The Founding Fathers and their heirs wanted to establish and maintain a prosperous republic, yet they welcomed limitations on prosperity as much as they had welcomed restraints on power. This healthy respect for limits offers a way to recover the political and moral realism that contemporary Americans have lost. Somewhere I recall reading the poet [...]
Nikole Hannah-Jones is right and wrong. Although the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the year and the event carry less significance than she imagines. Although neither deceptive nor careless, she is uninterested in facts in a conventional sense. Her principal objective is not to understand the past but to rebuke the present and, [...]
The West above all developed the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism, acknowledging that what is, if wicked or decrepit, can be changed or replaced, and that what is not, however improbable or preposterous, can be brought into being. This recognition filled the world with a host of new possibilities. To many in the United States [...]
Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. I. By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere [...]
To study the past requires a sense of tragedy and perhaps a belief in original sin, “the imagination of disaster” as Henry James called it. The celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our annual exercise in national amnesia and self-congratulation, by contrast, promotes the myth that “all’s well that ends well.” Only the most [...]
Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]
Although Gnosticism has conditioned the American mind and dominated the American character, the United States itself, as we are once again discovering, is a historical, not a providential nation uniquely blessed of God. Nothing makes inevitable continued American prosperity or even American survival. What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it [...]
If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, [...]
The new principles that Simone Biles is introducing into sport may be more humane, more compassionate, and even more just than the outlook that demands any sacrifice in the pursuit of victory, but they may also shine with a less radiant luster. I have no wish to add my voice to the chorus of praise [...]
By turns eager and reluctant to embrace newcomers, Americans in the twentieth century followed no uniform course of action. In 1919, when sections of almost every major American city were teeming with men and women who spoke a multiplicity of languages, former president Theodore Roosevelt, wondered whether the United States had not become a “polyglot [...]
Prohibition had cultivated both a growing mistrust and a growing acceptance of state power. It was becoming not only a legal and political mechanism to regulate personal habits and to modify social customs but also a means to impose cultural unity. Whatever dangers it posed to liberty, government regulation was by the 1920s a fact [...]
In the process of taming the wilderness of the New World by violent means, Americans absorbed and bequeathed to future generations some of the savagery that they determined to eliminate. Their purpose was to establish and maintain a civilization, but we have now lost this sense of purpose. Savagery is the product, then, not of [...]
Having lost both their identity as a people and their assurance of a better future, Americans suffer a profound uncertainty and desperation from which they cannot easily free themselves and from which they may not soon recover. I. Americans like to think of their country as unique. For a time it was. Americans were the [...]
Beethoven’s eccentricities only enhanced his reputation. They confirmed the divine madness that propelled his creative genius. He was a martyr to his art, a new kind of saint whose agonies and ecstasies brought him neither peace of mind nor purity of soul, but an admixture of public renown and disrepute. Sculpture by Max Klinger [...]