Praising Without Understanding

 

Betsy Ross Sewing the American Flag. Image from Pinterest

A month ago, we were inundated with patriotic gestures and speeches for the 241st birthday of our country. At least, I wish that we had been inundated. I am hindered by the fact that I was born in 1988 from personally knowing what I might call “the far past” but I have what can only be described as a feeling, so strong that it might be a certainty, that there was more patriotic fervor in the past. The curse of every age is its futile search for the lost “golden age,” futile because there has never been a golden age in the sense that there never was a time when everything was perfect when the biggest concern was whether to eat meat once or twice a day. But, in another sense, some periods of the past were better in the sense that people, in general, had a clearer idea about reality, the realness and goodness of real things, as it were, which seeped its way into all different nooks and crannies of everyday life; my grandparents have told me of songs that are impossible to find now, in spite of the best Google and YouTube searches, of trips and traditions, and of the fact that, when they were growing up, their parents hardly ever locked the doors at night. In this same vein, patriotism seems to have burned brighter in the past with more people more clearly understanding or intuiting what their patriotism was and what it entailed and why it was important and good.

Independence Day still manages to bring out some patriotic vigor, however; but, it may not be as lofty as it was and it may not be as lofty as we should expect it to be. Many times, men who rise to speak on the occasion of Independence Day will give some passing mention to the events of 1776, the Declaration, and the members of the Continental Congress; more often than not, praise for the military and for the men and women in uniform will be given, as well it should. This last aspect was a major component of President Trump’s remarks this past fourth of July. It is not the fact that there are still many people who speak on Independence Day that is the problem; it is the fact that there seem to be less and less who actually understand what Independence Day is about. Understanding of the Founding seems to be losing amid the words of all the speeches.

Often in or around Independence Day,  or when discussing the Founding in general, certain themes will crop up. Taxes are one; occasionally, among the more read speakers, the Enlightenment will make an appearance, particularly in the form of John Locke and, maybe, from time to time, Montesquieu. It is not that these themes are false but that they are incomplete. A miniscule tax on tea was not the sole reason why thirteen different clocks worked to chime as one; it was the idea and love and history of the traditional rights of Englishmen (such as trial by jury, innocent till proven guilty, the sanctity of the person’s home) and the threat made against them by the British, such as the writs of assistance which allowed port officials to board any ship and enter any home without warrant, to search for smuggled contraband. We also forget the political-philosophical questions and debates which the colonies’ protests raised, one of which was where sovreignty lay; was it in the people, the king, Parliment, the king in Parliment? In the same way, while Enlightened thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu did have an influence on the revolutionary mind, of even greater weight was the tradition of Christianity and the Bible (which was the most cited work in the Revolutionary pamphlets) and the Classics–Cicero, Plutarch, Tacitus, Cincinnatus, Cato, Demosthenes, and Aristotle. We forget the mythological glue which tied these diverse traditions and influences together. But, on Independence Day, we mostly talk about freedom.

Freedom is a curious word, or at the least, a curious idea, especially in our own time. The less we actually have of it, the more we talk about it, and there is certainly plenty to talk about. Many inhabitants of the Right feel that their freedom is, even now, under assault; they feel in their bones that the endless parade of regulations, made by faceless bureaucrats, living in the bowels of D.C., the taxes gathered and used for some of the most ridiculous projects, and the level of intrusion that the high government now posseses over us, make us, in reality, far, far less free than our Founders intended. They speak of cutting regulations, cutting taxes, and cutting the power fo the federal government to program our lives and they tie all these desires and ideas together with the word freedom.

