I am
re-publishing here today’s Column by Bret Stephens in The New York Times. Friends
will notice instantly the similarity of his argument with my own exposition in
the pieces on “Identity Politics and Christianity”, and then in “The Concept of
Freeedom”.
SEDONA,
Ariz. — As a government official in World War II, Hamilton Warren was outraged to learn that a black
colleague made half as much as his white peers. So, after the war, the
wealthy Harvard graduate and his wife Barbara pitched up a tent in a remote
corner of northern Arizona. Working together with the Hopi people, they built a
school open to every race, creed, orientation, and nationality, and dedicated
to values of environmental stewardship, physical labor and cultural
understanding.
Verde
Valley School was and remains among the most genuinely
progressive boarding schools anywhere. It is surely the most
American. Instead of aping the Etonian traditions of the Old World, it created
something different for the New. It believed in an identity that was forged,
not just inherited; in the possibility of transcending differences, not
reinforcing them; in making a break from the past, not remaining fixated by it.
So it
is with so much in the United States, which makes it so different from nearly
everywhere else. When Hernán Cortés and his men landed on the coast of Mexico,
in 1519, they encountered a world of utter barbarity: incessant warfare,
endemic slavery, and human sacrifice on an immense scale. They, in turn, inflicted their own barbarities: massacres,
epidemics, forced labor and religious intolerance.
Whether one barbarity was
better than the other is not a particularly interesting debate. The conquest of
Mexico was another chapter of history as it usually is, a contest for power
with little hope for progress.
The
Conquistadors and their successors also imported millions of African slaves.
Seen in the overall context of the Western Hemisphere — or, for that matter,
most of the pre-modern world — the arrival of more than 20 slaves in Virginia a
century later was abominable, but not unique.
Yet
something else came to America: the idea of liberty. Unlike the taste for
plunder, which is nearly universal, the idea of liberty isn’t. It emerges from
a distinctive intellectual tradition that, within a limited sphere, emphasized
the claims of individual conscience, a disintermediated relationship with God,
and a skeptical view of state power.
It also
emerged from a unique historical circumstance. Cortés was a soldier acting in
the name of the Spanish crown and the Catholic Church. Among those who came to
North America, many were religious dissenters and political refugees, starting
with the Huguenots in Canada and the Mayflower Pilgrims. They could be tyrants
and bigots, violent and superstitious. But they also saw themselves, if
sometimes self-servingly, as nonconformists and victims of political
persecution.
It was this
self-conception that encouraged successive generations of religious dissenters,
movement starters, and freethinkers to go their own way. As importantly, it
also made it untenable, over the long haul, for those in positions of authority
to oppose them. This is the thought that I’d like to contribute to The Times’s
1619 Project.
Elsewhere
in the world — Spain in the 17th century; China today — the argument against
liberty has mainly been an argument for tradition, hierarchy and order. In
America, the argument against liberty has been the argument of hypocrites. To
deny freedom to others inevitably means subverting the principle through which
one can claim freedom for oneself.
That’s
why every significant liberation movement in the U.S., from abolition to
suffrage to civil rights to marriage equality, has made its case by appealing to
foundational principles, not rejecting them.
“The
existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a
sham,” Frederick Douglass reproached a
Rochester audience on July 5, 1852. But he also said, in
the same speech, that “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the
Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” Martin Luther King Jr., made
essentially the same case 111 years later from the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial.
This
has always been one of the astonishments of America: The origin story of the
ruling class does more to undermine than bolster its claims to power. Take that
origin story away — the one that traces a line from Mayflower Compact to the
Declaration of Independence to the Battle of Gettysburg to the Freedom Riders —
and you lose this.
Past
generations of oppressed Americans have bested their oppressors by appealing to
their conscience and self-interest. But if a new origin story were to tell us
that our ideals have always been a sham (as opposed to being honored too much
in the breach), and that the whole story of America is one of unremitting
oppression (as opposed to the far-too-gradual relief of oppression), then we
would lose the mechanism of self-reproach by which past progress was made.
At that
point, the only thing for people with power to do would be to hold on to it.
Why should anyone bother to measure his behavior according to standards nobody
expects him to hold?
This is
a beautiful country, especially amid red rocks under vast skies. But as people
like Hamilton Warren knew, the real beauty of America has less to do with the
outer vistas than the inner ones — the ever-renewing possibility of being “more
perfect” according to ideals that remain our starting point and destination.
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