Why History; Why the US Constitution

Why is the US Constitution still relavant today? For that matter, why should we bother to learn from history/the mistakes of our past?

How can something that happened fifty, one hundred, one thousand, or even one million or more years ago still have relevance today?

People are different today - smarter, and more sophisticated, right?

If there's any one barrier of resistance to folks' understanding ideas like, 'History repeats itself,' it's those of the sort mentioned above. The answer is, yes, people are different, but consider: people are not that different. Whether you are an evolutionist, or a creationist, the fact is, since the beginning of humanity, people have not changed in any fundamental way - humans are still, by definition, physiologically, the same as they were from the beginning. And that, in a nut shell is why we are able to learn from history, and why the US Constitution is still relevant even in the technologically advanced, and so cultually different world of the modern day.

This human sameness is why history continues to be a relevant teacher, though it's tempting to look at history and think, "What could 100 or 200 years ago possibly have to do with today?" But when we look to history for answers, we're not asking history to teach us about auto repair, computers, or flying an airplane. We're looking at much more general aspects of history, and when we do this, we see that things, in the abstract, the general, have not changed nearly as much, if at all, as compared to more specific, and therefore superficial, aspects like technology, and cultual norms. People, interacting with one another; congressmen debating, sponsoring legislation; international diplomacy; at a fundamental level, none of the above is carried out in such a way as to render history irrelevant.

And the US Constitution is not a document couched in limitations of specifics, but rather it's couched in terms of principles, the abstract, general case, and as such continues to be relevant today - though there have been superficial cultural changes, there has been no change that would render the US Constitution irrelevant.

So when I open a history book, I'm not interested in the strange clothes, and wigs the players of history wore. I'm not interested in the strange way they talked. But I am interested in the meaning, the import of what they had to say. I'm interested about issues like justice, freedom, and so on. I'm interested in issues like tyranny, dictatorship, totalitarianism. These issues are relevant today, no less than thousands of years ago, if not more so. And that's because people are more or less, no different today than they were then. Indeed, people are essentially the same today, as when the first human beings roamed the planet - whether you believe that to be thousands, or millions of years ago.

And that's why the US Consitution is still relevant today. Also, that's why we'll always be able to learn from history.

General principles apply today, as they did then.

Bryan McGregor Hoover
bhoover@wecs.com