Yesterday we marked America’s first 250 years of national existence.
A few questions arise. Did we celebrate, really? Should we celebrate? That question would draw many responses, ever more politicized over recent decades, which is in itself a reason to temper the celebration. There are good reasons and ways to celebrate. But is some tempering appropriate? After all, won’t we just return to business as usual on Monday?
America conceived itself 250 years ago as a nation of principle, named in a creed of rights and self-government. No people had explicitly declared itself before. None had named itself by its beliefs rather than blood and soil. No ruler had been bound by consent of the governed. No body of subjects had had rights that had not been granted by their ruler. This radically conceived people could hardly be expected to last in the world; its efforts to survive would amount to an experiment. And survival, for a people defined by its own declared creed, would not reside solely in physical and legal independence: the same population with the same institutions would not be the same People without fidelity to our founding. Comity in its existential premises is necessary for the nation’s survival, and when political mindsets alienate each other, that comity is in doubt.
For 250 years, we have remained independent. Compliance to the letter of an abstract creed is impossible, and our observance has always been messy. We took 90 years to end slavery and another 100 to outlaw racial discrimination; we propped up foreign dictators in a global campaign against Soviet Communism; and many of us have gone unbridled in our pursuits. Yet, however incompletely, our creedal tenets, as a kind of implicit conscience, have recalled us from excessive selfishness and contention. In our growth and development we have made lives more livable, opened new horizons, and, however fitfully, instilled an ethos of fairness and personal opportunity. The nation can be said to have kept faith with the founding premises.
Will this continue? Current affairs might be discouraging. Partisans mis-appropriate the Declaration’s words in campaign rhetoric, careerists tout their profession’s interests as essential to society, opportunists conjure self-serving “visions” for the nation. All wrap their claims in patriotic rhetoric but cede no deference to the nation’s needs. They might be versions of what Thomas Paine called “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.” When the crunch comes, they will put their personal priorities before our comity in our creed. As they seem to dominate the public discourse right now, we may soon face more of those “times that try souls,” as Paine characterized December of 1776, two hundred forty nine and a half years ago.
Difficulties will be made worse by the upheavals of the post-modern age. New discoveries and innovations could render any standing norms false – if genetic engineering and artificial intelligence fulfill their possibilities, human life could, in a real sense, lose its value. Nations defined by traditions of kinship and received truths could face complete invalidation. In this matter, America has an advantage: our founding faith ties us to no past allegiances. It opens us to explore whatever may come, in the course of our free pursuits. We need not bend our origin story to fit with new science, so long as rights, and the free will they enable, remain plausible. The deepest science, philosophy and reason that we know, say they will.
If we recognize our creedal nature and act by that conviction, America endures. The Declaration’s creed remains valid for as long as we exhibit a viable nation striving to realize its tenets. This is not an easy condition; we all do have to reconcile personal drives with social order, so that all may exercise their own rights. This, and all its attendant demands, of self discipline, of social contract, of public management, make for a moral wrestling, in each conscience and in the public discourse. So long as that wrestling is over means and we all embrace the same ends, our experiment continues. It fails when our own conduct kills it.
Those who govern their personal wants, and nurture comity in our founding conviction, perform the service that Paine called for. As he said, they deserve the nation’s love and thanks. Any and each of us can. We start by viewing every American as compatriot in that conviction, and doing our wrestling in that spirit.
Celebrating America’s 250 years of survival is fully appropriate. So is praise and admiration for the founders and for the many people who furthered our development in the founding spirit. That said, again, our creed is about what America will be, and it is we who will make that. To appropriate Lincoln’s words, “it is for us the living to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us,” to pass the perpetual testing whether any nation, conceived as we are, can long endure. On the first day of our next quarter millennium, that self dedication may be the most important thing for us to consider.
Common Conviction 