To Think Anew and Act Anew
Part One: Reflections During Thanksgiving
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country . . . . Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. -Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862
November brings memories that are familiar, and usually family-based, to most Americans. Returning home at Thanksgiving—this most American of holidays—is a ritual of bonding, of sharing the good things of life, both material and spiritual, with those who know us best, and where we feel most comfortable—but we also often welcome new friends, guests, and those from other cultures in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-perspective country. We become E Pluribus Unum around the Thanksgiving table. Each family finds its own rituals and celebrates in its own way, though with many common stories and experiences (and with grace notes, I hope, to avoid family arguments). My household has always found the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade one of those rituals, with anticipation thereafter of the repast to follow, while watching the Westminster Dog Show (no football for us at this stage of life), in hopes that the golden retriever will win Best in Show, a hope never realized but always anticipated each year.
In more recent years, I sense November’s meaning in American culture more than ever—both because of Thanksgiving itself, but because of memories from childhood. In fifth grade, I was expected to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and write it from memory, and I learned it was delivered in November by our nation’s greatest President on a “great battlefield” of a Civil War that tore the country part in ways that my young mind could not comprehend. But learning by heart some of the finest words ever written in American history pointed my mind to the way that words can shape a culture, and public discourse, and in this case, as the historian Garry Wills wrote, “remake a nation.”
The darkest hours of the month for me will always be those few hours on November 22, 1963, when I sat with classmates in my elementary school classroom and heard our principal’s voice over the intercom telling us that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas, with another announcement soon following, telling us that the President was dead. The fear and uncertainty for a stricken nation at that time, regardless of politics or cultural viewpoint, were palpable, and deeply disorienting for many of us. It was if demons had been unleased in the public square, and conspiracy theories regarding the Kennedy assassination surged immediately and continue to the present day.
However, despite all of the turmoil of Sixties that followed, I always believed the country had within its grasp to become a better, fairer, place—and subsequent years showed that better country through the great accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement in overcoming the terrible sin of slavery and the Jim Crow period, a more broadly shared prosperity, more opportunities for both women in professions and in the workplaces, and across decades, a shared consensus about the essential goodness, even in a flawed democracy, of the country—that pointed toward what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”: the triumph of liberal democracy against totalitarian foes in the former Soviet Union and Mao’s China.
Even with recent decades showing the rising tide of authoritarianism across the world, and with liberal democracies under assault from forces both external and internal, I affirm the great chords of memory tied to Lincoln’s words that called for the country to renew itself as a liberal democracy. Those words always reminded me of the “unfinished work” before us: this broad canvas of a country attempting to become better in living out its status as a creedal nation of immigrants, always becoming, by fits and starts, a better place, one that acknowledged enormous variety in human experiences while also, to a large degree, depending on a shared sense of reality and trust in the nation’s institutions.
American Voices: Paradoxes and a Complex Fate
My own education in understanding the American character and the spirit of the country, and the raucous democracy that has sustained it for almost two and a half centuries, comes from reading and discussing American, history, politics, and culture. And more specifically, from reading American literature, from classic authors as diverse as William Bradford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Carl Sandburg, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Terry Tempest Williams, Wallace Stegner, and others not as often canonized, such as Randolph Bourne, Philip Lopate, Richard Rodriguez, Mary Karr, and Lance Morrow. Other vibrant, newer voices such as Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Rob Henderson, and Eboo Patel, have opened new vistas into the American experience for me, showed many the many-faceted dimensions of identity, and raised important questions about how our multi-racial, multi-faith, and enormously varied people can still remain a “creedal nation” called for by Lincoln’s magnificent words of the Gettysburg Address that I memorized as a fifth-grader.
