Chesterbelloc

Hist 583, Fall 2006, précis

Diggins, John P. The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations

of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984.

The greatest of the Roman historians writes, “The more I think about history, ancient or modern, the more ironical all human affairs seem.”[1] One must confess a never failing mood of irony, confirmed by the continued study of history. John Diggins recognizes that the ideological roots of the American republic – classical republicanism and American liberalism – are perceived to be antithetical, i.e., virtue, restraint, and prohibition opposed to the right of self-gratification. Thus politics deals with both the pursuit of virtue and also the containment of viciousness.

Yet Diggins argues that at the nation’s founding, there was very little difference between liberalism and conservatism. Madison and Hamilton, for example, were both liberals:

One expression of liberalism valued freedom, autonomy and sufficiency of the individual, the other power, stability, and the efficacy of the state. Both identified happiness with property and material pleasure; neither committed America to political ideals that appealed to man’s higher nature. Individualism provided the means by which Americans could pursue their interests, pluralism the means by which they could protect them (5).

In short, the “self” is never left behind. John Adams certainly did not appeal to man’s higher nature. He was a moralist whose pessimism about human nature is mixed with optimism about human potential. His Puritan sensibilities led him to believe the masses must be protected against themselves; that freedom resides where there is order and not where there is license, or no order. Adams proclaims that freedom demands boundaries.

For Diggins, the common ground of American liberalism and conservatism is that both deny the notion of moral conflict and attendant responsibilities. Granted, the Founders emphasized republican virtue in 1776 in order to justify the War of Independence. Hence politics is traditionally perceived as a moral endeavor, addressing questions of right and wrong, dealing with the public dimensions of the so-called “virtuous life.” But Diggins declares that the Constitution is a pragmatic document, having nothing to say about how people ought to live together. Its sole concern is how to prevent predators from doing one another in; power is counterpoised against power since, as the saying goes, “mere parchment is no insurance against oppression.” Like an arch sustained by the potential force and equality of pressure of separate stones upon each other, checks and balances are Machiavellian. (A wit might say that both the arch and check/balance are based on the principle of the Fall.) The Constitution is not morally elevated; it is Machiavellian also in that politics are divorced from ethics; it is politics without a soul.[2] It is a social contract dependant upon force to hold it together rather than a covenant of kinship. According to Diggins, the Founders struck a bargain with Locke, and the price of that deal, rhetoric notwithstanding, was a break with “the liberal idea of consent that obligated man to respect the rights of others” (319). For example, the Founders made a pact of expediency with regard to the moral evil of slavery. Diggins’s story is therefore of the classical liberal soul lost at the nation’s founding, found by Lincoln (“the conscience of liberalism”), and later lost, perhaps never to be found again.

The American republic turned the meaning of virtue on its head. Instead of self-restraint and the “greater good,” self-satisfaction became paramount. Classical republican rhetoric achieved little more than negative freedom; to wit, “freedom from political power and public authority, freedom for man to pursue his own ends, individual freedom – in a word, liberalism.” Ironically, Diggins agrees with John C. Calhoun that it is negative power – the power of preventing or arresting the action of the government – that forms the Constitution.[3]

Tocqueville posited that “self-interest rightly understood” bound Americans to one another, making them a people or nation.[4] True, self-interest makes no social distinctions – it applies to the laborer, the outcast, the criminal – but Diggins argues that Tocqueville’s America (which he grudgingly finds acceptable) lasted only until industrialization; that “self-interest rightly understood” degenerated into commercial rapaciousness and impetuous materialism (the new paganism). Hence the English corruption feared by republican revolutionaries in 1776 materialized, undermining the very logic of the Revolution![5] The Catholic Tocqueville hoped for a non-utilitarian religious revival in which virtue would be disassociated from “the rationale of effort and reward so central to modern Protestantism” (251).[6] The idea of virtue however had become firmly identified with self-interest, thereby abnegating the ideals of duty and moral goodness.

Henry Adams went further, separating virtue from political life altogether. In Adams’s view, capitalism, big business, and corruption “had so penetrated every layer of society as to render obsolete the classical distinction between political duty and economic activity, public good and private interests” (264). The Founders intended to protect the public against concentrated authority and predators, but failed to account for “future leviathans” fostered by corporate wealth. In Oedipal fashion, Adams renounced the republican virtue of his ancestors and turned to religion and a “feminization of virtue” (love, pity, compassion); the type of virtue exemplified in Medieval Europe and embodied in the Virgin Mary.[7] (Adams’s feminized virtue is distinct from eighteenth-century notions of “vain, luxurious, and selfish effeminacy” associated with commercial society.)[8] Adams’s views are best summarized by an old Irish slogan: “We will take our religion from Rome but our politics from Hell.”

