New Year’s 2025 looks like a milestone beyond the convention of turning the calendar, beyond the change of administration, beyond Jimmy Carter’s passing, beyond so much that’s happening.
The world is in flux, in a sense that feels less like passing turbulence than permanent global change. To an extent that now seems clear, all norms or establishments, any claims of virtue or expertise (real or overhyped), and notions of “reasonability” or “reality,” have come unmoored. Practically speaking, nothing works, nobody feels trustworthy, claims and argument have displaced knowledge and worth, and no truth – of physics or God or human nature – feels certain. Even entertainment, amid sequels, remakes, incessant branding, and streaming fees, is more business than fun. Are we facing an epochal collapse? Can Americans, or anyone, bring some good out of it all?
Any answer depends on what we value. As Professor Eliot Cohen advises politically homeless Americans, “We had better establish what we stand for.“ And anything anyone aims to “stand for” needs to reach beyond our comic book politics and shriveling public discourse. We need to look past politicians’ self-serving doctrines, and contemplate underlying values that wannabe leaders, movers and shakers always purport to carry. Real values have gotten submerged in rhetoric and dissemblance – how else could a murderous, enslaving, totalitarian entity like ISIS “inspire” acts of violence against us?
We must not try to fix the habitual norms, and should discard our politicized vocabulary of self-deepening division. Only if we transcend that polarizing terminology can we unfreeze public discourse from the current trench warfare. Only in new terms of reference can we overcome residual partisan contentions – the one side’s denials that they were self-righteously condescending in their ‘higher’ values, the other’s demands that defy reality and reason, both sides’ intransigence in polarized conflict.
Only in a new frame of reference can we build good discourse. Setting one is not easy. Beyond civic and social affairs, our capacity even to see meaning is compromised. A universe of quanta and dark energy overwhelms us. As science undoes traditional terms of faith – and yields no replacement answers but only next questions – choosing something to stand for feels like an arbitrary, unsupported, feeble choice. Even if we embrace established articles of faith, their Truth is transformed from cosmic “given” to matters of doubt and argument.
Baldly reasserting truths, beliefs, rules, and normal expectations, is futile. But we can recalls a practical concept, “zero based budgeting.” Old organizational planning normally took last year’s performance and made adjustments, added new goals, etc. But sometimes an enterprise needs to rebuild its plans, from “zero.” Assume away “normal” operations and costs, and imagine what might best be. Unmoor from what has been, and reach anew for the essence.
We need to establish what we stand for, not regurgitating the political, community, or religious stances that “I” have always held, but in pro-active, baked from scratch, deliberate choices. The natural question arises of where to start. Anything we stand for – anything at all – will rest on faith of some kind, and any article of faith is what we believe. Can we choose as a considered act of will, rather than among pre-ordinations?
As Americans, we have that right. Our nation conceived itself on the premise that every human, inherently, equally, and irrevocably, has the right to pursue “my” own life for my chosen ends. Certainly the right to seek meaning is a “pursuit of happiness” under this premise. Whatever ultimate faiths of existence and holiness any one of us may follow, we Americans conceived ourselves as a people by our commitment to leave each to their quests. Only the second of our self evident truths, that governments are instituted to secure those rights, with powers legitimated by consent of the governed, tempers “my” rights, and only for each to respect each others’.
This creed of the Declaration sets America’s national, ground zero, existential base. In Prof. Cohen’s words, our bedrock is “a kind of liberalism.” This creed is civic, and “liberal” in spirit, but implies no “ism” in its terms. It acknowledges the mysteries of existence: along with the enduringly mysterious workings of quanta and energy, we also cannot explain the origins of human impulse. Amid those quanta and impulses we value the freedom, for each to pursue life and meaning, regulated only by that mutual need to respect each others’. Where it all goes, no one can tell, though we find it unnatural for human power to repress humans’ pursuits. We need to re-commit to protecting and nurturing the unalienable rights, while accepting that, for ultimate “results,” we cannot know them any better than the next person. None, in fact, can know, any more than the proverbial Himalayan butterfly fluttering its wings can foresee the rainstorm it causes in Peru. We can only have faith that our best efforts will generate something of value, however beyond our ken.
America’s ground zero base, while civic, is also personal. In committing all of us to the rights of each, it does invite each to find best value by personal best lights – to make good use of our unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. That is not easy at all, and not obviously good to people in other times and places. Yet the right to freedom plausibly reflects a feature of human nature that “Realist” models of interest and incentive just can’t explain. Corresponding re-organization of our institutions will also be very hard, and complex. No two of us will agree on proper configurations. Thus the Declaration’s creed does not imply a call for “unity,” which today is actually the partisans’ rallying cry to defeat the nefarious other side. What we do need, in our re-set of public discourse, is comity in the Declaration’s Truths. We need to assert “the primacy of those deeper values over the urgency of any specific political program, [in our] belief that, ultimately, they matter more.”
Living in comity in our founding, we can deliberate together over the best arrangements and institutions, not as ends in themselves but means to a greater ends, which we all understand in common. We will recall the greatness of our abstract, aspirational, historically novel, American creed, currently buried in polarized argument. Where today we see repressive dogmas “inspiring” disaffected individuals to terrorism, we will inspire intentional people to invention and exploration. We can see today’s traumas as birthing pains, of a new era in which our promise will shine a new light.
Common Conviction 