The fathers and invention
By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff
Wired to the gills, plugged into the future, into the next millennium we hurtle, with our modems and our modern media and our medical advances and our marvelous machines too numerous to count. All that - plus a political system that was drafted in ink with a quill pen by men in knee breeches and powdered wigs who traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia in creaky horse-drawn carriages along primitive roads that flooded out each spring, cracked in the sun each summer, and were rutted in ice each winter.
The Constitution that will govern us in the new Age of Uncertainty is, of course, more than simply a parchment document and a collection of clauses. It is the American liturgy. It is both prayer book and hymnal. It is the object of civic worship itself. But the Constitution that created the American political institutions that will govern us in the 21st century is also the ultimate political expression of the 18th-century rationalism of the Enlightenment.
So now, on the brow of the new century and as the new world begins to emerge from the mists, we cannot avoid considering whether the Constitution and the system it created can ''endure for ages to come'' and ''meet the various crises of human affairs.'' Those words, which sprang from the timeless mind of Chief Justice John Marshall, were written in 1819. But now, as a new millennium approaches, the challenges to the old document so revered in our public life, the ancient assumptions so rooted in our approach to political discourse, the weathered institutions so exquisitely balanced in power and prerogative, cannot easily be deflected.
''There have been challenges to the Constitution throughout this remarkable century, but the challenges will be even greater in the next century,'' says Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. ''New technology has ironically changed all our ideas about people and national boundaries and communication. We can now tinker with life - create it, and alter it, and do all sorts of things to tweak it and change its vulnerability to disease. All this poses whole new challenges and strains.''
Some of these strains on the system are becoming apparent even now, though the clashes they are prompting haven't yet burst onto the front pages. The dispute about the ability of states to tax transactions on the Internet and to derive revenues from commerce crossing their borders, for example, is a challenge to state sovereignty, one of the principal ideas of the 1780s. The growth of global commerce is a challenge to the rule of national law, which was what the Philadelphia convention in 1787 was all about. The growth of international regulatory bodies like the International Telecommunications Union and the World International Property Organization constitutes a challenge to national identity, which is what the Constitution helped create. The advances in biotechnology are a challenge to centuries-old assumptions about the nature of human beings, assumptions that are at the heart of American political institutions. The new struggle to balance access to information and privacy is a challenge to the traditional balance of power between the individual and the state and - the twist for the 21st century - between commercial interests and the individual.
None of these challenges - the fruits of R&D operations, the products of laboratories, the harvests from that remarkably fecund breeding ground of American ingenuity, the garage - could have been anticipated by James Madison of Virginia, Alexander Hamilton of New York, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, and James Wilson of Philadelphia, who emerged as the architects of national government at a time when the business of New England was the importation of grain and flour and the export of meat, butter, timber, and fish - and the buttery rum that was distilled in Boston.
The American political system was born in a time when life expectations were modest and were governed by nature and chance. We are approaching a time when advances in genetic engineering are transforming our expectations of the human species, providing us with frightening choices, altering nature itself, crowding out the caprices of chance, both its dangers and its delights.
The Constitution was drafted three years before Samuel Slater set up America's first fully mechanized textile factory, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. We are approaching a century in which the ability to create wondrous new products through ever-miniaturized means of production in Pawtuckets yet unknown is multiplying with astonishing speed.
The Constitution was written five years before the first information revolution, when the Post Office Act of 1792 made it possible to spread news to remote parts of the continent with a speed that the drafters could not have imagined. We are approaching a century in which rapid, almost instantaneous communication is a given, not a goal.
The political system was conceived with the assumption that the public would have very little information and that the governed would be isolated from one another in remote population pockets scattered along the Atlantic Seaboard and the forbidding eastern slope of the Appalachians. We are approaching a century in which information will be limited only by virtue of its immense volume and accessibility, and Americans - first rural, then urban, then suburban, and now exurban - have spread not only from sea to sea but have filled in many of the empty spaces in between.
The skeleton of American politics was constructed before the Industrial Revolution, before what Emerson called the ''age of tools,'' at a time when steam engines were operating in England but were just beginning to be introduced in North America. We are approaching a period when space flight will look like the last century's dream, when the New Frontier will seem the last century's inspiration, and when the newest frontiers won't be distant places in the physical universe, such as the moon, but distant places in the human imagination, such as the Internet.
