I have more than once mentioned in
these essays my extensive if unsystematic collection of our national literary
patrimony in the Library of America. Now
and again I take one down from the shelf more or less at random. This past week it was one of the two volumes
of Teddy Roosevelt, the one containing The
Rough Riders and his autobiography.
I found the latter, first published in 1913 not too long before his
death, beautifully written, full of fascinating anecdote, and frequently rather
profound in its political philosophy.
That this final quality should so surprise me is partly an indictment of
my ignorance and partly an evidence of the degree to which I and many others
have come to “define deviancy down”, in the memorable phrase of Patrick
Moynihan. The last place one seeks
political profundity is in an American politician.
To the degree that I had already
formed a conception of TR when I picked up the book, it was of a rugged
individualist, outdoorsman, horseman, “environmentalist”, great white hunter,
and ninety-seven-pound weakling transformed into a war hero in an embarrassing
war. There was nothing particularly
mistaken about this conception, except for its utter inadequacy. In his opening chapter, entitled “Boyhood and
Youth”, he writes thus: “As regards
political economy, I was of course while in college taught the laissez-faire doctrines—one of them
being free trade—then accepted as canonical.”
He is speaking about the intellectual atmosphere of his years at
Harvard, from which he graduated in 1880. “All this individual morality I was taught by the books I
read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was almost no teaching of the need
for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute
for, individual responsibility there is a collective responsibility. Books such as Herbert Croly’s ‘Promise of
American Life’ and Walter E. Weyl’s ‘New Democracy’ would generally at the time
have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy.”
I did not
know who these guys were but soon found out.
They were progressive pundits and philosophers associated with the early
years of The New Republic. Weyl began his book (1912) thus: "America
to-day is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of
bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our
social conceptions.... We are profoundly disenchanted with the fruits of a
century of independence.” Well, it is
now a century later. During that century
America fought two world wars, experienced the dislocations of profound and
prolonged economic depression, confronted the twin political pathologies of
modernity, experienced mind-boggling technological and sociological change,
largely abandoned its spiritual heritage, and more than tripled its population. That hardly describes a century of
stasis. Yet, plus ça change. America
today is in a somber, soul-questioning mood, with nearly bottomless wells of
clamor, bewilderment, tremulous unrest, and profound disenchantment.
In
my opinion, a genuinely humble one, a large part of our dilemma is a failure to
recognize a truth that Theodore Roosevelt stated as “the fact that in addition
to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility there is a collective
responsibility.” How can it be that the
greatest democracy the world has yet known—a nursery and proving ground of
seemingly infinite industrial, intellectual, and artistic invention and
innovation--has a legislature that simply doesn’t work? How can it be that for all our political
passion, principles, polarities, and processes, not to mention the tweet storms, we seem incapable of
addressing, or for that matter honestly identifying, the most acute actual problems our nation faces? As I write this, our Congress is poised to
enact “historic tax reform”. Though they
are readily available in our overheated press, I share no apocalyptic
interpretation of the pending legislation.
That it will unleash a gusher of economic growth strikes me as most
unlikely. That it will make
sharecroppers of the middle class is hardly less so. Rearranged tax policies are not exactly
irrelevant, but there are many more important things we should be talking
about. However, one thing about this
legislation is indisputable. The process
by which it has been created is disgraceful.
You or I could make important decisions concerning our personal or
professional life by analogous procedures only by abandoning all self-respect.
“I
grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be
respected for what he made of himself,” Roosevelt writes. “But I had also, consciously or
unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole
duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest
in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the
unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in
trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive
development of individualism in a few.”
The
question of the relationship of the individual to society, the stuff of
political philosophy and for that matter most great literature, likewise
features prominently in the preamble to the Constitution. Its
authors there announce as their intention the formation of “a more perfect
union”. They were using the word perfect in its old Latin sense of
“finished” or “complete,” and they could modify the adjective—more perfect--because they knew that the
perfection could never be, well, perfect.
This left them, and us, to concentrate on the concept of union.
Merry
Christmas.
