Sacred West

America to me is the great Liberal creation of the western path, arising as the flower of the so-called Enlightenment, in an age when reason was adored, and adhered to. The American people, back in those Revolutionary days, were remarked across the world for their distinct “virtue”, a happy blend of piety and individual self-worth and civic sacrifice, all following from the influence on the age of the philosopher John Locke.

As a nation of farmers, even so our ancestors possessed more books of law per capita than any other nation of the time, and treated reason as a quality of the divine, and thus valued discourse as almost sometimes a sacred thing. And so they held debates whose outcomes could only be determined by the pure play of Reason, which had the power in those days even to overturn the factions of privilege, or the fixtures of rigid mind. Out of this love of liberality came the Constitution.

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Alone of all the people I ever knew and worked with in the conservative movements of the seventies and the eighties, I have actually read all of James Madison’s notes of the Federal Convention of 1787. In a summer in Colorado, I read - with bated breath - the proceedings of that summer in Philadelphia, when the men of the states came together to write the Constitution. I followed all the twists and turns, and the lines of reasoning, and the passions of the time, as these men created what was to become our ecosystem of freedom and supreme law. I was struck by how many times during their discussions these men referred to the “virtue” of the American people, which was to them the astonishing gift that not only allowed but actually mandated their mission: to create an ideal nation based on law.

What matters about this is what they said, these Founders, about the virtue of the American people. They all said, in essentially these same words, repeatedly though that founding summer, that if the American people ever lost their great virtue, then no genius of Constitution could save the Union.

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And so it is now, in this cold dawn as it were, that we must look at ourselves and ask if we still have the juice for this freedom thing. Do we possess the love of reason, the open mind that doesn’t know in advance the outcome of a discussion, but delights in waiting for all the elements of logic and persuasion to fall into the scales?

It is true to me that there is a greatness to America. But this greatness belongs to our ancestors. Our ancestors were great people, in an extraordinary age, embarked upon a task that struck the happiness of the world as if it were a bell, and caused it to peal out a sound that hasn’t yet ever quite faded into silence, not yet, not by any means yet.

So, in comparison with our ancestors, those people who created this oasis of reason and law, in comparison with them, I ask, who are we now? Are we the withered line of these people, their idiot descendants, half insane, half infirm - overweight, overworked, overwrought - with failing memory, and feeble wits, and no time at all to spare to get ourselves better?

No one knows the answer to this question. I know we have no right to call upon the greatness of America as if we possess it. The greatness is handed down to us though the generations, but it is for us to become worthy of it.