WHAT IS AMERICA?
Is it a finished country, defined by its station among the powers of the earth? … Is it an unfinished project, held together by a corpus of ideas and a commitment to their realization? …a single idea, the most ambitious flirtation with utopia yet attempted? … a voltage that drives the pursuit of happiness through the resistance of human nature and history toward a more perfect union? Is it, as one video booster recently put it, “freedom to do; freedom to grow; freedom to believe; freedom to live and let live”? Is it, in the WSJ headline, a “creedal nation”? (https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-america-is-a-creedal-nation-75676aa8?st=7QGtMx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)
The answers have their own power to mold the project. But as answers, they vitiate the power of the question.
“The Revolution,” John Adams wrote in 1818, “was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. A Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations.”
Where are our “minds and hearts” located nowadays? Do we feel religious sentiments of any kind, let alone duties and obligations? Where is the revolutionary spirit that can sustain a nation?
As Founders of the current America, we here declare both our duty to learn from our history and our responsibility to our children to engage among ourselves, and with them, in the ongoing reinvention of the country, re-constituting it as worthy of the promise of our mutually pledged honor.
We will ask, in its second quarter-millenium, what America the original Founders promised and prepared, what philosophical groundwork they assumed as bedrock, what problems of confederated subsistence they solved and avoided, and what substance remains of their invention. The Founders—Hamilton, Madison and Jay, and their interlocutors Jefferson, Franklin, Payne, et al.—thought up a country. Would it be possible to re-found America — to re-invent the polity on philosophical principles that produce, not the obsession with the individual and his freedom, but the actuality of constructive dialogue—an intensely felt and vibrantly resilient We-For-Each-Other? After two thousand years of philosophy, there are such principles available. How can we, current Americans, become the ongoing founders?
Now, America has already been invented, and its foundational documents mark a tectonic shift in the history of the world. But they are historical documents. On sounder and truer foundations we will think up another country, confident that in this re-inventing we will recognize the America that inspires the world still. The Marine Corps motto is “Semper Fidelis,” always faithful. We affirm the reality of its claim. The Marines’ operating principle, though, is bracing: “No one is coming. It’s up to us.”
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To Begin — EXAMINE AND RE-ENGAGE WITH THE FEDERALIST PAPERS
Hamilton began No 10, devoted to the danger for a republic of dissolution into faction, with a definition of a problem which American popular government is to solve.
The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.
Sound familiar?
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
The Federalist remedy for faction thus defined is to bring several states (erstwhile colonies) into the Constitutional structure of a republic:
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.
Is it in any way deniable that both the majority (as measured by the latest election) and the minority parties are factions, animated not by the common good of the whole, but by their ruling passions and interests … even masked as they are by vehement and vitriolic protestations of patriotism?
Hamilton continues:
“When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.
To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”
Both the public good and private rights. Hamilton rejects the pursuit of objectives separate from the good of the nation, and equally any agenda that would compromise private rights (property rights)…. But the question we are left with is that of the nature of the arena of contest which will allow preservation of popular government.
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.
In the 18th century this was plausible, at least. Today the ubiquity of social media–where factions are amplified among not only their leaders, but more perniciously among us—stokes the general conflagration. No longer do state borders contain the damage to our polity. So it’s up to us to save America from… America. The monetization of outrage is built into the public sphere now. Our polity is now structured not to prevent its own dissolution but to accelerate the blame mechanism.
So, a bare beginning: here we have a current monster problem to find/create the arena for solving.
Here’s the judge who rejected the President’s latest Us-Against-Them salvo:
The United States is a great nation, not because any of us say so. It is great because we still practice our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all. Strangers go out of their way to help strangers when they see a need. In times of fire, flood, and national disaster, everyone pitches in to help people we’ve never met and first responders selflessly risk their lives for others. Hundreds of firefighters rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11 without hesitation desperate to find and save survivors. That’s who we are. And on distant battlefields our military ‘fought and died for the men [they] marched among.’ Each day, I recognize (to paraphrase Lincoln again) that the brave men and women, living and dead, who have struggled in our Nation’s service have hallowed our Constitutional freedom far above my (or anyone’s) poor power to add or detract. The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us.
