Out of a living silence

“The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”—Justice Antonin Scalia (March 11, 1936–February 12/13, 2016)

Justice Scalia was one of the leading proponents of a method of interpreting the Constitution called originalism, a form of textual exegesis that uses historical and linguistic scholarship to determine what the authors of a text meant by their words or what the first readers most probably understood the words of the text to mean. The original meaning, once determined as well as scholarship allows, is then regarded as the only meaning of the text, unaffected by the what later generations of readers of the text may believe. According to Scalia, while the patterns of thinking of society as a whole may change from one generation to the text, the meaning of the Constitution endures without change.

The method of textual interpretation called originalism is familiar to and widely practiced by scholars of ancient and medieval texts, even if that name is not commonly used by textual scholars. While I was being trained in the field of Buddhist studies, for example, students were advised to try to discover what the expressions found in the Pali Canon (the scriptures of the Theravāda school of Buddhism) probably meant to speakers of Indian languages at the time of the Buddha and to ignore what those same expressions came to mean to commentators in later centuries. The greater the temporal and geographical distance of a commentator from the time and location of the the Buddha, the more that particular commentator was to be regarded with suspicion. What this meant in practice was that my fellow students of the Pali Canon and I were unlikely to turn even to Buddhaghosa (who probably lived in the same part of India in which the Buddha lived but nearly one thousand years later), let alone to Bhikkhu Buddhadasa (a Thai monk who lived from May 27, 1906 until May 25, 1993). Despite the fact that Buddhaghosa’s commentaries on the Pali Canon came to be the interpretation that prevailed from the twelfth century C.E. onward, and that Buddhadasa was regarded as the most authoritative interpreter since Buddhaghosa, an academic scholar of the Pali Canon trained in Toronto in the 1970s would studiously avoid being influenced by them. Similarly, when reading a Sanskrit text written by Nāgārjuna in the second century C.E., a student in Toronto in the 1970s would carefully steer clear of writings by modern Tibetan scholars, such as the Dalai Lama, from schools of Buddhism based on Nāgārjuna’s teaching. In other words, in my academic training in Buddhist studies, I was taught that academic respectability diminished to the extent that one’s method of interpretation of a Buddhist text deviated from textual originalism.

If I had never approached Buddhist texts in any way than as a textual historian, I might hold originalism in high esteem. My interest in Buddhist texts, however, was never motivated principally by historical curiosity. What motivated me, probably to my detriment as a serious academic scholar, was a search for inspiration, a perhaps vain hope to find advice on how to lead a more useful life. As a seeker of inspiration, my practice was to read and reflect on whatever came into my hands and to let it have its way with me. Looking back now on my thinking of several decades ago, I realize how divided my mind was against itself. Without consciously setting out to compartmentalize my thinking, I unconsciously developed two distinct modes of reading. While in academic mode I would read a classical Buddhist text one way; while in spiritual seeker mode, I would read that same text differently—sometimes only somewhat differently and sometimes radically differently. It was rarely possible to be in both modes at once, and it wasn’t always easy to discern which mode I was in at any given time. Flitting back and forth between the two modes became a way of life and probably caused almost as much confusion in the minds of my students and fellow Buddhists as it did in me. The confusion both for me and for others was much less when I was in the midst of Quakers, for my Quaker faith and practice was almost entirely uncontaminated by a scholarly approach to either the Bible or the writings of George Fox and other Quaker authors. Looking back on it all now, I think it may have been easier for all concerned had I been just a practicing Quaker with an intellectual curiosity about the history of Buddhist thought. That, however, is not what I was.

My bewildered and bewildering life as a scholar-practitioner has no doubt had an influence on how I think about the Constitution of the United States. My interest in that document has never been that of a historical scholar. If my interest had been purely scholarly, I would probably have been inclined to be sympathetic to some form of originalism. My interest in the Constitution, however, is much more like my interest in the writings of George Fox. I read and reflect on Fox that I might be a better Quaker, and I read and reflect on the Constitution that I might be a better citizen of the particular constitutional democracy into which I happened to be born. Given that orientation to reading the Constitution, I have relatively little interest in how the people who wrote the text, and those who voted to ratify it in 1789, saw the world. Since they lived and wrote, the world has been exposed to and enriched by the thinking of Charles Darwin and the tens of thousands of scientists who take his work as a point of departure; and to astronomical research that has resulted in a view of the universe that the Founding Fathers could not even imagine; and to quantum mechanics, which has resulted in a view of the universe that no one can imagine; and to neurophysiology, which has resulted in transformations of how we view personality, agency, responsibility, and what people used to call the self, the mind or the soul; and to Hegel and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who have made naivety in most matters impossible; and to Emerson, Thoreau, the Transcendentalists, the Pragmatists and numerous kinds of religious and philosophical pluralists; and to depth psychology; and to generations of brilliant litterateurs, social commentators, political thinkers and essayists. Since the Constitution was written, the United States has expanded across a continent, been blessed with waves of immigrants from all parts of Europe, Asia and Africa and survived several devastating wars from which surely numerous important lessons have been (or should have been) learned. There is hardly any aspect of modern life that would be recognizable to the authors of the Constitution. Why should the way we think and act in the world be recognizable to them? To expect people today to ignore all that has happened in the past two and a quarter centuries and to eschew all the wisdom gained from those happenings and to hew to the world view of the Founding Fathers is as unreasonable and impractical as it would be to expect great grandparents to continue thinking and acting as they did as toddlers.

