The Morning After the Fourth: Have We Kept Our Promise?

By Henry Grunwald

British Critic Sir Denis Brogan liked to tell about an incident that happened just after President Andrew Jackson died. A visitor attending his funeral asked one of Jackson's slaves whether he thought the general would go to heaven. The slave replied, "He will if he wants to." Brogan added the moral: General Jackson was and is a symbol of the typical American.

Perhaps not so typical any longer. The belief that America can go to heaven if it wants to, indeed that it has created a kind of heaven on earth, has been badly damaged lately. Last week's Fourth of July rhetoric was more resounding than ever. At Baltimore's Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem in 1814, President Ford said that in America's third century, "quality and permanence should be the measurements of our lives" and "mass production, mass education, mass population must not smother individual expression." Surveying the U.S. as it entered its 200th year, the President found "a free government that checks and balances its own excesses, and a free economic system that corrects its own errors, given the courage and constructive cooperation of a free and enlightened citizenry." In Stavanger, Norway, at ceremonies commemorating the 150th anniversary of the sailing of the first Norwegian immigrant ship to the U.S., Senator Hubert Humphrey lauded "these pioneers" who "brought with them no riches but skill, perseverance and confidence."

What with the Bicentennial, such rhetoric will probably continue unabated, instead of being put away for another year. Yet on the morning after the Fourth, perhaps we should ask ourselves just how free and enlightened we are, and whether the sons of those pioneers are as persevering as were their fathers. In short, just what are we celebrating--beyond mere survival, which in itself is no mean achievement?

The founding of America was not just a political event, the breaking away of some dissatisfied colonies from a shortsighted and selfish mother country. It was also an act of political philosophy and faith. It was a promise, as Archibald MacLeish put it, a promise to the colonists, to their descendants and to the world at large. The promise was contained in the Declaration of Independence: that people could govern themselves; that they could live in both freedom and equality; and that they would act in accord with reason--reason being a divine attribute, God's light for and in man.

Although the Declaration is today regarded as a semisacred text--and like most such texts, not read very carefully--it has often been attacked. Santayana called it a piece of literature, a salad of illusions. Carl Becker, a noted student of the Declaration, decided in the 1920s that it was "founded upon a superficial knowledge of history . . . and upon a naive faith in the instinctive virtues of human kind . . . This faith could not survive the harsh realities of the modern world." It is certainly hard to imagine that the Declaration could be adopted today. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? What is life, the biologists would ask, and what kind of life, the sociologists would demand. Whose liberty, both radicals and conservatives would cry. You don't mean happiness, but an integrated, autonomous personality, the psychologists would insist. As for equality, the disagreements would be bitter. The doctrine of natural, inalienable rights would be hotly denied by most philosophers. And the Creator would probably be kept out of the document with derision, or admitted only with empty piety.

Not long ago, a group of students in Indianapolis showed copies of the Declaration of Independence to several hundred people and asked them to sign it. Most of them refused; quite a few thought it sounded dangerous. It is easy to laugh at them, but perhaps they were saying in their own way that the Declaration is still a potent and even radical document.

What has happened to our view of the Declaration since it stated the American promise? Chronologically, it is still close. Jefferson died when Lincoln was 17. Lincoln died when Woodrow Wilson was eight. Wilson died when Gerald Ford was ten. But these haunting links of the generations matter little compared with the new American reality. Obviously the sense of self-reliance, the belief in their ability to cope, that animated the early Americans is hard to duplicate in a world of fearsome crowds, ever increasing and ever more specialized knowledge, and stifling public and private bureaucracies.

Quantitative change, however, no matter how overwhelming, never completely invalidates philosophical and moral principles. Moreover, change brings with it the means of adjusting to change. Knowledge has exploded, but the computer makes it easier to keep up with it. Modern communications make the direct debate of the town meeting obsolete, but they also help a Ralph Nader carry his protest to the country. Mass production may rob people of the satisfaction felt by the craftsman, but it also brings comfort, variety and independence into their lives. The real crisis of the American promise goes deeper.

One trouble is the decline of our belief in reason as an instrument. Increasingly, we have substituted emotion for reason. Psychology has told us that seemingly rational arguments are determined by hidden and irrational forces inside ourselves, difficult if not impossible to reach. Positivist philosophy has told us that ethics is merely a game of words and that moral judgments are only opinions. In an odd and coincidental alliance, pop culture and recent radical theory gave us a kind of debased romanticism, glorifying feeling over thought, will or desire over reflection, violence over politics, and instant satisfaction over anything else. In retrospect, those famous slogans of the '60s, "Freedom now!" and "Nonnegotiable demands," are appalling not for their goals but for their irrationality.

A second danger to the American promise involves a conflict over self-interest. As Author-Editor Irving Kristol has pointed out, the founders' basic idea was that the pursuit of every man's self-interest was the most reliable motivation on which to build a political system, provided it was "rightly understood" and curbed by political checks and balances. The concept also required a measure of "civic virtue" or "republican morality," which meant a willingness to suspend the pursuit of immediate self-interest to act for the common good. This may always have been more of an ideal than a fact. But today, more than ever, we see growing numbers of individuals and groups simply fighting for their immediate interest and gain, without regard for the goals or even the survival of the society as a whole. That is one cause of the recent pressing series of scandals in Government and private institutions; it is a part of the moral malaise, the sense of our having gone wrong somewhere, that afflicts the country. It can be argued that the task of defining people's true long-range self-interest and of mediating between contending groups is the task of leadership, which is bitterly lacking in America. But this is only a partial excuse. In a democracy, there must be an interaction between leaders and followers. In that sense, leaders must be led.