The sharp polarities of American experience revealed in the literature of the country may best be expressed by honing in on two writers that any student of American literature knows. First, the exulting and reverberating cataloging of the many aspects of human experience in Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” enumerating many scenes of action, trades, genders, races, locales, eponymized characters, with pulsing rhythms expressing the surging energies of a nation-in-becoming. Across the varieties of human experience and identity, Whitman’s poetry rips off the page and into the consciousness of the reader, calling for declamation and reading aloud. His singular poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” written after the assassination of Lincoln in April 1865, also perfectly captures the pathos and shock of a nation at the end of the great bloodshed of the Civil War.
The other writer, from a few decades later, who moves in exactly the opposite direction from Whitman, is the novelist Henry James, who once wrote, “It is a complex fate to be an American.” That cryptic statement revealed his own unsettledness in the raucous, industrializing country with no traditions that he thought were worthy—no established Church, no royalty, no class structure that provided order and meaning. His journey exactly reversed the path of Whitman and others who celebrated the promise of American life: James left and became a British citizen, where he spent the rest of his life exploring human psychology in ever more minute ways through novels and short stories that reverse the physical, muscular, and celebratory voice of Whitman’s. In effect, James became a “reverse immigrant” who departed from American experience. But his phrase “complex fate” attached to the American identity resonates because it does suggest the ever shifting and unsettledness of the country’s identity, and its many tensions, with a great gathering of peoples from all parts of the earth—and the ongoing challenges in redefining what it means to be an American, to be a citizen in a “creedal nation.”
The historian Michael Kammen best captures some of these contradictions about the “complex fate” of being an American in his People of Paradox, a classic text that delves into the origins of American culture. The tensions and contradictions that Kammen illuminates in his searching examination of how the American culture of E Pluribus Unum evolved out of enormous racial, religious, national origin, class, and experiential diversity have always consisted of movement toward greater equality of condition while celebrating plutocrats and robber barons; between religious piety and conformity around certain quasi-religious Protestant beliefs, while increasing multi-faith diversity and freethinking and atheism; between a libertarian individualistic streak while forming civic associations (a tendency now diminished, well documented by Putnam’s Bowling Alone); and a celebration of peace at home and abroad, while concocting ill-conceived and enormously costly military crusades in other countries through misunderstanding and ignorance of other cultures and histories. The many contradictions and paradoxes described by Kammen run like a thread throughout our history, embodied even in some of our greatest Presidents and leaders.
Two Great Americans of the 20th Century
Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg, that the nation was being tested about its very existence, whether a people “dedicated to the proposition,” of liberal democratic norms and human dignity, came to the fore again in another period of great testing, the worldwide Depression of the 1930s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in a time of great uncertainty, with the shock of the stock market crash of 1929 still reverberating and causing mass unemployment, privation, hunger, and despair throughout the country. His words in his 1933 inaugural address, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” his regular radio fireside chats, and his determination for “bold experimentation,” in solving the country’s economic problems, heartened a frightened people from across many classes, occupations, and stations in life. There was much “thinking anew” and “acting anew” in Roosevelt’s programs, even if some were ill-conceived and did not address fundamental problems in the economy; many believed that recovery was occurring and more important, that Roosevelt, himself crippled with polio, understood their plight and connected with them on a human level—and that their President’s very disability created that empathetic bond. Yet this same Franklin Roosevelt, along with a frightened Congress, approved the imprisonment of loyal Japanese-American citizens after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the dispossession of many of those citizens of their homes and property—a great moral blight on the country never completed remedied. Great leaders’ moral errors and fallibility become ever clearer in the bright light of history.
Another great American, Ronald Reagan, restored many Americans’ optimism and patriotism after the divisive politics, Watergate and post-Watergate, of the 1970s, and the economic woes of that era, with inflation, energy shortages, and the great humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. His certainty about the superiority of the free enterprise system (and what became later known as neoliberalism) against statist central planning of communist or socialist regimes elsewhere often oversimplified the accomplishments of the New Deal era, but there is little doubt that his foreign policy accomplishments in ratcheting down tensions with the then Soviet Union through arms agreements, and his outreach to a new generation of Soviet leaders, and his call for human freedom in his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” speech in West Berlin, created the impetus for opening up societies in eastern Europe that had been in the grip of Soviet domination for decades. Reagan’s ability to chart a new path and not accept the permanence of the Cold War, showed an ability to “think anew and act anew”, and to overcome the dogmas of rigid polarized thinking of that era, and revealed an imagination needed at that crucial time.
