The first amendment is among the great inventions of history.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It has five parts:
1. Freedom of religion or belief
2. Freedom to speak out in defense of or attack on beliefs
3. Freedom of the press to reach a wider audience
4. Freedom to assemble – or organize – around those beliefs
5. Freedom to take your cause to the government in order to effect change, through laws or budget.
It offers freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Just a century before, Europe had been torn apart by religious war and the result was 10 to 30% of folks on the continent killed. Our founding fathers knew the absurdity of legislating religion, whether trying to force someone to not believe something or force them to believe something.
But the first amendment is more important than that. Much more important. And it is brilliantly constructed to result in perpetual progress.
What freedom of religion really means is freedom of belief. The US can’t pass any laws to legislate what you believe. So essentially this is like giving 330 million Americans a license to generate all sorts of wild theories – some folks tales, some religious, some that - if taken seriously - will create great wealth and some that - if taken seriously - will result in death and destruction, some conspiratorial and some downright scientific.
But it doesn’t end there. You can speak about your belief and even go to press with your belief. You can argue for your own belief or against someone with a different belief. The first amendment says that you have a right to believe the earth is flat. It also says that everyone around you – from your neighbor to the nightly newscaster – has the right to tell you how stupid that is. And here is the really amazing thing about you going to press with your belief: it becomes something a little different in the mind of each reader. Your idea becomes the community’s idea. It changes. Your idea becomes bigger than you. In the same way that a gene can be passed on to someone else, an idea, a meme, can be passed on to others and - blended with other ideas - create something new. Someone once wrote, a city is where ideas come to have sex. Once it enters into other people's minds, becomes a part of the community's discussion, your idea will become something different than how it was born in your head.
What’s next? People can organize around this idea, this belief. The most obvious thing is that you can assemble and protest. Less obviously, you can engage in social invention and entrepreneurship to institutionalize your belief. Women organize to become suffragettes, arguing that they have the right to vote. Those groups are the first bit of organizing and then that takes us to the fifth bit of institutionalization.
You can bring your cause – your belief – to the government and work to have it translated into a new bit of legislation. The organized group of suffragettes who argued that women had the right to vote dissolved because they pulled off an even better bit of social invention: they changed the constitution so that women could vote. The reality girls are born into is now different because of their success.
The first amendment traces the trajectory of progress: you have an idea or belief, you talk about it with others, you even publish it, sending it out into the world to become something independent of you, and then people protest the status quo, arguing for this new belief to be made into a new reality and then …. It becomes the status quo for the next generation. It is not enough that Isaac Newton knows the calculus he has invented. What is really powerful is that we teach calculus to teenagers and it simply becomes a common tool for them to model and manipulate reality. At that point – the point at which your idea is institutionalized – the status quo becomes something very different.
This is how progress is made. And that may well be the most beautiful and remarkable thing about the first amendment. It actually traces a thought in your brain into a new, shared reality babies are born into. Each child does not have to start civilization from scratch. We simply don’t have time for that. What we’ve institutionalized becomes the starting platform for the next generation … who begin this process of creating new beliefs that have to go through the stage of challenging and spreading and then becoming the next thing that is institutionalized. The first amendment is so much but to me perhaps the coolest thing is that it is a description of progress.
The first amendment is not about demanding respect for old ideas and traditions. It is about demanding respect for new ideas and innovation. The first amendment is the social invention that itself generates new social inventions. That’s something to shout about. And thanks to the first amendment, you can.
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