This diary came about as a response to a question raised in another diary. How do you teach a kid about constitutional law? Isn't that a difficult thing to do in a period when the government is engaged in trying to transition back to a tyranny where we are ruled by the divine rights of kings?
My answer is to teach it in process terms. First give a little of the history that led to the establishment of the written law, covenents, and constitutions that establish, justify and sustain governments.
Don't make it too complicated or too specific to our constitution, but just generalize the idea and keep it simple. Maybe touch on the idea of a Republic, how different people have different roles and ideally each contributes according to their abilities and benefits according to their needs.
This is where the concept of the Narmer stance comes in.
A person can become a leader by force, or where the group is too large for the force of one man to be a sustainable organizing principle generation after generation, through persuasion; but the most frequent representations are similar to the Narmer palette which shows control of the land through the threat of the use of force.
In the Narmer palette the threat is to Aker, the personified god of the land itself, and to the irrigated land measured out as fields known as st3ts (estates). This stance is so common in ancient palettes its known as the narmer stance and is a symbol of control.
In early civilizations everyone participated equally, then as city states grew into kingdoms and kingdoms into empires only landowners had any voice in the affairs of state, and landowners became an aristocracy comprised of nobles who supported a king with their service.
You can find the earliest form of a constitution I know of documented in the palette of the scorpion king
That makes it possible for that leader to grant land in return for service to dig the ditch. I think thats a good analogy for how government works.
We could think of the constitution in terms of forming a covenant to work together for the common good.
Even in the earliest organizations by gene (kin) and oinkos (tribe) and phratre (brotherhood) there is the exchange of a benefit(land)in return for the ability to perform (service).
We might think of feudalism as one of the means a leader uses to implement an idea that improves everyones chances of survival. For example, if a leader can muster enough people to work together to dig a ditch to bring water to a field improving the chances of a sucessful crop and everyone having enough food to survive.
That leader then controls the water that is used to irrigate the land. The control of the water leads to the control of the land and the control of the land means the control of the people who live on the land.
There might be some sort of political analogy in there somewhere.
Now you could show how all politics is local and nobles function a little bit like political party hacks and elected officials, and from time to time they rebel against their kings as with King John and the Magna Carta, or King George and the Declaration of Independence, but basically the system remains pretty stable.
You could also show how as infrastructure and more rapid transportation and communications and control improved, gradually politics was expanded to include merchants as well as nobles and then guilds, and eventually workers.
Political power is the ability to persuade and to build consensus. Written laws and a constitution make it possible for the cooperative arrangements that persuade us to consent to be governed to become formalized and sustainable.
A Constitution provides and sustains the justification for a government by documenting the terms under which it shall receive the consent of the governed.
Now we get to the part that I think is pretty cool, which is where people realized that you could substitute the rule of law for the rule of a king.
You could even make the case that since the time of Hamurappi the written law has been viewed as carved in stone, and since the time of Moses as housed in an ark and the ark placed in a sanctuary and thus made sacred in the same way as the divine rights of kings were considered sacred.
You could say that in our system the written law was intended to be sovereign over the divine rights of kings, that no man, not even the king was above the law.
It would thus follow that what the Bush administration is doing is challenging that concept by claiming the king is above the law, because though both are sacred and divine, King George has a Defense Department and the ability to do warrantless surveillance.
Bush is taking the Narmer Stance and controlling the land by the threat that he has the power to destroy it.