There is no doubt in my mind that Justice Scalia was a deeply learned and highly intelligent scholar of the text of the Constitution. There is equally little doubt in my mind that an enduring or dead Constitution is no more than a historical artifact, as impractical in today’s world as a horse and buggy. What is needed is a method of interpretation of the Constitution that allows for changes in human thinking resulting from scientific discovery, developments in the humanities and social sciences and trends in the arts. The results of such interpretation would no doubt sometimes be wild and unpredictable, and occasionally discomfiting, exactly as life itself is. To be sure, not all change is for the better, but all change must be acknowledged to have taken place, for better or for worse. To ignore change is delusional. To resist it is futile. To embrace it is alone conducive to flourishing.

From both of my parents and all four of my grandparents, I inherited a distaste for self-promotion—even the indirect forms such as being patriotic or proud of one’s school or place of residence or of other members of one’s own family. Early childhood conditioning tends to be persistent, so to this day I inwardly cringe upon witnessing displays of self-referential praise.

Years ago, I was on an academic committee considering a faculty member for promotion. I knew and admired the candidate, and there was little doubt in my mind about his being worthy of promotion. That notwithstanding, I found myself put off by his supporting documentation. Rather than simply submitting the required teaching evaluations, he supplied an accompanying document quoting selected phrases from comments that students had made; these selected words of praise were isolated from the surrounding narrative by being placed in text boxes and formatted in a large and bold font so that there would be no missing how highly his students thought of him. Offprints of his publications were accompanied by a similar document, featuring laudatory remarks that reviewers had made of his work, also placed in text boxes and set in boldface type in a larger font size. The presentation felt like an advertising brochure, as though the candidate somehow believed that the only way to get an academic promotion by others was to display a capacity for self-promotion.

I was not the only member of that committee to be put off by the presentation. An older colleague, nearing retirement age, commented that universities nowadays are almost forcing their employees to expunge all traces of modesty and humility from their behavior, if not from their mentality. Department chairs are expected to write annual reports assuring the university administration that their department is filled with world-class scholars and universally admired instructors. By the time of the early 1990s, candidates for promotion in the academic world could no longer submit a simple letter and a typed resumé. They had to write 10-page descriptions of their goals as teachers and scholars, accompanied by ample evidence that they were accomplishing those goals and that their accomplishments were being recognized by others living near and far. When I sought my first promotion, it was still possible to submit a brief letter and a typed resumé. By the time I was at the stage of my career to seek a promotion to the next level, all that had changed dramatically. I found the new process so unpleasant to contemplate that I never sought another promotion after that first one—and I was amply rewarded by never getting another one. Putting together the expected sort of dossier was not worth the time and effort, but more to the point it was not worth the violence to my sense of dignity. Ironically, my sense of self-worth would have been undermined by having to present myself as worthy.

It is not only the academic world that has steadily gravitated toward a culture of vainglory. Far from being an unpleasant feature of a bloated ego, fulsome self-congratulation now seems to be expected. Just as no commercial product can afford to be presented simply as adequate to the task but must be portrayed as better than all its competitors and indispensable to the discriminating consumer, no person can afford to be seen as merely competent. Pretty good is just not considered good enough anymore.

During an election year in the United States of America, voters are treated to a parade of candidates who not only toot their own horns sans cesse but also boast about their country as the greatest country in the world, even as the greatest country in the history of the world. Some of the candidates go so far as to disparage political leaders who do not participate in their jingoistic frenzy; those not caught up in nationalistic fervor are characterized as actually hating their country and wanting to drag it down to the same level as ordinary countries. An ordinary country is one that has affordable health insurance and reasonably-priced medical services and pharmaceutical products for everyone; reasonable tuition fees and generous food, housing and transportation subsidies for students pursuing a higher education; a modest-sized military of men and women trained mostly to help citizens cope with natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes; and a prison system designed to reform and educate miscreants rather than punish them. An ordinary country does not have a bloated military budget that is used to send personnel and materiel to countries all around the word and to build permanent military bases in more than a hundred other nations. Americans these days who long to live in an ordinary nation are advised to go live in Canada or Northern Europe, for the United States is a nation for those who wish to participate in excelsior.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Carl G. Jung said in an interview broadcast in English that the United States as a nation is “extraverted like hell.” The quiet reflection of the introvert is deprecated to such a degree that the system of public education is skewed in favor of gregarious doers whose energy is dedicated to making changes in the world rather than in one’s own attitudes and expectations. The thriving industry dedicated to selling products designed to help people realize their dreams of “self-improvement” tend to focus on how to be more self-confident, more assertive, more aggressive, more successful by external standards of assessment, more admired by the crowd. Jung chose his words carefully; an overly-extraverted country truly is like hell.

Although the United States could be described as “extraverted like hell” in the 1950s, it appears not to have always been that way. Neither the New England where some of my ancestors were born and lived, nor the Midwest in which other of my ancestors made their way from the cradle to the grave, according to what I heard from family elders, had much room for the braggadocio narcissism that has become so prevalent in today’s culture.

It is possible that my elders’ memories of the prevalent culture of their early days were faulty. Perhaps they were just getting old and slowing down, as I have managed to do a few decades after they passed on. Perhaps the world always seems too fast-paced, too forceful and too brash from the perspective of a rocking chair on the porch with a commanding view of an array of bird feeders. Or perhaps a culture of modesty and moderation really has been mostly replaced by a culture of excess and hubris.