Do the Federalist papers give us considerations for maintaining the rights of the meanest citizens? How about immigrants? In the age of nearly unlimited population flows, do we need an arena in which questions of the status of foreign nationals can be fairly [adjudicated]? Where is the frontier tradition of the good of us all? Who is “us” now? Who are we?
As we re-read the founding colloquy, we’ll see that many of the problems the authors foresaw with establishing a federal system still bedevil our Union; so much so that, in combination with newer issues like immigration, we will have mighty labors to re-constitute anything that could bear the title of Commonwealth, let alone United States.
RE-ENGAGING THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, WE DIG DEEP INTO THEIR PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS
Why are democratic peoples around the world suddenly—utterly mystifyingly to so many of us—exhibiting new tendencies to turn away from and vote against democracy?
As Lincoln remarked in the Gettysburg Address, the United States of America was the first nation in history to found itself on a philosophical proposition. And the spread of democracy through the world over the two-and-a-quarter centuries after our founding was taken by many as definitive proof of that proposition’s correctness. Why knock success? On those very terms, though, the current widespread dis-endorsement of democratic governments—in its best light—gives us good reason to reexamine together the principle of our founding, and whence it arose. Might it be time to boldly and thoughtfully ask ourselves if there are perhaps better reasons on which to found democratic life than the idea that we are all created equal by being equally endowed, as discrete individuals, with natural rights?
Jefferson—the preeminent intellectual among our founders—claimed, in a letter he wrote late in life, that there were three indisputably preeminent individuals in human history. All, like him, were intellectuals, though their names— Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke—might come as a surprise to many of us now. Jefferson exalted Bacon high above the other two as the original intellectual founder of the modern empirical science that was then, as far as Jefferson could see at the time, given a definitive physical framework of natural laws by Newton and a definitive psychic and political framework of natural rights by Locke. America thus became the aegis under which a regime of truth advanced into Western modernity. If you think you know what’s true—what’s bound to be true—you are resting your case on assumptions about the nature of truth: that’s a regime.
Francis Fukuyama, in his 1992 The End of History and the Last Man, saw how liberal democracy had seemingly triumphed over all other prior forms of political regime, but with the deeply unsatisfying civic and spiritual whimper that has since come to be named “economic globalization.” Faced with that glum impasse—now appearing far less the triumph of democracy than of technocracy–the rule of the chain saw—and seemingly no other alternative, who in their right minds would not turn back in horror, running in search of seemingly lost forms of religious and political greatness?
What if we are not at base islands of matter with minds, seeking to accrue power to ourselves through the effectual manipulation of nature and our fellow human beings? What if we are instead souls who matter to one another, in a real physical world that is more soulful than material in its basic nature? If we could find principles of reason and methods of reasoning for this soulful mattering, we could refound democracy in ways that would humanely encompass technocracy and meritocracy, discovering together that there is a “relational truth” of far more import and bringing us far more happiness. Where are we to find the essence of that relational truth to supplant the regime of material truth to which democracy has been harnessed?
During the 1920s, the young German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss grew greatly disenchanted both with the civic and spiritual shallowness of the new Weimar Republic that had been modeled on British and American democracy and with the even deeper shallowness, thoughtlessness, and barbarity of the German nihilism that came to usurp it. Strauss spent the rest of his deeply scholarly life both thoroughly analyzing the low but relatively solid ground upon which modern democracy was philosophically founded and urging that modernity eventually be philosophically re-founded on both higher and more ancient ground. He recommended long, diligent efforts to understand Plato the way he understood himself. In so doing he became a prophet of our times, when the sacred temples of democratic principles and practices are visibly crumbling and need rebuilding, resanctified from principles and practices that can be philosophically mined from the deep human past. This is no intellectual parlor-game. The stakes are nuclear—cosmic forces could either bend the arc of justice like electrons in orbit, or blow it to dust, with radioactive fallout to poison the environment for everyone forever. The rule of law is—or should be—such a force. What does it depend on? The answer to this question—better, the continual presence of the question—releases the nuclear power of American civilization. In our dealings with each other, what does the rule of law import and portend?
