It will always be fascinating to me how the written word is used to connect brains and facilitate change. Whether it’s the power of the Gospel to change lives–transmitted via letter and encoded in canon–or the open “blogosphere” of the early internet that bypassed the establishment media, little snippets of text seem to resonate with our brains.
I think what we have now is a demented version of that natural attraction. The algorithms that continue to rule our content and the bazillion dollar websites that have captured our eyeballs with their redefined funnels of truth are abusing our desire to be connected via words. But more on that later. We’re here to talk about 200+ year old essays about the government written by John Jay.
The beginning of Federalist No. 2. Clearly not SEO optimized.
Federalist #2 can be summarized in these points:
We’re all in this together.
We always wanted to be together, until a few people threw that in to question with questionable motives.
God has blessed us with amazing resources and we are unified in that.
We share a common heritage of ancestry, language, religion, principles of government, and similar manners and customs.
The current government is inadequate in reflecting this unity, and the new Constitution will be better.
So the overwhelming sense of this paper is “unity”. Which brings up a couple interesting contrasts with today.
The Federal government has become huge and dominant over the states. I wonder if the argument for unity has come true in this drift to centralization? Has this top-heavy implementation of what the Federalist Papers advocated for actually resulted in unity?
Jay warned that these calls for disunity were to be treated with suspicion. Today, calls for unity are fewer and further between. Rather than accentuating common heritage of ancestry, language, religion, principles of government, similar manners and customs, we are increasingly called to identify with smaller groups, and find alternate identities. Once we find our identity group, vast volumes of recently brewed philosophy encourage us to be in conflict with other groups. And if the philosophy doesn’t speak to us, then the algorithms will.
Much more to think about. But until then, here’s an AI-generated picture of John Jay making a selfie for Federalist No 2.
Clearly these were the OG influencers. Do you think today’s “influencers” could make wigs and pirate shirts fashionable?
I read somewhere that the written word will be humanity’s only true form of time travel. It is a method of communicating across the ages thoughts directly from one mind to another. When you read a word, the writer reaches out across minutes, years, or eons and puts those thoughts directly into your head for examination.
Video, audio, and other means have a similar effect but there are so many competing factors. The written word is the most direct method.
Is it any wonder, then, that God chose writing to convey His will across all these hundreds of years? The uniqueness of this medium is manifest in the gravity of the phrase “the Word of God”. Indeed, in John 1 God Himself is defined as “The Word”.
A 1455 Gutenberg Bible in the Library of Congress. While the age of the document itself is amazing, the fact that the words reach out through thousands of years is really hard to fathom.
Ok so shove me in the shallow waters here. I’m only fixin’ to talk about the government.
It is a trip to think that the direction of government can be completely changed with words. Pamphlets, newspapers, doorhangers, and facebook post can all convey thoughts to a critical mass of people that will change the course of history. It’s why our First Amendment is so important.
Pamphlets like “The American Crisis”, by Thomas Paine were critical in motivating people during the Revolutionary War.
There are many other examples of how this has happened throughout history, but I want to focus on a collection of moderately obscure works called the Federalist papers.
Most people are familiar with what the Federalist Papers are. But it seems like very few people (including me) have actually dug into them to any degree. This is understandable given the sheer volume and density of the material. But in a time when the validity of the US Constitution is questioned at the highest levels of government, I think it might be a good exercise to dig in to such a thorough effort to justify it’s adoption.
In a nutshell, the Federalist papers (simply labeled “Federalist No. #” where # is a Roman numeral) were a series of articles across several New York newspapers arguing in favor of a new Constitution vs. the old Articles of Confederation.
Our original “Articles of Confederation”. Note the relatively boring lede: “To All to Whom”? Doesn’t really work on a bumper sticker. It was worth scrapping the whole thing just to get the much better “We the People”.
Federalist #1 was published in “The Independent Journal” on October 27, 1787, and was written Alexander Hamilton. One month earlier, the new Constitution had been proposed.
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.
-“Publius” in Federalist No. 1
Here are my summarizing points:
This nation is unique. There are fundamental questions on how a country should function that are being addressed here and nowhere else.
We’re at a turning point here. Either we update how our country is going to work, or things will descend into chaos. It will affect all of humanity negatively.
That chaos will create (and is creating) power for some people, so they will oppose a new constitution.
They will try to hold on to this power by painting the new constitution as oppressive.
Some people are also planning to dissolve or split the union of states to create more power for themselves.
It takes a strong government to protect liberty.
I’m writing under a pseudonym so that the arguments will stand for themselves.
We’re going to go over the utility of a unified, federal government for your political prosperity.
We’re going to show how the existing Articles of Confederation aren’t good enough.
We will show how a new government as proposed in the Constitution is necessary to preserve our original ideas for a republic. We will list the reasons why it will do this.
We will compare it with the current state constitutions.
We will also show how a unified republic as defined in the Constitution is more secure.
So essentially Federalist #1 is an opening statement for the series. It talks a little about why they are being written, what they hope to accomplish, and what points they are going to make.
It’s interesting to think that some of the most fundamental values and structures of our country were once open to such debate. I’m looking forward to digging in further.
