{"id":2031,"date":"2011-04-12T20:02:49","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T01:02:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2031"},"modified":"2011-04-12T20:02:49","modified_gmt":"2011-04-13T01:02:49","slug":"our-anachronistic-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2031","title":{"rendered":"Our Anachronistic Constitution?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just started watching another DVD \u201cGreat Course\u201d from The Teaching Company, \u201cChaos\u201d<\/a> by Prof. Steven Strogatz. Pretty good so far, although I’m only half way into lecture 3 (of 24). However, Prof. Strogatz said something in lecture 2 that kind-of worries me. He was speaking about Sir Isaac Newton and how Newton’s laws once implied an entirely rational, predictable, understandable world. I.e., an orderly \u201cblock universe\u201d <\/a> where the past, present and future are all just aspects of an already-determined \u201cblock\u201d; i.e. where everything has always been pre-determined. Of course, Newton’s ideas eventually developed into and were superseded by scientific concepts allowing for, even requiring randomness, contingency and unpredictability; i.e., \u201cchaos\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, back when Newton was very popular amidst the educated class, the United States of America declared their independence, and a few years later wrote a Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was one of the key authors of those documents. And as it turns out, Jefferson was a big fan of Newton. So big that he used some Newtonian concepts in the Declaration of Independence. Strogatz gives a few examples of wording reflecting the notion of an orderly, rationally acting world; e.g. \u201ctruths\u201d that are \u201cself-evident\u201d (akin to Euclidian geometric proofs), and \u201ccauses\u201d that \u201cimpel\u201d separation from previous governments. <\/p>\n

OK, the Constitution is a bit more \u201cnuts and bolts\u201d. Still, the D of I states the philosophy behind it. The Constitution is a blueprint to \u201cform\u201d a union and \u201csecure\u201d blessings. Still pretty deterministic, still quite Newtonian. Today, you can still find politicians and commentators who hail our Constitution as the best roadmap for government ever created by human-kind, and the light into the future. They imply that it will still be so in a hundred years. And I hope they are right. <\/p>\n

However . . . the world has changed quite a bit since the D of I and Constitution were written. Back then, the world was a simpler place. And simple systems tend to be relatively orderly and predictable. However, when systems become complex and interwoven and interdependent, as our world is rapidly becoming, the potential for chaotic side-effects increases. Black swans appear more and more frequently. Is our Constitution ready for that?<\/p>\n

I don’t have an answer to that, and I definitely don’t know what would be better. All I’m saying is that the US Constitution worked magnificently for us for around 200 years, and provided a blueprint for many other nations during that time (serving most of them quite well too). But in the past 25 years or so, the world starting going thru some really big changes, changes that the Founders wouldn’t believe. They lived in a Newton-like world of predictable causes and effects; today we live in a complex \u201ccloud\u201d of \u201cemergent phenomenon\u201d based on probabilities and \u201cstrange attractors\u201d. Big and unpredictable deviations happen more and more often. And the USA seems to be struggling quite a bit with that, in terms of economics, foreign relations, politics, etc. Our leaders are hitting buttons that once worked, but don’t seem to be having the same effect anymore. Can we get our mojo back? Or is our blueprint out of date?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just started watching another DVD \u201cGreat Course\u201d from The Teaching Company, \u201cChaos\u201d by Prof. Steven Strogatz. Pretty good so far, although I’m only half way into lecture 3 (of 24). However, Prof. Strogatz said something in lecture 2 that kind-of worries me. He was speaking about Sir Isaac Newton and how Newton’s laws once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2033,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions\/2033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}