Yet this same President Reagan fell into the dark undertow of American history while first running for the office in 1980, visiting the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from the location where four civil rights activists were murdered in 1964, and speaking there about the importance of “state’s rights”. This was another blind spot in leadership, as was his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal in his second term in office, revealing counterintuitively the ossified anti-communism caused by insurgencies of guerrilla fighters in Nicaragua. It was another lapse in judgment, and failure in leadership in understanding the world’s complexities that often afflicts Americans and their elected leaders.
Great Shame and a Reasonable Patriotism
The touchstones of Lincoln’s words from the Gettysburg Address, his Second Annual Address to Congress, and both First and Second Inaugural Addresses, form a testament of faith in the future of the country that reaches beyond the mundane strivings within messy democratic processes, of election cycles, of a greatly polarized country where divides about what is factual and true are now endemic. Those words summon the best instincts, the “better angels”, for all citizens, and for us to think anew and act anew in holding the country together. Lincoln’s words, along with those of Martin Luther King in his “I Have a Dream” speech, and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in his speech to a crowd immediately after the assassination of King in 1968, placing the tragedy in the long sweep of history, reaching back to the Greek poet Aeschylus and reminding his listeners—and all Americans—to “dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
The finest words of American leaders throughout our history crystallize the “complex fate” of being citizens in this country, and dealing with our many variations of identity, profession, and economic and class circumstance. I have best understood this complexity through the framing of “sacred time” versus “profane time” through which the great anthropologist Mircea Eliade illuminated how human communities understand what is transcendent, whatever rises above the mundane and serves to bind those communities together through great trials and tests. The words of Lincoln, King, and RFK Sr. strike such chords of the sacred even now for many of us, in a time of great polarization and division—in showing the starkness of the choices before us, in calling us to our better selves, and to build civic bonds of trust, understanding others’ different worldviews where possible, and engage in the work of cultural and political renewal.
Such renewal is necessary when our both our elite institutions and many of our political figures further distrust and division, and create reality distortion zones that make civil discourse much more challenging, and even toxic. Elite universities that perpetuate the “oppressor/oppressed” divide in explaining complicated human realities in a liberal democracy with a complex history, full of its own contradictions, are one such example. Such simplifications further divide, create greater distrust, corrupt scholarly inquiry, and make honest conversations challenging among colleagues. However, for me, the most flagrant recent example of creating a reality distortion zone from our toxic social media environment came from some leading political figures using an Internet hoax about Haitian immigrants eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio, causing great disruption in that city, and great fear among that ethnic community, who are now leaving or living in fear—those who contributed to the community as new Americans even with only the Temporary Protected Status provided by more than one previous administration for them (which does allow applications for asylum, a long process). The dehumanization of vulnerable immigrants, especially, takes away the sense of civility, decency, and even a shared sense of reality and basic facts, which are necessary for a liberal democracy to sustain itself. It is a deeply shameful episode of dehumanization leveraged for political gain. If this is what “Make America Great Again” means, I want no part of it.
In contrast, our country renews itself through the influx of new Americans through immigration ceremonies each year—those events where new immigrants join in a reasonable display of fresh patriotism to a country pledged to a creed of individual rights, the rule of law, opportunity and fairness for all, and a continuing intergenerational search for a better collective life for all citizens, whatever their nationality, gender, experience, profession, or aspirations. The words of President Reagan near the end of his second term call for a better sense of the common good in welcoming immigrants from a strife-filled world to recreate new lives for themselves and to add to the capacities of a self-renewing democracy. His “city on a hill” imagined a city with walls but with open gates for all those who needed refuge and a new home for their families and their hopes.
