The Pillars of Reason

I was reading Daniel McCarthy’s piece in Imprimis the other night—“The Fight Over America’s Public History”—and something in it kept returning me to a speech Lincoln gave as a young man in Springfield in 1838. McCarthy quotes the part that has stayed with me. Lincoln is speaking of the living witnesses to the Revolution, the men who had seen the thing itself, and he says:

They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls. They are gone.—They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.

 They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.—Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws...

Lincoln is clear enough. The heat that carried the founding—the memory still warm in the blood of those who had fought—could not be trusted to last. Time would cool it. What had to take its place was something colder and harder to stir: intelligence, a certain moral seriousness, and an almost religious regard for the Constitution and the laws that held the experiment together. Passion, he says, will become the enemy. The new pillars had to be cut from reason.

I keep asking whether those pillars are still standing.

It is not a simple question, and I do not pretend the answer is. The Founders were not angels. They left slavery in the Constitution; they compromised; some of them owned men. Any honest reading has to carry that. Yet the same men also wrote the principles that later generations used to dismantle the thing they had left unfinished. That is the ordinary, imperfect way of a free people: the ideal outruns the men who first stated it, and the work of bringing practice closer to the ideal is left to those who come after. Lincoln himself understood this. He did not ask us to worship the dead as saints. He asked us to replace their living presence with something that could endure without them.

What I see now is something different from the ordinary slow weathering of time. The “silent artillery” Lincoln spoke of has been joined by a louder kind. In the museums, the historic sites, the textbooks, the university departments that train the people who write the textbooks, a steady effort is underway to treat the founding not as the imperfect beginning of a long attempt at ordered liberty, but as the original sin from which the country must be redeemed by becoming something else. The Revolution is backgrounded. The Declaration is treated as rhetoric that concealed power. The Constitution is read mainly for the clauses that later generations amended or for the silences that can be filled with present grievance. Public history, which McCarthy describes as the place where ordinary citizens meet their past, has in too many instances become a vehicle for the claim that the past was not worth keeping.

Who is doing this? Not a single conspiracy, but a climate. It is the work of scholars formed by a suspicion of the West that runs from Rousseau through later theories of power and identity; of boards and curators who treat the acknowledgment of slavery or inequality as the principal moral duty of a historic site; of educators who have come to believe that reverence for the Constitution is a form of nostalgia that must be outgrown. Their best argument is not foolish. They say the older story left too many people out, that the language of liberty was used to justify exclusion, and that a nation serious about justice must keep the exclusions in view. That is a real claim. The difficulty is that the remedy they propose is not a fuller account of the same nation, but the gradual replacement of its founding principles with a different set—one in which equality of outcome or group recognition stands higher than the older restraints on power, and in which the past is useful mainly as evidence of what must be overcome.

The result is an identity crisis that is hard to name because so many people still use the old words. What does it mean to be American if the Revolution and the Constitution are no longer the common inheritance, but a contested claim that some citizens are invited to treat with skepticism or hostility? Lincoln thought the danger would come from within, from the loss of attachment to the laws. He did not foresee that the loss of attachment could be taught as a moral advance. Passion, which he already distrusted as a future support, has returned in the form of moral certainty about the past’s guilt. The cold reason he wanted—intelligence enough to see both the achievement and the flaw, morality steady enough to prefer ordered liberty to the satisfactions of condemnation, reverence for the framework that makes argument possible—has been harder to maintain once the framework itself is presented as the problem.

I do not know whether the temple has already begun to lean or for how long it will stand. I know that the materials Lincoln named are scarcer than they were, and that the people charged with shaping public memory have, in many places, decided those materials are no longer the ones required. The work of supplying new pillars was always going to be difficult. It becomes nearly impossible if the quarry itself is declared off-limits.

by Alfonso Beccar Varela and Grok