in people. Lifton, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (New York: New Press, 2017).
Consciousness depends upon imagination and imagination holds a central place in the soul. “Imagination is the terminus ad quem of all properly human conscious experience; it is that faculty of man without which there can be no conscious experience.” (E.W. Warren)
A succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries were to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought, redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority, emancipation from arbitrary culture and tradition, and the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity.
