|
 he
invitations to the malls this season have been enhanced, if that
is possible, by the clarion call of patriotism: We are told it is
our duty as citizens to help spend our way out of the recession
caused, in part, by the enemies of freedom who recently attacked
our country. But before we decamp to the malls, we can profit by
pondering the lives of those heroes of freedom whose birthdays we
are observing — Washington and Lincoln — and the ways
they embody two qualities of citizenship palpably absent from our
public life and public discourse: virtue and thought.
Our public
life is greatly impoverished by the abolition of virtue as a public
concern. The virtue of the government's leaders (and not less its
followers) was a matter of great interest to Washington and his
fellow "founding brothers" (to use Joseph Ellis's felicitous
phrase). Our public discourse, particularly in campaigning and so-called
political speeches, is bereft of actual thought and the poorer for
that deficiency. Lincoln, the most thoughtful of our presidents,
spent the 49 months of his presidency in one long meditation on
human nature and society, government, and the troubled American
union. We are the richer for his reducing these thoughts to writing
in speeches that most agree are the most profound produced by an
American president.
It is difficult
for us today to appreciate the impact George Washington had on his
contemporaries. He contributed almost nothing to the political debate
and theorizing that were rampant in the revolutionary and constitutional
era, but his primacy among the Founders was unquestioned by his
peers. Among the reasons for Washington's acknowledged leadership
was his martial air and courage in the face of fire, to which he
repeatedly exposed himself in battles his ill-equipped troops commonly
lost. Contemporaries and other 19th-century successors called this
"moral courage." Washington's fortitude in the face of
defeat and through trials such as those of the winter in Valley
Forge sustained the Continental army more than provender and more
muskets could have. Washington understood that his army did not
have to defeat the King's army — it had only to keep itself
together and outlast its opponent in what proved to be a long war.
Washington sustained the army with his moral courage and constancy,
virtues required of his countrymen as well.
Washington
extended his influence over his fellow Americans by what he did
not say and what he did not do. He had what his irrepressible
vice president, John Adams, described (perhaps enviously) as "the
gift of silence." His intimates knew that Washington had an
enormous temper. But the general learned, through force of will
and practice, to present himself with great dignity in public settings,
speaking rarely, and usually carrying the group with him when he
did disclose his thoughts.
Washington's
surrendering his commission as general of the Continental Army to
Congress in December of 1783 was the first impressive instance of
what he did not do. He did not use his military triumph to claim
the reins of government as many successful generals (such as Oliver
Cromwell the century before in England) before him had done. Instead,
his resignation evoked the virtuous general of Republican Rome,
Cincinnatus, who had resigned to return to his farm when he could
have demanded the emperor's title.
Washington
presided silently over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
in 1787, during which the delegates debated the powers that should
be assigned or denied the office of president. They knew that Washington
would surely be chosen the country's first chief magistrate, but
their unspoken concern was to limit the office's powers when a less
virtuous man than Washington occupied it.
Finally, Washington
dutifully accepted the presidency when the first election under
the new constitution required his return to public service. His
self-imposed moral term limit ended his presidency after eight years,
and example that guided his successors for almost a century and
a half. His farewell address was a wonderful testament to his countrymen,
but it paled in comparison to the sheer virtuous gesture of voluntarily
relinquishing power. This made the first transfer of power in the
nascent republic possible and peaceful, and again evoked the virtuous
Cincinnatus.
George Washington
was such a paragon to his contemporaries because he exemplified
virtues of self-restraint, discipline, courage, and disinterested
public service, virtues they believed were necessary in both the
leaders and citizens of the country they had founded. In the Federalist
#57, Madison stated: "The aim of every political constitution…ought
to be, first, to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to
discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society;
and, in the next place…keeping them virtuous whilst they continue
to hold their public trust."
It was understood
in the revolutionary era that not only must the leaders be virtuous,
but the citizens who elected them as well, since the form of government
they envisaged entrusted more freedom and ascribed more responsibility
to more of its citizens than had any form of government in human
history. It was understood at this time that freedom without virtue
produced license, and responsibility without virtue produced self-serving
and corruption inimical to the public good. The new government was
founded on virtue, with Washington its preeminent exemplar.
This agreement
that virtue had an important role in public life largely disappeared
by the late 19th century. The idea has made brief comebacks during
times of war, when discipline, courage, and self-sacrifice were
thought necessary for the nation's survival, or at least victory
over its enemies. The only forms of virtue admitted to the public
arena today are tolerance and respect for diversity, whose practice
produces behavior that used to fall under the rubric of good manners.
The disappearance
of virtue from public life is due in part to the fact that religion
has proven to be the only font of sufficient depth to under gird
the full range of virtues. Thus, government can no longer invoke
virtues without invoking religion, a breach of the First Amendment.
Virtues and faith-based personal-reformation programs have proved
to be the most effective means of addressing intractable social
problems like substance abuse, crime, and family dissolution, so
government has been reduced to contracting out its public virtue
work to the faith-based ministries that traffic in virtue and conversion
from a "sinful" life. The very notion of civic virtue,
a pale secular imitation of its religious predecessor, which was
understood to obligate a citizen to become educated on public issues
and vote accordingly, seems quaint today. The social definition
of the American as citizen has been supplanted by that of the American
as consumer, and our elected representatives are chief among the
abettors of this transformation. The expulsion of virtue from public
life and its confinement to the shrinking pool of our so-called
"private lives" is nearly complete.
Lincoln's patience,
courage, and constancy in dealing with the national trial that coincided
with his entire presidency were considerable, but it is his ability
and depth as a thinker that is instructive to us today. Lincoln
had to grapple with the meaning of the conflict that consumed the
country, and devise a conceptual framework for leading the Union's
response. He drew on three main sources for this effort: the law,
primarily that embodied in the constitution, the ideals of the American
Revolution, and Divine Providence.
