Americans must guard against the silent unraveling, and the slow drifting, of each generation away from the others, warned historian Wilfred M. McClay of Hillsdale College as he accepted the 2022 Bradley Prize last month in Washington, DC.
While there will always be a degree of tension between the old and the new, we must never lose a sense of continuity between the living and the dead, McClay said. False dogmas of the past should be discarded, but the ancient foundations of our freedom must ever be remembered and refreshed in our memories.
But we, as Americans, have lost this practice, according to McClay. The image of the past now slips from our mind, and its effects are present all around us: the influence of our ancestors is lessening; we view ourselves as beyond history’s gentle but firm guidance; beliefs are changing, customs are fading, and religion is receding; fidelity is lost toward the fatherland—reverence is rarely found in the tongue of him who speaks of his country.
And this is not a political doctrine alone: one must look no further than the way Americans think about elders and ancestors, McClay said: they are not seen as wise, but anachronisms, relics from an age soon to pass.
McClay stressed the story, myth, and narrative of America. Such is the project of the historian: to furnish our imagination with a vision of who we have been and who we must become. Plutarch, the great Greco-Roman historian, grasped this. He told the story of great men so that others may become like them.
We too must remember our history; McClay made clear. History extends her hand to us in our youth and leads us along the path to virtue. She makes clear the many sins of the past, but alongside these horrors she turns our attention to our nation’s triumphs. To dismiss this past, to disregard history, is rarely progress; it simply leaves men without a map, and without this map we are barred from becoming men.
McClay dispensed this wisdom in the context of an off-hand comment made by his friend, “I want to live in a serious country.” But a country, he reminds us, is only as serious as its citizens. Listening to his words I was reminded that we are to be men of gravitas and levity, who know the hour to be jovial and the hour to be firm.
Children live in fantasies; they seek perpetual joy. Let them enjoy this, but such an attitude is not proper for citizens, charged with the blessed burdens of liberty. And McClay gave reason to be serious: commerce decaying, families shrinking, institutions fading, debt rising, politics polarizing, all make us witnesses to the fierce convulsions of an exhausted country.
But Americans are not passive observers of this exhaustion. Let us be serious men and women in a weary age. Teddy Roosevelt was fond of citing the poet who spoke of America as being “nursed by stern men with empires on their minds.” Stern men are not children, but the luxury and tranquility that fell upon America after winning two World Wars and the Cold War, has allowed the child to linger within us.
This concern is not new. Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th did not fear that America would fall into the hands of a tyrant; instead, he warned of a soft, mindless servitude where adult children, not brilliant tyrants, are at the helm.
Tocqueville said of this democratic despotism that “It would resemble paternal power, if like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.”
Nevertheless, our position is not without remedy, and it was on this point that McClay’s speech found its greatest force. “The work will not be easy.” This is no simple platitude, but the forewarning of the historian. He is aware of the striving and great lengths that were necessary to overcome past hardships. His counsel is a return, not to reinstate the past (for that is neither desirable nor plausible), but to consult its wisdom; Americans must be trained to learn from its image.
McClay’s teaching is a call to action. American’s must refresh our memory, recall our first principles, and relearn the virtues that established our prosperity. It is paradoxically in the past that we find a vision for the future. To use a sports analogy, we must have our “head on a swivel,” with a vision that spans the past, present, and future. Only then can we achieve what the poet T.S. Eliot called “an easy commerce of the old and the new.” Only then can we adequately solve the many problems of today.
Comment by Rev. Dr. Lee D Cary (ret. UM clergy) on June 12, 2022 at 8:53 am
Excellent piece,
“…the luxury and tranquility that fell upon America after winning two World Wars and the Cold War, has allowed the child to linger within us.”
The children among it, at all institutional levels, have successfully destroyed the UMC.
And the sooner we commit it to the ground, the better for all involved and the stench of the ordeal abate.
Perhaps, then some of the children may grow up.
BTW, the IRD, in its effort to maintain a balance between the “Progressives” and the “Traditionalists” – labels that the progressives designed and pushed – has helped fuel the fire of division.