A third threat to the American promise concerns equality. The Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" has always been the most embattled of its "self-evident truths." Philosophers and politicians consistently attacked the idea. "The cornerstone of democracy is a natural inequality, its ideal the selection of the most fit," declared Nicholas Murray Butler. The bitter debate about slavery centered on the belief that neither God nor nature had created men equal in strength or gifts.

But gradually there developed what might be called a respectable American consensus that all people are or should be equal in intrinsic human dignity, equal before the law, and should have equal opportunities in education and employment. We obviously have not lived up to that consensus, though progress has been made toward it. But even as we struggle, more or less sincerely, to improve equality of opportunity, a new and alarming demand is being put forward: the demand for equality of result. In brief, this theory holds that natural inequalities of birth, strength, intelligence and ability are inherently unfair and that justice requires society to compensate for such inequalities. One of the leading proponents of this view is Harvard's John Rawls, who argues in his book A Theory of Justice that "equality of opportunity means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind in the personal quest for influence and social position." Rawls would allow some inequalities, provided that they benefit the less advantaged members of society. Nevertheless, his view leads logically to the elimination of meritocracy, to quotas in education and other fields, and to drastic redistribution of income.

All this is no longer a matter of theory. The recession and a certain disillusionment with the expensive social remedies of the 1960s may have made us more cautious in what we hope society can accomplish. At the same tune, as Sociologist Daniel Bell pointed out in FORTUNE recently, we are facing a revolution not merely of rising expectations but of rising entitlements--a staggering increase in the number of things people feel they are entitled to, regardless of their own productivity or contribution to the economy. In the 1960s, says Bell, the Government "made a commitment, not only to create a substantial welfare state, but to redress all social and economic inequalities as well." If this course is pursued, it would mean not only permanent inflation, but the disappearance of those incentives that create capital. Or, putting it another way, the shrinking of the very income that is to be redistributed. Above all, it would mean a further expansion of bureaucracy and the power of the state.

This is not an argument against society's providing a floor of safety for everyone, nor a plea against fighting much harder for true equality of opportunity. But carrying equality of results to its logical end would mean the ultimate destruction of the American promise. The ultimate choice is not between equality and inequality, but between different lands of inequality. Socialism, for instance, promises (on the whole, falsely) economic equality, but in most cases at the price of political equality. In the final analysis, total equality can be enforced only by total tyranny.

What of the American promise to the world? Despite the doctrine of "manifest destiny" and certain episodes in Mexico and the Philippines, until World War I Americans widely agreed with the view that their country should lead by good example--or as Hayne Davis, a writer on international affairs, put it in the Independent hi 1903, "simply to let her light so shine, by wise conduct of her own home affairs, that other nations may see her good works and adopt the political principle which has been her source of power." This passive, if naively arrogant belief was transformed into a crusading spirit by Woodrow Wilson's call that Americans must fight to make the world safe for democracy. Except for one serious interlude of isolationism, this view remained at the heart of American foreign policy until Viet Nam, and it was shared by many of America's friends. As recently as 1959, the French Dominican Father R.L. Bruckberger exhorted us thus: "Americans, Americans, return to the first seed you sowed . . . Your task is to extend the Declaration of Independence to the whole world, to all nations and all races."

Hardly anyone today would dare to define the American promise in such grandiose terms. On the other hand, we can hardly return to the idyllic notion of leaving the rest of the world to its own devices except by setting an example. We may not be smart, rich or powerful enough to run the world, but we are certainly not smart, rich or powerful enough to maintain our prosperity and democracy in a world dominated by antagonistic forces and philosophies. To find the balance between more or less saintly isolation and crusading global zeal, between the danger of exhausting ourselves through untenable foreign commitments and imprisoning ourselves in an untenable American fortress--that is the difficult current task of American foreign policy.

Americans have always had a certain Manichaean attitude toward other nations--and indeed toward life itself. There was light and darkness, good and evil, success or failure--and no other choices, even within ourselves. The whole trend of American history and character has made us believe that an individual can be anything he aspires to be (can "go to heaven if he wants to"). That is a heady belief until he fails; then failure is all the more bitter because it is his own fault. The nation as a whole can do anything it aspires to, including transcend history and escape tragedy. That is a heady belief until history and tragedy catch up with us; then we meet them unprepared.

Could it be that America has simply promised too much? Both equality and freedom, both individualism and order, both growth and stability, both power and innocence--is it all more than can be accomplished? Perhaps. And yet--

The American promise of self-government in freedom, under law and with self-restraint, remains the most stirring and hope-giving in the catalogue of political systems. What is needed for its survival is a rigorous concentration on its meaning, including a concentration on some things the Declaration left out. Freedom, like the Declaration itself, is not a gift but a permanent demand on us to keep giving. Perhaps in our minds we need to insert in the Declaration some words like these: ". . . that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inescapable duties, and that among those duties are work, learning and the pursuit of responsibility." For our attitude toward work still determines the kind of life we deserve; a willingness to learn, meaning an open mind both to the new and the old, is necessary to keep liberty real; a sense of responsibility, rather than hedonism alone, is necessary for that elusive goal of happiness. Finally, only the willingness to perform certain duties can , guarantee our rights.

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