That’s why the rights of people today shouldn’t be dictated by a document written over a century ago. Idolizing a document over human rights is terrible.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana
That’s the full quote that people like to reduce to the final sentence.
Documents are a species’ way of remembering the past and establishing core ideals so that future generations don’t have to reinvent those wheels.
Not to say any given document is without flaws or captures the right values, and as our societies grow and mature so too should the values that we align ourselves with.
Idolizing a document over human rights is terrible.
Well, to be clear, human rights, other than being a vague philosophical concept, are also a document. Much younger, and much more sensible and uncompromising, but still also a document.
Hopefully if new rights are deemed to be needed, they can be added.
I mean, if a document has specific rights written on it and society moves forward and has need for new rights to be added then we should be ready to rewrite and add rights as opposed to treating the document as divine and unchangeable.
Slavery is legal in prisons here in the U.S.
Yes, precisely.
written into the constitution
That’s why the rights of people today shouldn’t be dictated by a document written over a century ago. Idolizing a document over human rights is terrible.
- George Santayana
That’s the full quote that people like to reduce to the final sentence.
Documents are a species’ way of remembering the past and establishing core ideals so that future generations don’t have to reinvent those wheels.
Not to say any given document is without flaws or captures the right values, and as our societies grow and mature so too should the values that we align ourselves with.
Well, to be clear, human rights, other than being a vague philosophical concept, are also a document. Much younger, and much more sensible and uncompromising, but still also a document.
Hopefully if new rights are deemed to be needed, they can be added.
I mean, if a document has specific rights written on it and society moves forward and has need for new rights to be added then we should be ready to rewrite and add rights as opposed to treating the document as divine and unchangeable.
Well you benefit from that very same document right here (free speech). The first thing tyrants do is get rid of things like constitutions.
I meant the ability to add rights and amend, not destroy the document.
Sadly. We should change that, but you-know-who would be against it, like they had been throughout the nation’s history.