The aspirational patriotism of new immigrants, seen each year in naturalization ceremonies across the country, is a window for all citizens of how civic renewal works, such as this one at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello—another enduring contradiction with this event held at the plantation home of a founding father who penned the Declaration of Independence while also possessing human beings in bondage. The complexities of American history endure, but these events that elevate the vitality of citizenship, and the contributions of a wide range of peoples from across the globe to renewing the nation, are a legitimate source of pride and patriotism for all of us.
The Epistemic Secession
My experience across decades of thinking about, and participating in, our liberal democracy, have acquainted me with its increasing distempers. Over a period of several decades, the inability of our elected leaders at the national level to work together productively, the constant media frenzies about scandals large and small, the structural aspects of our Constitution designed by our brilliant but also fallible Founding Fathers—these and many other causes coalesce to make many of us lose faith in our institutions, in our leaders, and increasingly, in each other. Add to these causes the isolating effects of social media and the fragmentation of our information ecosystem, we have now arrived at a place where our two great political parties have seceded from each other, and from a shared set of facts, according to political scientists Ornstein and Mann. This rupture is real in the broader culture and western democracies, as explained recently by Sam Harris, neuroscientist and public intellectual. This epistemic secession means that we are now living as at least two different nations, without a shared reality that makes liberal democracy possible, and where the rights and obligations of citizens are obscured in a swirl of memes and a cacophony of competing “narratives”, where anyone can supposedly become a “citizen journalist” via (X); where scientists and their expertise are often dismissed out of hand; where the “deep state” is demonized as parasitic upon the energies of the broad citizenry; where podcasters spin their own perceptions and biases endlessly; where substackers and bloggers occupy niches appealing to a particular audience of the likeminded searching for confirmation bias and the agreeable facts that ratify their “priors.” The motivated cognition, belief signaling, and opportunistic coalition-formation, all accelerated by our current information system, further cause challenges for those elected to lead, to govern, to offer expert judgement, and to describe the “wicked problems” that affect us and members of all liberal democracies—in this, we Americans are hardly exceptional.
Lincoln spoke and wrote a time of actual civil war, when the country’s fabric was rent in twain, and he both pointed back to first principles and also found a way, in the Gettysburg Address, to articulate a “new birth of freedom” with a transcendental belief in an emerging nation of equality, opportunity, prosperity, and fairness. We are now, in our time, engaged in a cold civil war, with a splintered sense of reality. Fortunately, a counter-movement, with civic associationism at its core, has also surged in recent years. with some regenerative organizations at the grassroots, campus, and associational levels: Braver Angels, the Lyceum Movement, the Prohuman Foundation, the National Conference on Citizenship, the Interfaith America initiatives, the Pluralism and Civil Exchange Program, citizenship education organizations and student debate clubs on campuses, and professional associations such as Heterodox Academy, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression championing free speech rights for all. The battles within this new cold civil war—against overt and self-censorship, for sound scholarship and open inquiry, for better listening and openness to change, for engaging with those who differ from us as citizens with respect and forbearance—will be long and often intense, with uncertain outcomes but with the hope that we can, once again, renew the nation and trust in its epistemic institutions for the benefit of all.
I choose to hope, rather than despair, about this country and its institutions, its news and media organizations, and the behavior of fellow citizens, despite my frustrations and my own biases. To think anew and act anew, as Lincoln called for his fellow citizens to do in 1862, is a new summons from the past that places me again, as a fifth-grade boy, sitting in a classroom in a rural west Texas school, struggling to memorize the words of the Gettysburg Address, and searching for meaning in the simplicity and majesty of those words, to resolve that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The mystery of the words abides.
This is the first of a three-part series on “To Think and Act Anew”. This first part addresses the broad sweep of my own experience in thinking of Lincoln and others who were significant in the intellectual and political life of the country. The second forthcoming part addresses “To Think and Act New” in the general cultural and academic context. The third part continues these reflections within the library context.
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Wonderful piece Craig -- very much in the tenor of the late Lewis Lapham!