Changing the Law

PAREDES

The fourth of July found me attending a dinner party at the house of an American friend who is married to a Cebuana. The party, however, was not meant to celebrate the Independence Day of the United States here in Cebu. It was rather a simple birthday party for the couple’s boy, who had just turned 13 that day.

When he invited me, I told my friend that we actually used to celebrate July 4 as Philippine Independence Day, after the Americans granted independence to the country on July 4, 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War. The US government chose the date perhaps to symbolize how democracy in the Philippines took for its model that of her former colonizer.

Claiming “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines, the Americans took it as their duty to facilitate the process of democratization as they seized control from the Spaniards, or rather, from the newly-independent Philippine Republic that established itself in 1898. And contrary to the American claim that Filipinos were uncivilized and needed to be tutored, the leaders of the Philippine Republic were actually completely aware of the theories of democracy. In fact, the Katipuneros and the illustrados who supported the struggle for independence, were all inspired by the democratic revolutions happening in the West in 18th century.

The Filipinos revolutionaries looked up to the ideals of liberte, egalite, and fraternite of the French Revolution, as enshrined in its Declaration of the Rights of Man. This was evident in how our own founding fathers framed the 1899 Malolos Constitution with the French document as well as those of the American Revolution in mind. Even the menu of the banquet of the Malolos Congress in 1898 was completely French.

The French Declaration clearly emphasized that “forgetfulness and contempts for the natural rights of man are the sole causes of the miseries of the world.” The American Declaration of Independence, which itself was inspired by the French, also states: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

These principles, in fact, reflected the zeitgeist or the spirit of the time in 18th century or the Enlightenment period, which was marked by the common hope that the power of Reason, that universal fountain of immutable knowledge, would lead us to understand the inherent structure of the human mind and, externally, the laws and order of nature. This free exercise of rational inquiry led to great scientific and philosophical discoveries. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution and led people to eventually rise against monarchies as they demanded more egalitarian systems. The West took it as its duty to cast this light of reason on the uncivilized world through colonial conquest. Such is the irony of the Enlightenment project.

Yet the West has no monopoly over these “self-evident Truths.” Just as the Americans made their rightful claim to democracy and human rights, the Filipinos also demanded them from Spain, invoking natural rights as they fought for freedom and equality.

This principle of universality is at the core of our Constitution since its birth in Malolos in 1899. Up to the 1987 Constitution, the framers were all aware of the importance of making Reason the sole source and basis of the basic laws of the land. As its principles were deemed timeless and immutable, the Constitution was meant to be permanent, except for occasional minor amendments.

It is supposed to remind us that we are a society founded on Reason, whose laws ought to reflect impartiality and discernment in contrast to the way tyrannies are ruled according to the whims and passion of their leaders. The immutability of the law is supposed to remind us of how subjectivity and relativism can make us blind to self-evident truths, such as the idea of human dignity based on inalienable natural rights.