“Steadfastness, trustiness, and sincerity—these I affirm to be the genuine philosophy, but as to all other forms of science and cleverness which tend in other directions, I shall, I believe, be giving them their right names if I dub them ‘parlor-tricks’.” This is Plato in his Tenth Letter, depicting the heart of philosophy as an eros [a love not only of body but of compassion and virtue] tying the nature of philosophy far closer to the Greek philia than the current norm tying it to dispassionate “objectivity” or to the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.” Installed at the aegis of our commonwealth, this triumvirate, an eros of democratic friendship, would transform our world. What did Plato mean by “steadfastness, trustiness, and sincerity”? And what do they have to do with the rule of law?
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JFK’s famous 1961 Inaugural Address called America to become more a centripetal than a centrifugal nation: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!” Whirling matter in a centrifuge separates into discrete pieces, each with its isolated characteristics, the blood cells clumped apart from the plasma. And there are good purposes to be served by harnessing this mechanism. In the seeking a center of “country,” as electrons cohere around a nucleus, another good is served. What Socrates discovered, though, is that neither of these two forces, over-stressed, makes for a truly stable or lastingly fulfilling form of political life, and that there is, in fact, a third principle of democracy, which we can call “each for each”—based on an eros of “steadfastness, trustiness, and sincerity” that citizens can learn to come to bear both for each other and for the world. Learning is not, for us, processing data, memorizing and reciting. It is being together and inventing. It is a site where the trustiness and sincerity of the teacher meet in the steadfastness of inquiry shared among inventors.
What Socrates might be said to have discovered was “the divine center” of the human as human, in relational truth: by investing ourselves in one another, and in the world as a soulfully cosmic whole, we gain a kind of immortality, our acts of soulful care being seeds bearing potential to bear fruit in others’ later acts of goodness. This is a democracy in which citizens fundamentally seek to become the better angels of one anothers’ natures: through the soulful, friendly giving of themselves to others and the friendly, responsive reception of others’ gifts. [That word “soulful”—what could that mean? Are we embarked here on a religious revival? Is a tent-meeting the paradigm that will save America?]
Real religion manifests in what Judge [?] called “our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all.” But the return to religion will be salvific only if it is real religion (re-ligare, like ligament). Might there be great hope in Erika Kirk’s unconditional forgiveness of her husband’s murderer? She must think there’s something more available in the country to which Charlie gave his life than endless recrimination, taking people as if they were labels, lumping them into a right side and a wrong side, rightists and leftists. Charlie Kirk himself was not above that lumping impulse, and paid the price for it.
For religious stirrings we could look back to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, begging the American people, after a brutal war, to refound ourselves full-fledgedly on the “each for each” principle of “malice toward none, [and] charity for all.” There he goes back beyond the Gettysburg Address’s “four score and seven years ago” to announce a definitive reckoning with “the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” (1865 minus 250 or so is about 1619.) Lincoln saw that what was above all needed was “a bind[ing] up [of] the nation’s wounds,” not just from its recent war but from its earliest history, so as to create not just “a new birth of freedom,” but a newly “just and lasting peace” out of the thus far perpetual social and economic wars of democratic life. That slavery was the root of the civil war now mattered still, but more so in the light of what was at the root of slavery. We will inquire if that root still [noutishes, and poisons] our togetherness.
But it cannot in any full sense be said that the active Socratic, “each for each” revolution of democratic life began until the year 1889, a score and four years after Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. That was the year that Jane Addams—an Athena sprung from the mind of Lincoln, who was a friend of her father’s—chose to move from her home in rural Cedarville, Illinois to the squalid Chicago slums to found Hull House: a center for social and cultural dialogue for the global microcosm of impoverished immigrants huddled around it. The philosopher John Dewey called Jane Addams the modern, hands-on discoverer of democracy as a complete way of life, not just as the outward form of popular government. In that way she is the modern Socrates of global culture, and the ultimate anti-Machiavellian, by virtue of her creative founding of a cultural microcosm for relational truth in an environment then best known for its animal butchery. She is the mother of compassion—a word that means “shared struggle, shared suffering or enduring.”
