By Damien K. Picariello
In honor of Constitution Day this past September, I wrote a column for The Sumter Item calling for "humility and charity" in our politics. I ended that column with a quote from Judge Learned Hand, which appears in a speech called The Spirit of Liberty.
"The spirit of liberty," says the judge, "is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." In other words: Part of living in a free society is learning how to live with disagreement and recognizing that we might be wrong, even when (especially when) we feel really strongly that we're right.
This Fourth of July, as we celebrate American independence, some of us may be tired of focusing on our disagreements. But it's important to remember that that disagreement about important things has been with us since the start of our republic - and it's not going away any time soon.
Our founders understood that disagreement about important things is unavoidable. James Madison writes about this in the Federalist Papers, where he says:
"As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves."
In other words: We're always going to disagree. And when we disagree, each of us is going to think that our own opinion is right, and opposing views are wrong. This is part of human nature: We reason imperfectly, and then we insist that we're right. There's no way out of this, and nobody is immune.
Our founders had first-hand experience with this in the handful of years between the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and the drafting of our Constitution in 1787. Once free from British rule, Americans couldn't stop disagreeing with one another about important things, and they had a really hard time figuring out how to manage these disagreements without falling apart. Eventually, our founders designed a government that they hoped would manage our most vociferous disagreements in a peaceful way - because they knew that these kinds of disagreements are a permanent part of human life. As former congressman Lee Hamilton wrote in The Sumter Item just last week: In American politics, "nothing is ever settled," and "winning is never total." Our arguments are just as perpetual as our union.
We have lots of mechanisms for managing disagreement in the United States, from regular elections to the protections of our Bill of Rights. But it's probably not realistic - since we're all only human - to think that we're going to stop disagreeing about important things. Instead, this Independence Day, let's celebrate a United States in which we're all free to speak our minds - however much we disagree with one another.
And let's remember, with Judge Learned Hand, that we just might be wrong.
Damien K. Picariello is associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina Sumter.
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July 05, 2020 at 05:00PM
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OPINION: On Independence Day, we can live with disagreement - Sumter Item
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