“The Year of Living Constitutionally,” by A.J. Jacobs, and “Ben & Me,” by Eric Weiner, search in the past for guidance on how we should live now.
For many Americans, they are inspirational figures deserving of uncomplicated reverence — the creators of modern liberal democracy. For others, they’re the monsters who prolonged slavery in the United States, the chauvinists who excluded women from the franchise and the morons whose rules would grant as many senators to Wyoming as California, despite its having one sixty-eighth of the population.
A.J. Jacobs, in “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” is initially dubious. “Should we be skeptical of this set of rules written by wealthy racists who thought tobacco-smoke enemas were cutting-edge medicine?” he asks. Surely yes …?His method for assessing the continuing utility of the Constitution is to “get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers.
Jacobs’s point isn’t that the Founders were maniacs or that we should ditch the Bill of Rights. Rather he’s building a case for living constitutionalism, the philosophy that the founding documents’ basic tenets can remain a guide even as society and technology change. At a time when a majority on the Supreme Court favors its opposite, originalism , and is actively attacking freedoms such as, it’s vital to question the philosophical underpinnings of their approach.
Franklin is the subject of Eric Weiner’s book “Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life.” Weiner, like Jacobs, searches in the past for guidance on how we should live now and finds, in Renaissance man Franklin, an inspiring example.Among his many admirable qualities, per Weiner, were his stoicism and the “modest diffidence” he practiced in conversation and debate — in stark contrast with today’s feral hyperpartisanship.
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