Scott
Verified User
Just finished reading this article published on UnHerd today by N.S. Lyons, thought it was quite good. I'll say that I'm not Christian myself, but the author also mentions "some broader but less easily defined moral character", which I like. Quoting from its introduction and conclusion...
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Last month, the US Supreme Court considered arguments in a landmark case on the legality of America’s metastasising censorship-industrial complex. The case, Murthy vs Missouri, rests on whether White House requests that Twitter and Facebook take down alleged Covid misinformation constituted illegal censorship that violated the First Amendment right to free speech.
Given the ample evidence of the Biden administration’s sweeping censorship efforts in recent years, many legal observers assumed the case was a done deal. And yet, during the hearing, it quickly became apparent that a majority of the court’s justices were sympathetic to a counter-argument that, actually, it’s the Government who’s the real victim in this case — because what “free speech” really means is that the Government has a right to tell Facebook that you need to shut up.
[snip]
John Adams once warned that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”, and that, should that national moral character disappear, the resulting political passions “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net”. Adams was of course referring primarily to Christianity and its system of moral order, and Maistre would have very much agreed. In his view, the origin of a strong, stable and legitimate constitution could rest only in God and what we might call the popular fear of God: a sincere (even if subconscious) belief that to transgress the constitution (written or unwritten) was in a way to transgress divine law, an act liable to be punished accordingly. Ultimate authority then effectively rested above any man or document. Without this source of higher authority, the constitution would crumble and only the whims of petty tyrants would remain.
It sure seems that this is what we’re witnessing today. Whether or not we attribute the key role to Christian belief or to some broader but less easily defined national moral character, it seems clear to me that the Constitution is no longer alive with any such frightful sacred authority; it has been thoroughly profaned, and therefore opened to abuse. Nor is there today even a shared national understanding of its meaning and unwritten spirit. Whereas once few people would have dared try to blatantly twist its words to mean something that all would know implicitly they could not mean, our rulers no longer hesitate to do so — and often succeed. They succeed because that implicit constitution has been replaced.
I know that for Americans, who put so much faith in our Constitutional tradition, this is probably a particularly difficult and demoralising reality to accept. But accept it we must. Otherwise, we won’t be able to grasp the nature and extent of the challenge facing us. No amount of legalistic quibbling about the details and original meaning of the Constitution will rescue us from our present situation; nor could the nation’s highest court, even if it weren’t full of quislings. Even if the Supreme Court were to strongly reaffirm the principle of free speech, it would provide at most only a temporary reprieve — a ruling which the regime and its institutions would in all likelihood simply proceed to ignore, knowing they could get away with it.
No court has the power to define America’s true, unwritten constitution. If we want to change that constitution, and so restore any substance to the Constitution, then what will be called for is nothing less than a sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution sufficient to re-mould the very animating spirit of the state. It would, in other words, require an effort just as sweeping as the long revolution which dismantled and subordinated our original constitution in the first place.
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Full article:
The Constitution won’t save America- It has lost touch with the nation's twisted soul | UnHerd
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Last month, the US Supreme Court considered arguments in a landmark case on the legality of America’s metastasising censorship-industrial complex. The case, Murthy vs Missouri, rests on whether White House requests that Twitter and Facebook take down alleged Covid misinformation constituted illegal censorship that violated the First Amendment right to free speech.
Given the ample evidence of the Biden administration’s sweeping censorship efforts in recent years, many legal observers assumed the case was a done deal. And yet, during the hearing, it quickly became apparent that a majority of the court’s justices were sympathetic to a counter-argument that, actually, it’s the Government who’s the real victim in this case — because what “free speech” really means is that the Government has a right to tell Facebook that you need to shut up.
[snip]
John Adams once warned that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”, and that, should that national moral character disappear, the resulting political passions “would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net”. Adams was of course referring primarily to Christianity and its system of moral order, and Maistre would have very much agreed. In his view, the origin of a strong, stable and legitimate constitution could rest only in God and what we might call the popular fear of God: a sincere (even if subconscious) belief that to transgress the constitution (written or unwritten) was in a way to transgress divine law, an act liable to be punished accordingly. Ultimate authority then effectively rested above any man or document. Without this source of higher authority, the constitution would crumble and only the whims of petty tyrants would remain.
It sure seems that this is what we’re witnessing today. Whether or not we attribute the key role to Christian belief or to some broader but less easily defined national moral character, it seems clear to me that the Constitution is no longer alive with any such frightful sacred authority; it has been thoroughly profaned, and therefore opened to abuse. Nor is there today even a shared national understanding of its meaning and unwritten spirit. Whereas once few people would have dared try to blatantly twist its words to mean something that all would know implicitly they could not mean, our rulers no longer hesitate to do so — and often succeed. They succeed because that implicit constitution has been replaced.
I know that for Americans, who put so much faith in our Constitutional tradition, this is probably a particularly difficult and demoralising reality to accept. But accept it we must. Otherwise, we won’t be able to grasp the nature and extent of the challenge facing us. No amount of legalistic quibbling about the details and original meaning of the Constitution will rescue us from our present situation; nor could the nation’s highest court, even if it weren’t full of quislings. Even if the Supreme Court were to strongly reaffirm the principle of free speech, it would provide at most only a temporary reprieve — a ruling which the regime and its institutions would in all likelihood simply proceed to ignore, knowing they could get away with it.
No court has the power to define America’s true, unwritten constitution. If we want to change that constitution, and so restore any substance to the Constitution, then what will be called for is nothing less than a sustained and determined national cultural, intellectual, religious, and political counter-revolution sufficient to re-mould the very animating spirit of the state. It would, in other words, require an effort just as sweeping as the long revolution which dismantled and subordinated our original constitution in the first place.
**
Full article:
The Constitution won’t save America- It has lost touch with the nation's twisted soul | UnHerd
and a very fucking sad one.