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Respect for one another’s natural rights is in many ways nothing more than a tempering of a presumed underlying war of all against all. When that altruistic binding of wounds is encompassed by the loving receipt of one another’s personal and cultural gifts, though— Jane Addams, W.E.B. Dubois and others recognized that the consciousness of the marginalized may in fact already be richer than that of often relationally stupefied elites, perceptually blinded and psychically stuck through an attachment to caste that freezes the processes of authentic attachment to others, the world, and their very selves—when repair becomes compassion, then it becomes the poetic condition for an “each for each” being of all with all. From the religious then, we move to the poetic, which means “making.” We, current founders, are engaged in something profoundly offensive: we can only offend those powers devoted to the secular culture of material acquisition, and to the re-presentation of phenomena already in evidence. We are making, inventing, bringing to birth, and that milieu is the womb in which the religious and moral character can grow. Can we be moral without re-inventing morality for the times and for each other? Is the proclamation of “equal rights” as an abstract value anything more than a cop-out?
In Democratic Vistas, written in the wake of the Civil War and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Walt Whitman prophesied our current crisis with the proclamation that democracy will never “prove itself beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriously grows its own…religious and moral character.” DeTocqueville had already thought we had such a character, in our genius for “voluntary associations.” The voluntary association we proclaim here is not to be confined to the intellectual elite, to the financial titan, or to the “political class.” “All men are created equal,” we said at the beginning. We will explore what that (with its corollaries) meant to the Founders and to the founding generation, the populace of the colonies. We will seek a renewal of its import for us, the current populace. Using infrastructure already developed by the many democracy-promoting organizations already extant, we will organize [Country-Constituting Leagues] to solve intractable problems and stop problems from being created in the first place. We will promote a quality of thinking and a kind of engagement that our Founders had the priceless opportunity to pioneer. As people increasingly understand the immense value of the pioneer engagement, being together at the frontier, we expect to re-create Wise Democracy and the Good Society. (https://www.wisedemocracy.org/3-wisdom-council-process.html; https://www.wisedemocracy.org/citizens-assembly-vs-wc-process.html)
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What does that “love of birth in beauty of body and soul” look like in practical, educative terms, though? And how do we philosophically constitute it, through methods of reasoning? These are highly important questions that Socrates and Plato raised. But it took over 2000 years of subsequent philosophizing for the beginnings of adequate answers to appear.
One of the founding principles of the West, built into the intellectual fabric of the American founders, is Descartes’ maxim Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. What if there is a more valid source principle? The contemporary Husserlian philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has remarked: “We encounter being when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not.” Amo, ergo sum is the first-person singular form of the principle. The pluralwhich founds Americais Amati sumus ergo sumus. We are loved, therefore we are.
In 1848, Marx and Engels cried, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” And answering them were many waves of workers’ unions and peoples’ revolutions, until the counter-tsunami of economic globalization engulfed them and rendered them relatively helpless.
Lying at an even deeper level than the chains of economic exploitation, though, are the chains of psychic isolation imposed by the subtly inherited philosophy of atomistic materialism that, since 1513 (the date of Machiavelli’s The Prince), has spread itself around the globe, aided greatly by Marx, whose dissertation, non-accidentally, was about Democritus and Epicurus: whose picture of a world composed of separated atoms of matter, and the scientistic enterprise it fueled, swamped (and still swamp) Amati, the American plural.
What might happen if we set forth a new cry: “Lovers of the world, meet! You have nothing to lose but the falsely enchaining idea that we are islands of matter, rather than souls who matter to one another! And the friendly, more and more perfect and wise union of world-loving souls is the broadest and deepest form of freedom for human beings.”
The lovers of the world can finally unite when we come to know together that love is a power far greater than mere knowledge, and that it can be cultivated methodically. In a liberally liberatory democracy whose central institutions are educative, not legal or commercial, we take the only power that knowledge has—to reproduce and extend knowledge—as a servant power. It is not that law and commerce are unecessary. But the institutions that support them can only work if they are supported by, grown in the culture of meeting. What if our founding principle—that all men are created equal—really means that the foundation of the country where we live is meeting between persons?
