Local opinion: On Constitution Day, consider what holds us together

“Good morning. You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“How is your mother?”

“Not good.”

A grimace. A shake of the head.

I overheard this conversation among three people on a commuter train into Boston. They may never see one another anywhere but on that train.

But they are friends of a particular kind: train friends. They notice one another. They remember whose mother is ill.

They bear witness to one another’s lives.

Another scene: a long flight delay at the Montreal airport. Around the gate, people were asleep on chairs and on the floor. Adults and children, surrounded by their belongings.

They were sleeping among strangers.

These scenes seem unremarkable. Yet they suggest an answer to a question we increasingly ask:

Is humanity doomed?

I don’t think so.

Not because human beings are inherently good. History offers too much evidence to the contrary. My reason for hope is simpler.

We need one another to survive. And that means we have to trust one another.

Political philosophers have wrestled with this. Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and Montesquieu differed about human nature and political authority, but their ideas helped shape the thinking of the Framers.

Their question remains ours. How can human beings, with competing interests and impulses, live together?

We can be selfish, tribal and violent. But we also cooperate. We help strangers. And every night we do something instructive:

We go to sleep.

To sleep is to surrender control. We close our eyes. We trust that the building will remain standing, that the pilot will remain at the controls, that the stranger near our suitcase will leave it alone.

Sleep may be an ordinary act of faith in the social contract.

We cannot remain perpetually on guard.

History offers dramatic examples of the trust on which we depend.

At Dunkirk in 1940, hundreds of vessels evacuated more than 338,000 Allied troops. On Sept. 11, 2001, Canada launched Operation Yellow Ribbon, diverting 224 flights carrying more than 33,000 passengers to Canadian airports. More than 6,500 landed in Gander, Newfoundland, where residents opened schools, community centers, and homes to stranded strangers.

That day in Lower Manhattan, hundreds of vessels responded to a Coast Guard call, helping evacuate more than 500,000 people.

Different circumstances. The same human impulse.

Someone needs help. I can help.

That impulse matters, especially on Sept. 17, Constitution Day.

On Sept. 17, 1787, after a summer of argument and compromise, the Constitution was signed.

The Constitution depended, and still depends, on an act of collective trust.

The Framers did not design a government for angels. They divided power and created checks and balances precisely because no one should hold unlimited authority.

But the document rests on another assumption:

Self-government requires trust.

Not blind trust or agreement. Not even affection.

It requires enough trust that people who disagree can live under common rules; that political disputes can be settled without violence; that institutions can outlast their occupants; and that millions of strangers can regard one another as participants in a common endeavor.

That is the social contract.

The evidence for pessimism is real.

But it is not all the evidence.

Civilization itself is evidence on the other side.

Two cars approach on an undivided road; each driver trusts a stranger. We board airplanes flown by strangers. We entrust our lives to doctors, engineers, firefighters and paramedics whose names we may never know.

We survive through networks of trust we barely notice.

Perhaps the useful question is: Which human capacity will we cultivate?

Humanity is not somewhere else.

It is us.

Every conversation with a stranger, every institution we preserve, every disagreement we resolve without violence, every person we help strengthens the bonds on which we depend.

The Constitution cannot guarantee those bonds will hold. No document can. It gives us a framework to choose, generation after generation, whether to maintain them.

So, this Constitution Day, perhaps the question is not “Is humanity doomed?”

Perhaps it is simpler:

Can we still trust one another enough to live together?

I believe we can.

I have seen the evidence on trains, in airports and on boats.

And, like everyone else, I would like to get some sleep.