Divide that in two:
1- Radicalism and revolution.
2- The expression of values over time.
Those thoughts are distinct. There is no necessary relation of one to the other, and the difference between Canada and the US is in the former, not the latter; the latter being the standard model of interpretation as such. The debate over interpretation in the United States is one of dynamic extremes, the debate in Canada is not. The process itself is more or less identical.
There will never be one Constitution as there will never be one Bible, even one King James Version, as there will never be one history of the Revolutionary War or biography of Winston Churchill. There will never be one Shakespeare or Gian Lorenzo Bernini. In language and communication oneness is banality; words are not numbers.

This post and the one it links to in the context of academic discussion, is so supremely anti-intellectual as to be bizarre.

Summersett’s Case, for example, decided that not only should slavery not be legal, but that it never had been legal.

I was very happy with the Presidential election outcome because it was a sign to me that this country is not dense enough to put Sarah Palin one McCain heart-attack away from the White House. I was pleasantly surprised to see proposals pass in my home state of Michigan allowing the use of medical marijuana and the legalization of stem cell research.

And then I also saw that Proposal Eight had passed.

I hadn’t thought Obama’s election would actually make me feel worse about this country than had he lost. I’m not gay, and don’t have any family or close friends who are really affected by proposal eight, but the hypocrisy of it all has never left me as ashamed of this country as I’ve been the last few weeks. While the country sits around and pats itself on the back for painting the White House black, at least 11,000 same-sex couples in California just had their marriages declared invalid by their fellow Americans.

You are well named and your criticism/suggestion is indeed a valid one as I tend to get into stream-of-consciousness jags. I’ll try to be more parsimonious in the future.

The ones who care about not being evil will likely care the same whether it’s God or society or their mamas who tell them what evil is. The ones who just don’t want to be caught likewise will not care about the source of the rules, what they’ll care about is how to avoid getting caught.

What I’ve found surprising is the people who have maintained the doctrine that says anything you do for yourself is good for the world unless you get caught. That somehow the market will make sure that anything you make a profit on will benefit humanity. A peculiar god they believe in, but I can see how they’d want to believe.

Rector says, “As different observers since Alexis de Toqueville have remarked, the U.S. is organized by a set of ideological tenets: liberty, equality, individualism, laissez faire, and so on. G. K. Chesterton wrote in What I Saw in America, for example, that ‘America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.’ Chesterton and many others have suggested this national creed shades over into the realm of the religious: The creed is not only a matter of civic practice, but it is venerated, pursued with missionary zeal, and offers solace from fear.
“Like most religions, the cult of the American nation, forged in the experiences of dissenting Protestant settlers and in the context of a War of Independence, carries with it a fear that borders on paranoia: a fear of foreign attack, a fear of enemies foreign and domestic. And like every religion, it can appear from the outside as irrational belief. …
“Canada is a scattered collection of regions formed by an act of political compromise, the Confederation of 1867. The country was founded on pragmatic negotiation: There was no national project, no national creed, and this continues to be expressed as a general suspicion of grand projects and romantic designs. This mistrust of idealistic motivations, of course, was a factor in the Canadian decision not to join the war against Iraq. …
“And while it has some nationalist sentiment, the Canadian flag is a purely secular symbol. The flag does not embody a coherent set of political or ideological tenets and it cannot offer solace. It may be associated with things that characterize this political federation, such as socialized health care, or its people, but there are simply no sacral qualities to the Canadian flag. It is part of a coherent public culture in which we also assign no sacral qualities to the government, to the Constitution, or even the nation. These are all pragmatically negotiated and fully secular institutions. ”

I lived in Amsterdam for several years and it seems to me that the Dutch are even more pragmatic. Does it work? Will it promote general health and welfare? If so, let’s do it. The Dutch, one might say, are Canadians on steroids.

Canadians, as has been noted, are a modest people—and damned proud of it! Just before the final presentations to the Olympic Committee that would decide which city was awarded the 2010 games, a Vancouver representative, interviewed on radio, said something like, “Our presentation is going to blow the other presentations away—but in a nice way.”

In the endless struggle of Canada to survive and assert itself in the face of U.S. manifest destiny, Stan Rogers’ song “Barrett’s Privateers” says a lot: it’s about the encounter on the high seas of a privateer from Nova Scotia with a U.S. gold ship in 1778, and the chorus, which begins with “God damn them all!” (not just the Yanks) from the survivor of this futile attempt to beat the Americans, is always sung at parties not with lamentation but with great gusto. To me, the way it’s sung (good cheer and defiance in the face of impossible odds) makes it the ultimate Canadian anthem. Or take the Canadian movie “Last Night”, with its much quieter, humorous and typically weird take on the end of the world (which cannot be averted), and compare it with any American heroic (almost) end-of-the-world movie.

I don’t disagree with a single word you have written excepting for your concluding para. You see, I am an agnostic at best, so I am hardly one to “seek solace in absolutes.” I was rather attempting to make two points: (1) The logical inconsistency shown by those who deride the very concept of Natural Law in the abstract, yet seize upon it at their first opportunity as their main weapon to shield otherwise defenseless humans from the predations of their fellow men by appealing to the court of public opinion to remove/undermine the legitimacy of the actions of the oppressors, and, (2) once man, and man alone, is seen as “the measure of all things”—”all things” are indeed not only seen as possible, but, in addition permissible as well. And while many cruel things have historically been done in the name of religion, it seems to me that until we become Gods ourselves and enact the rise and fall and rise again drama all within our own psyche we will have no other ultimate restraint on our actions save that thought to be inherent in our very natures as guided by a superior being. “If God did not exist he would have to be invented” pretty much sums up the view that man alone is an uncertain reed upon which to lean to determine the survival of homo sapiens on this planet. Strangely, paradoxically, this puts both the “Greens” and the Marxists on the side of those believing in God, i.e., that something other than immediate gratification and personal individual benefit should be derived from man’s efforts to govern himself—the Greens in their belief that mankind should sacrifice it’s standard of living for the good of “Mother Earth”—and the Marxists who believe the individual should give up his individual rights for the good of the commune. So you see, it turns out that Marxists and Greenies are nothing so much as good Catholics after all—so what’s the beef with religion?—at least with the Catholic version of it. Isn’t the gripe the Latino community has about the inroads the evangelical’s are making on Latin Catholics and the Church the fact that Protestantism encourages individuals to keep the profits of their own labor to make themselves rich, instead of tithing to the Church to make the Church rich? It seems to me that those “on the left” are only arguing for the replacement of religion by the unrestrained collective of men unfettered by anything other than their own conscious. And when men have nothing but their own conscious to fall back upon they often fall into the abyss. Far better, it seems to me, to have a world and society governed by those who feel constrained in their actions somewhat by their own insights about belief in “self evident” higher powers rather than a society organized along the lines of the historical collectivist approach uninhibited by such appeals to self evident rights—whether by dint of the Catholic religion or scientific dialectics—both approaches using the “transmission belts” of received authority to bring order to the masses.