In truth, in the United States, the twine of technology (which we often think of as being part of the arts of commerce and science) always has been wrapped tightly around the Constitution (which we regard as the province of the political arts).
In that remarkable year of 1787, Oliver Evans already had begun operating a water-powered mill, complete with conveyor belts, an invention that eliminated human labor in the production of flour. That year, the power loom was invented. That year, Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia merchant whose ideas were circulated widely among the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and whose notions informed the framers' world view, had a vision: ''By wind and water machines we can make pig and bar iron, nail rods, tires, sheet-iron, sheet-copper, sheet-brass, anchors, meal of all kinds, gunpowder.''
The big debates that year were about the nature of republican government, the separation of powers, the protection of personal rights, the extension of liberty, the challenges of what Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead called the ''excess of democracy,'' the dangers of what Benjamin Franklin called the ''constant kind of welfare between the governing & governed,'' the dangers of what George Mason called the ''oppressions & injustice'' of democracy - and, often overlooked, the role of manufacturing in American culture.
The framers agonized about ideology - and technology. ''The questions of the introduction of domestic manufactures and the role that labor-saving machines might play in American life,'' the historian John F. Kasson wrote, ''were considered not as isolated economic issues but as matters affecting the entire character of society.''
Then, as now, technology was ripping American culture from its moorings, forcing the nation out of the safe harbors of the familiar into the high seas of the unknown. That is the overwhelming, overbearing single truth of American history. Henry Adams noted that he and his ''18th century, trogloditic Boston were suddenly cut apart - separated forever'' by the opening of the Boston & Albany Railroad, the new Cunard steamships, the wondrous telegraphs. In our own century, the technology of the American kitchen that was the setting for Richard Nixon's signature Cold War confrontation, the ''kitchen debate'' with Nikita Khrushchev only 40 years ago this year - a blink in the eye of history - is now obsolete, making the voyage from the modern to the museum piece a mere stroll across four decades. The transformation, of course, is even swifter in the computer world, where last year's high technology is today's trash.
But as Americans were inventing a new form of government at the end of the 18th century, they were proceeding with the conscious knowledge that, as they were doing so, they were also inventing a culture, one that was relentlessly, irrevocably, and unambiguously technological.
They sought to construct the two together, and they built into their political structure the suppleness to absorb the shocks they knew that technology would bring. ''The genius of the Founding Fathers was the creation of an infinitely flexible system,'' says Jere R. Daniell, a Dartmouth College specialist in 18th-century American history. ''The idea was to create a system for a very pragmatic people. It's worked so far to accommodate all the great change since the Great Depression, and it may be well equipped to survive into the next century.''
Indeed, in the great sweep of American history, it is remarkable how much the political system has been able to accommodate - and how difficult have been the problems that the system has been called upon to mediate. Industrialization in the 18th century; slavery in the middle of the 19th century; the allure of world empire at the turn of the last century; the trials of capitalism during the 1930s; the challenge of the European dictators of the '20s, '30s, and '40s; the twin trials of domestic and national security during the Cold War; the struggle for civil rights and the extension of freedom that are the dominant feature of the last third of the century - all have passed through the sieve of the system.
''This government was meant to be experimental,'' says Pauline Maier, the MIT historian of the Colonial and early republic periods. ''The framers assumed as circumstances changed, it would be adjusted. The founders' Constitution had limits, and they were perfectly clear that they understood that it had limits.''
Now its limits seem infinite - and, as the century turns, intimate.
And so we wonder: Can the Constitution and the political system it spawned deal with a world where miniature nuclear arms springing from terrorist cells and weapons of mass destruction springing from biology and chemistry laboratories put a 21st-century chill on the 18th-century values of an open society? Where the invisible hand of God, whose gentle touch and mysterious motives have explained the imponderables of human life, is joined by the trembling hand of man, newly empowered in the genetic sciences? Where the polling station, that durable symbol of American republican rule, is joined by electronic sinews that make digital democracy possible? Where old ideas dating to the ancients and to Locke and to Lincoln are joined by the dreams of thinkers yet unborn, conceiving of technologies yet unimagined to deal with problems yet unenvisioned in a world yet unformed?
Maybe.
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