Proposals for amending the Constitution
At the beginning of the month, I had the chance to speak at Arizona State University Law School alongside Jeff Rosen, Caroline Frederickson, and Ilan Wurman about the project we worked on to draft proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was a fun discussion that touched on a lot about how and why constitutions are written, and about the lessons we learned from negotiating resolutions between people who disagreed about a lot. You can watch it here:
Is it okay to mind your own business?
In my latest review for The Objective Standard, I look at a new book entitled Why It’s OK to Mind Your Own Business. I strongly agree with the title. But I was a little disappointed that the authors don’t do a very good job of defending the idea that it really is okay to pursue your own happiness. Here’s an excerpt:
[The authors] describ[e] the experiments of psychologists who have explored so-called pathological altruism—a term these researchers define as “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs.” Their research has shown that children who “scored very high in altruistic behavior and very low in self-actualizing behavior” turned out to be “very likely to share, care for other children, and help around the house,” but they were “not at all likely to enjoy their successful helping behavior . . . or to want to do things on their own.” Those results are unsurprising because the self-renunciation and perpetual “rescuing” that the ethics of self-sacrifice demand are inevitably destined to generate numb resignation in its subscribers or resentful cynicism in its survivors.
The conclusion one should draw here is that the morality of duty and self-sacrifice is inherently misguided: The primary aim of one’s ethical activity—just like the primary aim of one’s diet and exercise regimen—is not to rescue others but to live a healthy, productive, and joyful life. Human nature is inescapably individual. Unlike ants or bees (which appear to be truly collectivist creatures), we live through inalienable and autonomous selves—single coherent personalities, the survival and flourishing of which is our natural standard of moral value. Happiness and suffering are inescapably experienced by these selves, and each of us is in the best position to make the choices governing our own actions—that is, each of us is self-responsible.
This individuality inevitably affects everything we do—all our desires, goals, and our sense of success or failure—which is why a proper ethics must center around what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or individual flourishing, defined as “the life of the man who is active in accordance with virtue.” A morality that, by contrast, commands one to sacrifice happiness and live out a duty of serving as a perpetual lifeguard makes as little sense for human beings as a theory that bees should move out of the hive and live on their own, or an argument that horses should eat meat. (It’s no coincidence that the foremost advocates of selflessness, whether religious or political, have invariably found themselves fashioning wild schemes for transforming human nature itself.)
Defending the rights of taxpayers and public sector employees
My colleague Jon Riches and I were in the Arizona Supreme Court two weeks ago to argue our constitutional challenge to “release time,” a practice whereby the government pays money to the union, but doesn’t get any services in exchange for the money; rather, the union gets to spend that money on an employee who works for the union. In the Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit, we argue that this violates the Arizona Constitution’s prohibition on “gifts” of public funds to private entities, but in a previous case, called Cheatham, the Arizona Supreme Court said it doesn’t, because this money is really just “compensation” paid to employees. So in our case, we argue that if that’s true, then “release time” is still unconstitutional, because employees are forced to give it up to the union, which then spends the money lobbying the government and engaging in other kinds of speech—in violation of the constitutional prohibition on “compelled speech.” You can read more about the case here and watch Jon’s argument here (by clicking on Gilmore v. Gallego).
Visiting Dickinson, Wilson, and Pitcher
I traveled this month to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to speak at Penn State Dickinson School of Law about the constitutional thought of Frederick Douglass. Douglass celebrated February 14 as his birthday, and he also died in February, making it an apt time to remember this great man. I wrote about him for his birthday for the Goldwater Institute’s blog and for the anniversary of his death for the Cato Institute’s blog.
Anyway, while I was in Carlisle, I got to visit the grave of Molly Pitcher and the site of the home of James Wilson.
Wilson is still, unfortunately; under-appreciated. Second only to Madison as a constitutional thinker, he is not only one of the few to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution, but he later served on the Supreme Court, and taught law. Probably his greatest contribution was to the theory of “sovereignty” as represented in the Constitution. Specifically, he argued that states were never sovereign, and that the union of states came into existence in the Declaration, not the Constitution. These arguments anticipated by decades the arguments that Lincoln and other unionists would use against secession; had people listened, we could’ve avoided the Civil War.
People did listen to Molly Pitcher, on the other hand. She was quite a character, and well deserves the elaborate monument they’ve given her—although the Ginsbergian jabot is…probably a bit much.
New review of Freedom’s Furies
The folks at The Objective Standard ran a review of my book Freedom’s Furies, which you can read here. Excerpt:
With carefully selected detail, Sandefur captures essential currents of 20th-century thought with its seismic shifts in politics, literature, and cultural values. He shows how the three “furies” used their philosophic understanding to criticize and undermine these trends—and replace them with a new vision of freedom and human flourishing.
Keys to the Kingdom
Christina ran in this month’s Disney Princess Half-Marathon weekend (a 5K, a 10K, and a half-marathon), and brought me along so nobody would steal her purse from the hotel room. While there, we had the chance to take the “Keys to the Kingdom” tour of Disney World.
It’s a five-hour back-stage tour (they give you lunch) that includes a look at everything from their state-of-the-art trash compactors to test-runs of parade floats, to the famous tunnels (“utilidor”) underneath the park. In fact, as the guide explained, it’s not really “underneath” the park, so much as that the park is on the second story of a two-story structure. You couldn’t actually dig a tunnel system, because it’s built on Florida swamp land.
The tour was a fascinating experience; and a real testament to the ingenuity and hard work that went into building, and goes into maintaining, this incredible theme park system.
We tend to take “Disney” (the films, the parks, the entire institution in the abstract) for granted. In fact, it’s an extraordinary empire of joy and optimism that’s unimaginable in any civilization before ours. And it faces the extraordinary challenge of preserving and articulating a national self-conception even while that conception is constantly shifting and evolving. Walt himself, and the company he founded, are (among other things) avatars of The American Dream. But how we think about that Dream has itself changed a lot since 1955, and Disney’s had to simultaneously preserve and keep up with the changes. It can’t afford to turn into an antique, yet at the same time, it can’t afford to brush away the nostalgia that is such a cornerstone of its identity. And as it walks that tightrope, every step it takes is watched over by millions of fans who want to tug it in one direction or another, who resent anything they perceive as deviation, and who are constantly projecting upon it their own conceptions of what it ought to stand for and what it ought to say. In all of this, Disney as an institution is very much like America itself in miniature. And that, of course, is why people tend to have the same mix of emotions about that they do about the country—alternately loving it and (claiming to) hate it.
Marching forward
I’ll be heading to Oregon next week to speak at the University of Oregon Law School. Then on March 11, I’ll be speaking at ASU (main campus) about the ongoing Supreme Court cases involving the “Administrative State.” (Please join us!) Then on March 21, I’ll be speaking at the Federalist Society at ASU (law school campus) as part of a discussion of the Electoral College.
Jazz Impressions of Japan
I’ve lately been enjoying Dave Brubeck’s album Jazz Impressions of Japan, which he and his group recorded after touring that country. (They also did a Jazz Impressions of New York, Jazz Impressions of Eurasia, and Jazz Impressions of the U.S.A.) It’s a short album, which was released in 1964, and then largely forgotten until it was released on CD in 2001. It’s upbeat, with lovely moments—the quartet at its best, really. I find his later work sometimes cloying (his Christmas album is unlistenable), but at their height, the quartet was fantastic, especially Paul Desmond, whose saxophone is, as usual, so beautiful that it’s really in a class by itself.
Until next month!