Custom vs written law

For a history book group I'm in we've been "reading" (I've been listening in the car) to Linda Coffey's The Gun, The Ship and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World. Once more, a rather wooden reading of a book is dragging the book down, though I suspect it would have been hard even for Meryl Streep or Sarah Silverman to make this one fun.

Which is not to say that the book lacks merits. I would scarcely want to do that, as it was I who recommended the book to the group. Coffey looks at the history of constitutions around the world from the mid-18th century forward and how their institution is intimately bound up with getting subject peoples to accept conscription.

As she catalogs the effusion of constitutions everywhere and the enthusiasm with which scribblers of all sorts jotted them on napkins the world around, one thing that becomes clear, as if it ever weren't, is that having a constitution don't mean shit. The American constitution has been a relative success -- in that it hasn't been thrown out and replaced for a long time or wantonly trampled upon -- because people take it seriously and because it has reasonable mechanisms for change. More important than the law itself is people's attitude towards it, again, in some sense, being infused with the spirit of the law, a desire to do the right thing. Hence the eternal theme in westerns and cop shows that the guy with the gun who really wants the right thing to happen ends up being more right in the deepest sense than the pencil pushers back in city hall or the capital city who are cramping his style.

But in reality it's always a complex dance and fraught with tension.