Book Club: The Roots of American OrderChapter 1

I know you will all be shocked to hear that I am already in love with this book. I think for now my plan will be to write a Real Post on Tuesdays, and then post my favorite quotes on Wednesdays. We’ll see if I can actually pull that off over time, but for now that is the format I’m hoping for follow for the duration of this book club.

So. Onto my post, of course.

I want to ponder three main points coming out of this chapter:

1. Order is the most important thing. Considering that this chapter is titled Order, the First Need of All, it should come as no surprise that this ranked as a “main point.” He he.
2. The best order comes from within, rather than being imposed from without. This is my interpretation, of course.
3. Our American order comes from things that precede us. In other words, history has given us many gifts.

Much though I hated the Communists, I saw then that even the grim order of Communism is better than no order at all. Many might survive under Communism; no one could survive in general disorder.

This reminds me of the stories Siah’s grandpa used to tell. He and Grandma were missionaries in China during the Communist takeover. I expected horror stories, but they had none {of course, the Communists kicked them out of the country before things really got going}. Instead, he always emphasized how horrible the streets were, and how the Communists cleaned them up. They got rid of the prostitutes, etcetera. {One wonders what they did to these people, but still.}

Kirk writes:

[O]nce a revolution or war has demolished an established order, a people find it imperative to search for principles of order afresh, that they may survive. Once they have undone an old order, revolutionaries proceed to decree a new order–often an order harsher than the order which they had overthrown.

The idea is that disorder cries out for order.

This reminds me of what is sometimes done with out-of-control children. They are sent to military-type boarding schools, where rigid schedules and forms attempt to bring order out of chaos. I don’t know what the results of this are, but I have known a number of men whose lives greatly benefited from the order found in the military as young adults.

The Best Order Comes from Within
The order imposed from without is militaristic, especially when we are speaking on a cultural level of the government imposing order on the people. It is easy to get offended at new laws. I myself am constantly offended by them, and I do believe it will one day make an secret anarchist of me. But the point remains that many {not all} new laws are crafted to make up for some insufficiency in the character of a particular segment of society.

I think, for instance, of the handful of judges who have tried to attack, outlaw, or regulate homeschooling in some way. Some of these judges might have an ax to grind with homeschoolers in some sort of perverse, anti-liberty sense. But when I have read up on the jobs these judges have to do, I realize they are dealing with deadbeat parents most of the time–to the point where they no longer trust parents to actually be good at their jobs.

Now, jaded people should not make laws, and judges ought not be activists anyhow.

But the point remains that the order they were seeking to impose was likely born out of their perception of a disordered morality inside of the homes of one too many families.

Kirk writes:

The “inner order” of the soul and the “outer order” of society being intimately linked, we discuss in this book both aspects of order. Without a high degree of private moral order among the American people, the reign of law could not have prevailed in this country.

Kirk later explains a bit of the decline of Rome, and concludes:

Like Plato before him, Cicero understood that the problem of order is simultaneously personal and social: Roman men and Roman justice had declined together. It is so still.

History has Blessed the United States with Order
I only point this out for some of you who are not reading along, and may not entirely “get” the point of this book from the other two posts. We are going to walk through history, touching on the parts that have most influenced American order. This means: Biblical Hebrew culture, Greek and Roman culture, pre- and post-Reformation English culture, and American colonial culture itself {among other things}.

Earlier this month, Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg advised the Egyptians to look elsewhere when crafting a new constitution:

America’s judicial representative counseled the Egyptian people that “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.” Dismissing the document that has ensured the God-given “blessings of liberty” of the American people for over 200 years, Ginsburg instead pointed to countries whose people look to government — rather than the Almighty — as the creator of their rights.

“I might look at the constitution of South Africa,” Ginsburg suggested, referring to the once proud and self-sufficient nation that has teetered on the edge of anarchy for the past 20 years. “It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done,” she said…

She also suggested such UN-modeled documents as the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms implemented by Canada…along with the Convention on Human Rights of the European Union (EU)…

“Yes, why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world?” encouraged Ginsburg to her Egyptian audience.

I don’t really want to discuss her suggestions {though the article I linked takes a few shots at them}. Instead, I found it interesting that all of her examples were from very recent history. Kirk talks about exactly this in his foreword:

T.S. Eliot remarked once that we have been condemning the rising generation to a new form of provincialism: to the provinciality of time, which imprisons men and women in their own little present moment.

We often call this sort of thing chronological snobbery.

This is not to say that new documents cannot possibly have any wisdom. That is not the point. The point is that the American document was written using the knowledge of human history. {Not to mention Scripture.} To act as if it no longer applies is really to say that all of the past no longer applies, either.

Justice Ginsburg is notorious in her desire to look around and use documents other than the Constitution she is supposed to be interpreting and applying. She obviously finds it insufficient. But at the very least, she could have encouraged the Egyptians to do as our Founders did, which is to reach into the depths of great civilizations of the past, and mine their jewels for the benefit of our progeny. Instead, she suggested the Egyptians trap themselves in time.

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Read More:
–Buy the book and join in the conversation
–More book club posts linked at Cindy’s blog