Lincoln took
his oath to uphold the Constitution to heart, and was meticulous
in framing his actions in a manner consistent with the nation's
charter. When he referred to himself in taking military actions,
he used the title "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy
of the United States," exactly as it is phrased in the Constitution,
not the shorthand title we are accustomed to. He conceived the war
as a violation of the Union embodied in the constitution, and repeatedly
declined to take any action to free the slaves because slavery was
expressly permitted by the Constitution. The Emancipation Proclamation
was carefully tailored as a military measure to free slaves in those
areas still in rebellion, precisely the place where the Union could
not enforce such a measure. He was convinced that abolition of slavery
could be achieved only by amending the Constitution.
As the war
proceeded, and its staggering body count mounted, Lincoln needed
to ground the war in something more profound than the idea of the
Union, however sublime that was. He needed this both for his own
peace of mind and to sustain the people of the north, whose war-weariness
threatened the government's ability to continue the war. By November
of 1863, when he prepared the Gettysburg Address, he was already
perceived as "the great emancipator," however mistakenly,
for the proclamation that had taken effect at the beginning of the
year. In his speech, which Garry Wills in Lincoln at Gettysburg
argues amounts to a third founding document, Lincoln returned to
the Declaration to evoke the ideal of freedom as a God-given right
upon which the country was founded, and for which this awful war
was now being waged. He linked that freedom to the ideal of self-government
("of the people, by the people, for the people") that
is embodied in the Constitution, and reformulated the war as a struggle
to vindicate both human freedom and the American experiment, which
was only 74 years old at the time. Lincoln's expansive intelligence
had found a larger meaning for the war, and many of his countrymen
immediately recognized and adopted this grander conception of the
suffering they were both causing and enduring.
By the time
of his second inauguration, in March 1865, much had changed. His
reelection, of which he had privately despaired, was assured when
Sherman had taken Atlanta and Phil Sheridan had swept through the
Shenandoah Valley, driving Confederate soldiers before him while
wreaking the same destruction Sherman's men were doing in Georgia.
Grant and Lee were entrenched around Petersburg, and the end appeared
to be near. But the devastation of the war, in lives and in property,
and the consequent human suffering, was on a scale Lincoln and the
country could not comprehend. His earlier rationales for the war,
of preserving the union and advancing human freedom seemed unequal
to the price the country, north and south, had already paid.
So Lincoln
had to look deeper, or higher, if you will, for a conceptual framework
in which to locate these four years of unalloyed suffering. He found
it in the religious notions of Divine Providence and expiation for
sin. The second inaugural address is Lincoln's most sublime, with
the loftiest imagery found in any of his speeches. He locates the
suffering of the war in the loving care of God, which does not so
much explain the suffering as make it bearable. He accounts for
the bloodshed as just in the eyes of God, even if incomprehensible
to humans ("until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall
be paid with another drawn with the sword…still it must be
said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'").
Lincoln had taken on the weightiest subject ever faced by an American
president, pondered it, and found a meaningful way to think about
it and accept it. This growing expansiveness of view in which to
locate matters of great public concern is one of the ways we have
of identifying Lincoln as our greatest president.
It is this
way of thinking, of locating matters of public policy in larger
frames of reference, that has been largely abolished from our public
discourse. Examples include the war on terrorism, Social Security,
and the debate over education. Scholars such as Benjamin Barber,
in Jihad Versus McWorld, have pondered the conflict brewing
between blood-kin, traditional societies (which may or may not be
Islamic) and the free-trade, internationalist, entertainment-driven
culture created largely in the U.S. and regnant in most of the developed
world. The public formulation of our policy to make war on terrorism
makes no mention of the benighted concerns of these backward countries
that are our current or prospective enemies, and denies any legitimacy
to religious or cultural interests that would shut out dollar-denominated
loans and U.S. pop culture. Conceiving and communicating the war
on terrorism on a larger scale than preserving U.S. interests would
be intellectually demanding, but it might give it a better long-term
chance of success.
As recently
as the 70's, the view of Social Security as an intergenerational
social contract matched the concern of employers to provide a stable
income to their retirees. With the coming of 401(k)s two decades
ago, companies have been able and quite happy to pass much of the
risk associated with retirement income on to their employees. Now
it is proposed to incorporate some of this sort of risk into Social
Security accounts in order to address the intractable funding crisis
the system faces. This may be a good idea, as public policy, but
what is missing is an open discussion of how this longstanding intergenerational
social contract can be sustained or must be changed because of the
funding issues. A fuller public discussion of changes to Social
Security would include dealing with this relationship between retirees
and the workers supporting them and may provide the only way of
heading off the generational conflict predicted by many.
The crisis
in American education has been characterized primarily by sub par
or declining test scores. This focus on testing would have seemed
alien to the government and educational leaders of the country's
first century and a half, for whom the main objective of education
was moral, that is, forming good human beings and good citizens.
Most of the colleges now called Ivy League were founded and operated
as religious institutions for most of their history. Students of
these institutions, such as our current president's father, would
have had mandatory chapel sessions in which a minister or the school's
president (often the same man) would lecture the students on moral
formation, the obligation of service, and their duties as well-educated
citizens. A more thoughtful examination of our current educational
problems would include an open debate about the ultimate ends of
education, rather than leaping to teach-to-the-test solutions. This
approach would surely examine the ways schools help young people
prepare to play the most important role society can assign them
— citizen.
Playing the
role of consumer, happily, requires very little thought and even
less virtue. In the wake of September 11, it even has even been
described as patriotic. Rather than just nodding to the presidents
for our savings at the mall, we might contemplate Washington's virtue
and Lincoln's thoughtfulness and see what they mean to us as citizens.
|