[Levinas, Buber, et al—mentioned by Laurie Patton (first female Director of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences) as signaling the transformation we seek.] [Bring Ich und Du into the vernacular]
[we will have explicated what “meeting” and “educative” mean—and we have to get real about “love”! Eros/agape?]
THE UPSHOT OF OUR SHARED INQUIRY
The modernity initiated by Machiavelli can now be seen as adolescent: a 500-year identity crisis of rebellion against the past, a [tantrum] with its desperately wild self-assertion. Its Enlightenment, grounded in Newtonian optics, illuminated a sterile and lifeless nature and severed human relationship from creation as effectually as it mastered the materials of the world. This semi-millennium might thus better be named an “Endarkenment,” as it tended to extinguish the light of the soul.
Addams’s, Stein’s, and Husserl’s basic lesson for us is that democracy can not just “go on” but thrive as never before…when we see (and know and feel) its center as the potentially infinite channeling of love.
We currently collectively evaluate ourselves as a nation by the quantitative measurement of a Gross National Product. What if we qualitatively assessed together, along Husserlian lines, what we might call our Gorgeous National Educt: by the quantitatively immeasurable but empathically, erotically knowable ways that we in friendly co-reflection draw out (educe)one another’s souls, and thus become the better angels of one another’s natures?
Walt Whitman, asked by a reporter if he believed in miracles, replied simply, “What else is there?” Through the lens of endarkenment we can see the miraculous only as an exception to the normal round of things, not a potential within them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson concluded his “The American Scholar” of 1837 with this thought: “A nation of [human beings] shall for the first time exist when each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul that also inspires all….” More recently, in 1967, Martin Luther King—informed by the prophetic thinking of his phenomenologically-trained friend Abraham Joshua Heschel (famously pictured walking arm in arm with him across the Selma Bridge)—called for “the rapid transition from a thing-centered to a person-centered society.” Whether Lincoln read Emerson or not, surely King was channeling Lincoln.
The current condition of political liberalism is perhaps best named as one of meritocratic elites dutifully altruistic to socially marginalized groups but having a general disregard, and often antipathy, for others of the democratic masses who then, feeling themselves newly marginalized, naturally tend to rebel against the marginalizers. What we have tried to show here is how this condition can be superseded through the expansion of the current liberal agenda of dutiful equal rights to a newly encompassing, universally life-giving agenda evoking abundant, soulful, responsive and responsible personal and cultural gifts, in a culture in which material suffering would appear not merely as unjust but as anathema—a condition that a nation thoroughly imbued with the universally feeling ideal of Socratic, Platonic, Whitmanian, and Addamsian “body and soul” would not for an instant be able to allow. Isn’t that what we Americans are up to?
Imagine, if you will, a United Becoming of America, reinstated as the spiritual leader of global democracy, seeking to bind up our nation’s wounds with an agenda not just of repairing its injustices, but of ending its “crisis of loneliness” by refounding it on an “each for each” basis whose fundamental agenda is to help every one of its citizens feel deeply, soulfully loved. Then the Us Against Them which kills every one of us individually will vanish into the enlightenment of We For Each Other.
Lest we think of this community of love as an otherworldly and vaporous hippie ideal—the chat of the Valley Girl—here is General H. R. McMaster on the covenant between the “warrior ethos” and our civilian lives. His prescience, in light of current events, could not be more telling.
I have long been concerned about the erosion of the warrior ethos. In 2014 I had the privilege of giving a speech at Georgetown University commemorating Veterans Day. In that speech, I defined the warrior ethos as: a covenant between the members of our profession comprised of values such as honor, duty, courage, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. But our warrior ethos also depends on our military’s connection to our society. That is because when we are valued by others we value ourselves. Ultimately, as Christopher Coker has observed, it is the warrior ethos that permits servicemen and women to see themselves as part of a community that sustains itself through “sacred trust” and a covenant that binds us to one another and to the society we serve. (9/30/2025)
IT’S UP TO US.
Meetings of Opposites 