Going through life as individuals and as a society, we
constantly update our stance in regard to our philosophy of life as well as the
worldview we hold of what we believe is happening around us.
If and when we fail to do this, we find ourselves
lagging behind the others, and so we choose to catch up with them or choose to
live in a bubble of anachronism that keeps widening the distance between where
we stand and where we ought to be.
The reason why, from time to time, we stubbornly
refuse to update our stance, is that we are programmed to prefer coherence over
chaos. That is, every time that we change something in our system of beliefs,
we feel the need to reconcile the change we took in with the core of what's
already there to maintain coherence. But this also means that we need to alter
the core of what’s there to accommodate the newcomer.
This causes the chaos that we dread, even when we know
it will only last for a short period of time. Thus, depending on how well the
core has served us, we prefer to hang on to it anachronistically, which means
that we resist the change imposed on us by society for as long as we can.
Unless we are a young rebel going through that phase
of life during which we thrive on chaos, we all reject most of the changes that
come our way till we cannot resist anymore. We finally accept the inevitable
reality that's around us, and work to reconcile the old that's a part of us
with the new that's heaped on us.
However difficult such decisions may turn out to be
for the individuals that have to make them for the self, they become even more
difficult for those that have to make them on behalf of society. This happens
mostly in the cultural field, such as the performing arts when a director is
faced with the choice of preserving the integrity of the work as put together
by the author of a bygone era, or tweak the work to make it conform to the
demands of the time.
In fact, having to decide between the available options
can be difficult to make everywhere you look in contemporary life where taste,
fashion and woke considerations are deemed so important, they can give rise to
lawsuits in some cases, even riots in the streets in other cases.
But the hardest decisions to make come in the field of
justice. They fall into the lap of the Supreme Court Justices when the choice
they must make is between the “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution,
which is coherent by definition, and the “living Constitution” approach that
seeks to impose an altered system of beliefs––which may be chaotic to the
status quo––but coheres with the reality of contemporary life.
One such case was recently adjudicated by the Supreme
Court of the United States with a surprise and a controversy that will be the
subject of discussions for a long time to come. It was discussed by Kyle Sammin
in an article that was published on April 22, 2020 in the online publication,
The Federalist.
The article came under the title: “Three Lefty Supreme
Court Justices Affirm Originalism In Unanimous Jury Ruling,” and he subtitle:
“With three conservatives and three liberals signing on to the originalist
ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana, we see more evidence that the 'living
Constitution' school of thought is in decline”.
Because it is a complicated case, I cannot do justice
condensing it into a paragraph. And so, I urge those who are interested in such
matters to read the Kyle Sammin discussion of the case in The Federalist.
The surprise that the readers will encounter is that
liberal judges came on the side of what is essentially a conservative choice.
The reason for that is simple, but the beauty of it is that it widens the
discussion with regard to the subject of having to make a choice between Constitutional
Originalism and the principle of a Living Constitution. In this case, both the
liberal and conservative judges came down on the side of preserving freedom as
defined originally by the framers of the Constitution.
What this says is that when it comes to jurors and the
Justices of the Supreme Court, they do not show absolute adherence to one
school of thought or the other. Looking at the merit of each case, they
discriminate between what is serious and what is frivolous. They reject the
frivolous and make the best decision they can on what they consider to be
serious.
Thanks to those jurors and Justices, there is a whole
lot that can be said and will be said about this matter today and in the
future.
On this occasion, the case involved the serious
subject of freedom, and so the jurors as well as the judges after
them––liberals and conservatives alike––did not hesitate to serve the cause of
freedom above all other considerations.