Lincoln was a moral genius who “elevated the vision of 1776 above the plumbing of 1787.”[9] For Diggins, Lincoln was the Declaration of Independence incarnate – a “synthesis of religious sentiment and political obligation” (295).[10] Probing the meaning of virtue, good, and evil, author Herman Melville concludes that true virtue derives from self-knowledge. “Know thyself,” commands the Delphic oracle, and Lincoln answers, “Sin.” Lincoln’s political philosophy was similar to Melville’s Christian-oriented conviction that “man’s fall from grace may be necessary to the full moral development of human character, that without sin salvation would be meaningless and suffering absurd” (297). Thus Lincoln viewed the Civil War as expiation for the sins of slavery.[11] Just as Christianity came to consecrate an ancient dogma of the innocent suffering for the guilty, of sacrifice balancing evil, so Lincoln explains the sacrifices of war in terms of a Christian construct.[12]

Lincoln and Melville Christianized the American political imagination, returned to the first principles (and final judgment) of the Declaration, and sought to reinstate the authority of a Calvinist past, “a past alien to both Jeffersonian liberalism and classical politics” (298). The notion of “good” and “evil” returned to American political discourse, opposed to Machiavellian power and expediency.[13] In his speeches, “Lincoln returned to the framers not to praise them but to bury them so that true [i.e. moral] virtue may live” (306). For both Lincoln and Melville, the good can be the enemy of the best: the good (but amoral) Constitution permitted the evil of slavery to last until a day of reckoning. Lincoln called for “a reconceptualization of the American Republic” by embracing the sublime doctrine of the Declaration and “contemplating a higher concept of virtue . . . rooted in the moral conscience and enraptured by the religious imagination . . .” (303). Were it not for Lincoln, America would not have been born again, but simply would have grown old, or worse. This is not to say that society adhered to Lincoln’s moral admonitions, but the bar had been raised.

The greatness of Lincoln lies in the attempt to accomplish the impossible; to replace classical republican virtues associated with civic humanism with Christian ideas of righteous judgment (not by humans but by God) and virtues such as compassion, forgiveness, humility, and sacrifice. A cynic might argue that Lincoln, like the Founders, elevated moral rhetoric in order to justify the sacrifices of war. Nevertheless, by presenting a dialogue of the ideal, people such as Lincoln, Melville, and Adams ensured that a state of tension – a dualism between religious ideals and social realities – became the condition of American society and letters well into the next century.

There is always a considerable gap between the moral standards of a society and the practice of the individuals – the higher the standard, the wider the gap.[14] It has been argued that such tension propels society forward, both morally and materially. What followed Lincoln were the corruption of the Gilded Age, the ethical bankruptcy of Social Darwinism, rampant individualism, and muscular realpolitik in foreign affairs.

Comparing Ronald Reagan with Lincoln, Diggins tries to illustrate Chesterton’s maxim that “the first and not the last men of any school or revolution are generally the best and purest.”[15] Writing in the 1980s, Diggins (probably to distance himself from the pesky Moral Majority) accuses Ronald Reagan of moral posturing during the Cold War and declares that “moral judgment should never endanger the pursuit of peace” (345). Diggins’s double-standard is explained by comparing Reagan’s “evil empire” speech with Lincoln’s apparent lack of moral judgment toward the Confederacy. Diggins laments the Machiavellian idea of checks and balances when applied to contemporary foreign affairs (344). He decries the modern “culture of narcissism” in which the pursuit of happiness became a pursuit of pleasure; when the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism to hold them back.

In sum, Diggins holds that the liberal idea came at a cost in political understanding. Plato spoke of the soul (and perversion of the soul) in political terms. In the modern age, questions of the soul and non-utilitarian virtue were placed in one corner, and political questions were placed in a different corner. Influenced by the Enlightenment, America’s founders tore asunder the rational and the irrational. For Lincoln however, the physical world and the moral world are interrelated.

