One thing that really irks me in the debates that fill the public discourse, is the way that people say, "Obviously our founding fathers couldn't have foreseen [insert some eventuality], when framing the Constitution." [Note: I'm also going to include the Bill of Rights in this umbrella term from now on] This is followed by that person using it to justify his or her position in the debate. Now, the first thing that I should say is that I also hate when people use this rhetorical/logical device in support of positions that I myself back.
Allow me to make an example. "The founding fathers can't possibly have foreseen the kind of weapons that we have in society today, so the second amendment can't be taken as a literal statement, applicable in our time."
Now, without going into details that are off-topic, I generally agree that some additional gun control would be good for America, but I have also been a hunter and shooter for most of my life. Despite that, I can't support any attempts to dismiss, off-hand, the decisions made during the formative years of this country based on the clairvoyance of our predecessors.
For one thing, making that argument is somewhat self-defeating. If you are saying that people can't possibly imagine the legislative needs of a future version of their own society, then why are you supporting a particular approach? Doesn't that mean that your efforts are doomed to let down your great-great grandchildren, constraining them to a set of options ill-suited to the problems they face?
Now, that response is as spurious as the argument it refutes. I didn't spend much time on that back-and-forth, because it doesn't seem to bear much effort in my mind, due to the mechanical inconsistency involved (if you disagree, please comment, I would be very happy to see another point of view). As such, I'm going to get to what I think is the central issue, which has more to do with a basic misconception.
I think that what bothers me most is what could be considered an amalgam of two common cognitive biases; recency and confirmation. We want to believe that we are the smartest, most well-informed people ever, and so we gravitate towards evidence that supports that notion. We are also most familiar with our contemporary situation, which puts evidence in support of our modern sensibilities at our finger tips at all times.
...And that's fine. It isn't new; our grandparents suffered from those biases, and so did the framers of the Constitution. You know what else we have in common with them? The ability to consider a large data set, identify patterns, and extrapolate possible futures. We don't have a monopoly on that kind of thinking. We didn't invent it, we inherited it.
By the time the Constitution was being written, humans had investigated cause and effect pretty thoroughly, and utilized geometry and calculus (which they had already invented) to describe and predict the movement of heavenly bodies with a high degree of precision. The ability of humans to evaluate a situation taking into account nuance and subtlety was well established long before the United States came into being (a process which also took place over about hundreds of years, not in a moment).
It's not even a very complicated thought process, and there is extensive documentation proving that people of that era (and every one before it) were aware of the evolution of western armaments, along with many other things. Does anyone really think that members of the colonial aristocracy didn't understand the significance of the difference between the weapons possessed by the Native Americans and European settlers? Are people so arrogant as to believe that the founding fathers didn't have a sense of history very nearly as advanced as our own? Do people think that imagination is a recent evolutionary development?
There is no chance that Thomas Jefferson wasn't consciously aware of at least the following progression:
Humans throw rocks at one another
Invent slings to better throw rocks
Invent bows and arrows, replace rocks as missiles
Invent crossbows, replace bows as delivery mechanisms
Invent primitive firearms, replace both the launcher and ammo
Invent muskets, replace delivery mechanism
With plenty of iterations in between these leaps (one of the big advances in crossbow technology was the windlass, which required less strength to more quickly cock the weapon). When we represent things like photon torpedoes, light sabers, and ice-nine, we are taking our current understanding of technology, and applying our imagination to a projection of observed trends to create that image. It's a brilliance that, as far as we know, is unique to humans, but isn't unique to humans in the past 30 years.
Temporally, our distance from those colonists is only about 200 years, even if the technological gap has accelerated lately. That is about the same distance as they were from the 16th century, a time that saw Copernicus and Tycho Brahe challenge the widespread assumptions about the heavens and propose a heliocentric rather than geocentric system. The founders were building a new democratic society on a continent that had hardly existed on maps 200 years earlier. They were the inheritors of a network of settlements created by Protestants as a result of Martin Luther and the Reformation, you guessed it, about 200 years earlier. These were massive scientific and philosophical advancements that had radically changed Western civilization, and to suggest that the founders would not have been self-aware enough to recognize social evolution is either silly or arrogant.
Are we writing laws to control the proliferation of civilian models of future-government space lasers? Of course not. We are dealing with our current problems, not trying to legislate the solution of tomorrow's problems.
[Understand that this isn't a gun control argument, that's just an example of one way that the false dichotomy that I am illustrating is manifest]
Quite frankly, any discussion of the framers' intentions is pointless because we either have their own words expressing their thoughts, or we are guessing. If it doesn't inform our attempts to solve our current problems, it's no more than an interesting academic exercise in the context of the current debates (I say this as someone with a history degree). The Constitution is an important document, but it isn't the Ten Commandments, carved in stone. If we want to sanctify it, then it should be lovingly retired and removed from issues of public governance, because at that point it is no more than an idol for dogmatic worship. If it is sacrosanct and immutable, then it is a religious document and has no place in politics. If we treat it as a vital, living part of our republic, however, then we should be able to shape it and change it to suit our needs the same way that we would a bill that funded local road improvements.
If the founding fathers didn't create rules for us today, it's because they trusted that we would be able to handle that ourselves. We shouldn't belittle their contributions to the growth of this nation in order to justify our own. The United States, as a nation, continues to evolve, as does the body of documentation that defines it. We should feel free to change the Constitution because it is our responsibility to safeguard the well-being of this country today, not because we need to correct the ignorance of yesterday.
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