None of these desires are bad in themselves and the vices they seek to correct are nonetheless vices simply because some people may speak of them passionately. But this is not the whole picture, nor could it be the whole picture, even if it tried. It is only natural to want to be free from tyranny but the question then has to be asked: Why do you want to be free? We can’t just answer, “So that we can be free!” since it puts us in a circle of wanting to be free in order to be free which we would not need to be if we were already free to begin with. It is very true that our Founders desired and prayed for a system of government that was very much like the Great Pyramid of Giza, with the cental government the topmost and, because of that location, the weakest of the three divisions of political power–the local, the state and the federal. That was one reason for the strictures placed upon the federal government by the Constitution. But this was by far the only thing that the Founders desired. When Thomas Jefferson made mention of the inalienable (and natural) rights of men, he did not give an entire catalogue following, at least implicitly, Edmund Burke’s reasoning that an entire list of natural rights cannot be compiled due to their very nature. The three that Jefferson did list, however, did not mention low taxes or a small, federal government. His short list was much more basic, citing Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. There is an almost poetical progression or syllogism in the order of the three rights: Life is, of course, the most basic natural right since, without it, we cannot enjoy any of the others, including Liberty; Liberty is required so that we can have the movement necessary to pursue our happiness; and, of course, the pursuit of happiness is necessary to have a chance to gain happiness.

This progression leads, naturally, to the asking of what, exactly is happiness? People of our time have a very subjective idea of happiness with most thinking and/or believing that happiness is doing whatever makes you happy, as long as you do not harm anyone else. This, though, is not what the Founders thought or believed. For the Founders, happiness was dependent on Virtue. Virtue, when it is thought of today, is often confused with “niceness” and a person who is nice is often cited, explicitly or implicitly, as a virtuous man. But, again, the word has suffered from a watering down, or, perhaps more correctly, a hollowing out caused, ultimately, by our own laziness. In the time of the Revolution and the Founders, Virtue was not “being nice” but was a unity of the classical virtues of ancient Greece and Rome–justice, honor, patriotism, to name a few–and the Christian virtues, such as the faith, hope and charity. It was this union of what was best in the pagan past and its fulfillment in Christianity that constituted Virtue, and it was this Virtue which was deemed necessary, not just for social order but for a man’s own personal happiness.  George Washington, in his first inaugural address in 1789, declared to the Congress:

…there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.

For Washington, the idea of happiness–real, deep, and genuine, contrary to merely pleasure or satisfaction–was impossible without Virtue. His vice-president, John Adams, believed the same. Adams, who had a life-long habit of thinking and writing on government and political philosophy, declared that Liberty, that second link in the Declaration’s syllogism, was impossible without religion and morality, as they were the only principles upon which Liberty could securely stand. What was more, Adams declared that morality depended on religion since it was religion that taught morality and because all morality started from first principles which were supplied by religion. The John Jay echoed the same principles when he said in a letter to John Murray, written in 1818, that, “The moral or natural law was given by the Sovereign of the universe to all mankind; with them it was co-eval and with them it will be co-existent. Being founded upon infinite wisdom and goodness on essential right, which never varies, it can require no amendment or alteration.” We all realize, in some form or another, that wisdom and goodness are good things–we all want goodness and we all want wisdom (even if we do not realize it). Since the law written by the “Sovereign of the universe” was based on infinite wisdom and goodness and since we were made in His image (as John Adams noted) it was only by following this moral law that true happiness could be found.

This belief that virtue and happiness were linked irrevocably together was not a new idea, plucked from the Founders from the clouds; it went back to some of (if not the) greatest thinkers of history, such as Aristotle and Cicero. The Founders simply had the wisdom and the humility to see that these giants were right and, from that point, the Founders attempted to build upon the shoulders of giants. This entire line of thought comes to head in the words of Mirabeau Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, who said, ” Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed…so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.”

There is much gold to be found in the words of the Founders. At the very least, there is such a high possibility of gold, that their words and ideas and arguments should be examined with the utmost detail and care in order that we could prosper from their accumulated wisdom. And yet, while their thoughts concerning freedom are well known, their thoughts on the foundations of that freedom are more often than not, ignored. At the most, they may be quoted from time to time and repeated amongst some group or another, but their application leaves much to be desired. Perhaps, more than the speeches and the fireworks and the clichéd speeches, the best honor that can be given to the Founders, both on Independence Day and all the days before and after, is the pursuit of happiness as they knew it to be.