Like Virginia Woolf’s hero in Orlando, sitting on a hill under a large oak tree, from which he can see thirty English counties, Diggins surveys the American historical landscape from the moral elevation at Gettysburg, and echoes the Romantic poet, “We look before and after, and pine for what is not.”

---

[1] Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, 3:15, trans. Michael Grant (New York: Penguin Books,

1956; reprint, 1996), 127 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

[2] See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), 98. Niebuhr writes: “The Constitution is characterized by awareness of conflicts of power and passion in every community. It knows nothing of a simple harmony in society . . .”

[3] See Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7^th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1953; reprint, 1995), 175-7.

[4] “Nation” must be distinguished from “State.” According to the OED, the former is “a large aggregate of people closely associated with each other by factors of common descent, language, culture, history, and occupation of the same territory as to be identified as a distinct people. . . .” The State, on the other hand, refers to a political body, i.e., government. It can be argued that self-interest alone does not make a nation. James McPherson, in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, writes: “The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve a Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation.” Lincoln’s multiethnic nation was the antithesis of a European nation; it was the first modern nation-state.

[5] See Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 59-60.

[6] Protestant virtues are described by political scientist Eric Voegelin as “virtues of bourgeois ‘propriety’ adequate for urban and middle class way of life.” Neither humility, charity, nor asceticism is written large. “Honesty, punctuality, cleanliness, dependability, diligence,” writes Voegelin, “can be called ‘secondary virtues’: virtues which do not imply any ends in themselves, but must be assigned to determined goals in order to be positive. . . e.g., I can appear punctually at [church] or in the Gestapo cellar” (Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell, vol. 31 (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 103-04).

[7] The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists four cardinal virtues, none of which involve civics or earthly reward as an end. “The goal of a virtuous life is to become like God” (St. Gregory of Nyssea). According to the Church, the four cardinal human virtues, around which all others are grouped, are: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

[8] McCoy, 32.

[9] Richard John Neuhaus, “The Soul of American Politics,” review of John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics, National Review, 12 July 1985, 53.

[10] Opposed to the Constitution, the Declaration was based on a secular creed, “enunciating that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just” (G. K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America [1922], The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. 11, ed. George J. Marlin (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 41.

[11] Stated in metaphysical terms, Grant and Sherman ground Southern valor into powder because of moral evil, and under a law as mysterious as it is inexorable, all wrongs must be expiated. Similarly, Counter-Enlightenment theorist Joseph de Maistre viewed the Revolutionary Terror as redemption – a cleansing by means of blood – for toppling the monarchy and thwarting the providential mission of France. In tones similar to Lincoln, de Maistre writes, “The great purification must be accomplished and eyes must be opened; the metal of France freed from its sour and impure dross, must emerge cleaner and more malleable into the hands of a future king. Doubtless, Providence does not have to punish in this life in order to be justified, but in our epoch, coming down to our level, Providence punishes like a human tribunal” (Maistre, Considerations on France [1796], trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 38). For more on war as spiritual sacrifice, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977).

[12] Diggins’s description of Lincoln and collective guilt resembles the religious conversion experience writ large, in its essence a turning away from sin as much as turning towards a positive ideal. Psychologist William James, writes, “Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal that we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the sin almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is ‘a process of struggling away from the sin rather than of striving towards righteousness’” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience [1902] (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 194.

[13] Lincoln held that transcendent moral absolutes (good and evil, right and wrong) existed everywhere and always. Making no claim to personal revelation of Truth, Lincoln proposed that right action, whether of individuals or states, be guided by a temporal “trinity” comprised of reason (rightly followed through), religion, and history (see Diggins, 319). In the modern era subjectivists roundly criticize political leaders for such Manichean views, for seeing the world in terms of black and white, lacking the shaded nuances cherished by intellectuals everywhere.

[14] It has been argued that a state of spiritual tension, the constant gap between ideal and practice, has contributed to the spiritual and intellectual dynamism that characterizes Western culture in general. “Where this tension is absent,” writes British historian Christopher Dawson, “where civilization has become ‘autarchic,’ self-sufficient, and self-satisfied, there the process of Christian culture has been extinguished or terminated” (Christopher Dawson, “The Recovery of Spiritual Unity” [1952], Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Works of Christopher Dawson, ed. Gerald R. Russello (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998) 247-8).

[15] G. K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic [1929], The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, ed. George J. Marlin, vol. 3 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 311