Benjamin Jones
Crown
We may receive an affiliate commission for anything you purchase from this article.
New York Times bestselling author and humorist AJ Jacobs previously wrote about his experience living life as interpreted by the Old and New Testaments in “The Year of Living Biblically.” Now, in an effort to fully understand our nation’s founding document, Jacobs has embarked on a yearlong quest to be the original originalist, in “The Year of Living Constitutionally” (to be published by Crown on May 7). Yes, muskets were involved.
Read the “preamble” of the book below and Don’t miss John Dickerson’s interview with AJ Jacobs on “CBS News Sunday Morning” on May 5!
“The Year of Living Constitutionally” by AJ Jacobs
Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available now.
The Preamble
I recently discovered that if you walk around New York City carrying an 18th century musket, you’ll get a lot of questions.
“Are you going to shoot some redcoats?”
“Can you please leave?”
“What the hell, man?”
Questions aside, a musket can be useful. When I arrived at the local coffee shop at the same time as another customer, he told me, “You go first. I’m not going to argue with someone who’s holding that thing.”
Why was I carrying a ten-pound firearm from the 1790s? Well, it’s because I’m in the middle of my year of constitutional life. For reasons I will explain shortly, I have committed to trying to express my constitutional rights using the tools and mindset from when they were written in 1787. My plan is to be the original originalist.
I will bear arms, but only the arms available when the Second Amendment was written. Hence the musket and the bayonet that accompanies it.
I will exercise my First Amendment right to free speech, but I will do it the old-fashioned way: by scribbling flyers with a quill pen and handing them out on the street.
My right to assemble? I will meet in cafes and taverns, not on Zoom or Discord.
If I am punished, I will insist that my punishment be not cruel and unusual, at least not cruel and unusual by 18th century standards (when, unfortunately, Americans considered it acceptable to have one’s head stuck in a pillory and to be pelted with mud and rotten vegetables ).
Thanks to the Third Amendment, I can choose to house soldiers in my apartment – but I will kick them out onto the street if they misbehave.
My goal is to understand the Constitution expressing my rights as they were interpreted in the era of Washington and Madison (or, in the case of later amendments, as those amendments were interpreted when they were ratified). I want, as much as possible, to get into the minds of the Founding Fathers. And in doing so, I want to discover how we should live today. What do we need to update? What should we ignore? Is there 18th century wisdom worth reviving? And how should we view this most influential and disconcerting North American text?
I undertook this search because reading the news last year led me to three important revelations.
The first revelation was how much our lives are affected by this 4,543-word document inscribed on calfskin during that ancient Philadelphia summer. The Supreme Court’s recent controversial rulings on a range of issues—including women’s rights, gun rights, environmental regulations, and religion—claim to derive from the Constitution.
The second revelation was how shockingly little I knew about the Constitution. I had never read it – at least not the whole thing. Thanks to Rock School! I was familiar with the “We the People” preamble. And I can think of a handful of other famous passages, most notably the First Amendment, which is beloved by me and my fellow writers (as well as my children, who quote it whenever I ask them not to curse me). But what about the entire document, from start to finish? Never read.
And third, I realized how much the Constitution is a national Rorschach test. Everyone, including me, sees what they want. Does the Constitution support laissez-faire gun rights or support strict gun regulation? Do you ban school prayer or not? Depends on who you ask.
And it’s not just the issues we’re divided on – it’s the Constitution itself. Is the Constitution a document of liberation, as I was taught in high school? Or is it, as some critics argue, a document of oppression? Should we venerate this brilliant roadmap that arguably guided American prosperity and expanded freedom for more than 230 years? Or should we be skeptical of this set of rules written by rich racists who thought tobacco smoke enemas were state-of-the-art medicine?*
[* Tobacco-smoke enemas were a mainstream medical treatment for all sorts of ills. They involved hoses, smoke, and hand-powered bellows. It is quite possibly the origin of the phrase “blowing smoke up your ass.”]
This reminds me of a William Blake quote I once read about the Bible:
[We] they both read the Bible day and night
But you read black where I read white.
And, as with the Bible, whether we see black or white in the Constitution largely depends on one crucial question: What is your method for interpreting this text?
Should we try to discover the original meaning of when the text was written? Or does the meaning of the text evolve over time?
In fact, Bible-Constitution parallels helped give rise to this book. I decided to steal an idea from myself. Several years ago I wrote a book called The Year of Living Biblically, in which I explored the ways we interpret the Bible. I did this by following the rules of the Good Book as literally as possible. I followed the Ten Commandments, but I also followed hundreds of more obscure rules. I grew some alarming facial hair (Leviticus says you shouldn’t shave the corners of your beard) and threw away my polyester sweaters (Leviticus says you can’t wear clothes made from two types of fabric). I became the last fundamentalist.
The project was at times absurd, but also enlightening and inspiring. I have found that some aspects of living biblically have changed my life for the better (the emphasis on gratitude, for example). I also learned the dangers of interpreting the Bible too literally (I don’t recommend stoning an adulterer in Central Park, even if those stones are the size of pebbles, like mine). And I learned how challenging it is to figure out how we should replace literalism.
I am not the first to note that we treat the Constitution and the Bible similarly. Scholars have long described the Constitution as the sacred text of our civic religion. Jefferson called the delegates “demigods.” And as with the Bible, there is an ongoing debate between those who say we should stick to the original meaning and those who say that meaning evolves. It’s the originalists versus the living constitutionalists. Both camps have existed for decades, but in the last five years, originalists have gained surprising power. Five of the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices are originalists of some kind (John Roberts is the exception), a position that has affected their rulings on abortion, gun rights and many other topics. I felt like it was time. I began to prepare for a year of constitutional life.
Excerpted from “The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Original Meaning of the Constitution” by AJ Jacobs. Published by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2024 by AJ Jacobs.
Get the book here:
“The Year of Living Constitutionally” by AJ Jacobs
Buy locally at Livraria.org
For more information:
