Jan 17
To John Creech and his short article on with the approach the Martin Luther King Jr took to unjust laws, our Constitution needs to be amended continually. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Along with the fact that Creech does not fully report on Martin Luther King Jr. and his approach to the law, the key to incentivizing the writing of just laws and inhibiting the writing of unjust laws greatly rests not just on the contents of The Constitution, but on how that document is interpreted.
The legalistic approach to Interpreting The Constitution tends to promote the idea that unless a given right is explicitly state in that document, then a new amendment is required to have that right recognized. One of the main problems with such an approach is that either the majority or a significantly large portion of the minority of the people can prevent appropriate and needed rights of a marginalized group from being protected by law. American history is replete with examples of marginalized groups that have had to wait for centuries to have their rights recognized and some of these groups are still waiting for their equal rights. We should note that King was not a big fan of waiting for rights to be recognized.
A non-legalistic approach recognizes that not all of what is implied by The Constitution was realized by its writers and those who added amendments to it. And so they look at what is implied by the text of The Constitution to see if a right is being denied by some practice or existing law. That might have been King's approach as he described how equality for Blacks back in his day existed only as part of a promissory note found in our founding documents.
Both approaches contain tradeoffs. So it would seem that we need to reach a good balance between the two of them. Unfortunately, those holding to the originalist approach to interpreting The Constitution have failed to reach such a balance. That assessment also applies to some who see The Constitution as being living document.
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To Michael De Sapir and his article on how to appreciate 20th Century music despite where it breaks with past approaches to music. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Though De Sapir's article brought some pleasant surprises from what I expected, the following paragraph describes why I feel that his article is still wanting:
My plea is, give me music for its own sake, not music for the sake of history. Music is, or should be, about joy and delight and pleasure; it touches the emotions and stimulates the mind; but it should be approached with passion and involvement and not in sterile abstraction.
De Sapir's approach to music is similar, but not identical, to the approach that many conservative traditionalists have to music. For them, music is there to express one end of a continuum. For many conservative traditionalists, that end of the spectrum aligns itself with what they regard as being ideal. Here De Sapir gives more of an explicit description: joy, delight, pleasure. It is good that De Sapio sees music as a form of communication that should be full of passion. I full agree. But if music is only there to express the ideal, then our music is missing out on much of life. And it becomes more likely that music will be treated as an upper, a mood-altering drug.
But much of life consists of sadness, struggle, loss, and brokenness. Why is it that music should be prohibited from expressing those parts of life?
This brings us to the two reasons why people listen to music. The first seems to be, to a large extent, De Sapir's primary reason: to make one feel the way they want to feel. The second reason to look for music is that it expresses what life is like like now. And maybe I misread De Sapio's article, but, to me, music is too important to use it like one would use a mood-altering drug.
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