Interesting Thought

I'm reading Simon Schama's The American Future and enjoyed this bit of text where he argues that school children shouldn't be taught the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead, they should be taught the following text from Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Schama then goes to point out that Jefferson's belief that rationality was enough is undermined by Jefferson's treatment of his slaves and by the subsequent history of the United States:

The fervour of the abolitionist evangelicals complicates the way we might feel about the 'wall of separation' erected by the Virginia Statute [on religious tolerance] and the First Amendment between morality and politics. Of course it was entirely possible to arrive at an abhorrence of slavery from rationally derived ethics; the degradation of man to commodity; the violation of natural right to sovereignty over person, and so on. Historically, though, both in the early nineteenth century, and again in the 1960s, the force of shame directed at slave-holders and segregationists was religious. Realistically, it is unlikely that the propagation of Enlightenment views of humanity would have swayed millions of nineteenth-century white Americans against slavery. After all, such moral principles convinced Jefferson and Patrick Henry of the infamy of the institution, but still failed to move them to liberate their own slaves, so what hope was there of persuading less high-minded southerners to make sacrifice of their property, or what Henry described as 'inconveniencing' himself?

It is a tough question. History is littered with high political principles while ordinary society ignores the principles. Religious views have fueled deep changes in society, but also religions have created their own chains and madness. For me, it simply comes down to the fact that humans are complicated. The task of living a good life is a never-ending struggle because temptation abounds and the cast of characters -- ordinary humans -- continually changes as the old die and young are born and the lessons have to be learned all over again.

As for the Pledge of Allegiance, I think it is funny that it was composed by a Christian socialist. All those right wingers who demand that every child recite this bit of propaganda don't realize the origin of the pledge.

As for the point about separation of Church and State, the Pledge of Allegiance is a good lesson in history. From Wikipedia:

In 1940 the Supreme Court, in deciding the case of Minersville School District v. Gobitis, ruled that students in public schools could be compelled to swear the Pledge, even Jehovah's Witnesses like the Gobitases, who considered the flag salute to be idolatry. In the wake of this ruling, there was a rash of mob violence and intimidation against Jehovah's Witnesses. In 1943 the Supreme Court reversed its decision, ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that "compulsory unification of opinion" violated the First Amendment.

Personally, I believe not just in a separation of Church and State, but a removal of the right of a State to dictate public oaths and other acts of propaganda. Again, the history of the Pledge of Allegiance shows the swamp that you enter when the State begins dictating oaths of allegiance:

Swearing of the pledge is accompanied by a salute. An early version of the salute, adopted in 1892, was known as the Bellamy salute. It ended with the arm outstretched and the palm upwards. It eventually evolved to palm downward. Because of the similarity between the Bellamy salute and the Nazi salute, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted the hand-over-the-heart gesture as the salute to be rendered by civilians during the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in the United States, instead of the Bellamy salute.

I've never seen any historical film of the little school children doing Hitler salutes while "pledging" allegiance, but the picture is pretty horrifying.

Another bit of historical fact that most people don't realize is that oaths are malleable to the political winds. During the McCarthy era where people were force to "swear allegiance" or lose their jobs, this bit of political theatre was added to the Pledge of Allegiance:

"Under God" was officially incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, it had been in earlier use.

In short, the First Amendment was undercut by the very people who demanded a daily oath to the Republic. Talk about blind stupidity! Those who were demanding the unthinking recitations of "allegiance" themselves didn't understand the very principals upon which the country was built. Bizarre! You don't build commitment by threatening to beat it into somebody. Loyalty and commitment are built up, emulated, learned, and drawn out of people by idealism. Not by threats and punishment.

And these lessons never seem to be learned:

A bill — H.R. 2389 — was introduced in Congress in 2005 which, if enacted into law, would have stripped the Supreme Court and most federal courts of the power to consider any legal challenges to government requiring or promoting of the Pledge of Allegiance. H.R. 2389 was passed by the House of Representatives in July 2006, but failed due to the Senate's not taking it up. Even if a similar bill is enacted, its practical effect may not be clear: proponents of the bill have argued that it is a valid exercise of Congress's power to regulate the jurisdiction of the federal courts under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution, but opponents question whether Congress has the authority to prevent the Supreme Court from hearing claims based on the Bill of Rights (since amendments postdate the original text of the Constitution and may thus implicitly limit the scope of Article III, Section 2).

Somehow "patriots" feel they can dictate patriotism. They rely on propaganda rather than truth. So we come full circle back to the wording of Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom. He argues that the best political climate is one in which ideas are free to contend and people build allegiance to an idea because it persudes them, not because some politician dictated the precise words they have to mouth each day.

This lesson is over 200 years old and is still imperfectly learned by Americans. When will they take their founding principals to heart and really, really learn this lesson?