The Winter in Which Only Hope and Virtue Can Survive

Anthony Mansueto

Civilizations die for many reasons. Sometimes their ideals are unworthy. In this case they may still produce great leaders, but those leaders are seldom recognized in their time. They are prophets for whom, as Karl Morrison put it, “the present belongs to Herod, smirking over the head of John the Baptist.” These prophets speak to the future. And this is indeed the case with positivistic modernity, which seeks divinization through scientific and technological progress. This modernity is a lie and true greatness will always speak against it.

But American modernity is different. A complex product of the interaction of the Puritan ideal of the Holy Commonwealth, humanistic modernity’s ideal of rational autonomy and democratic citizenship, and the many different ideals brought to our shores by our immigrant ancestors, America offers the promise of a public arena which is neither secular nor confessional but rather pluralistic, and in which conflicting civilizational ideals can compete with each other while individual communities pursue their own distinctive variants of humanity and collaborate in creating the physical and social infrastructure which makes that civilizational mosaic possible. This ideal is worthy. It is in jeopardy, and may well die, rather, because neither of the structures developed by modern societies –capitalism and socialism-- really support it.

It is because of this that we are still able to produce great leaders and recognize them, as we did in the great civic liturgy in which Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States and anointed as Bearer of the American Ideal. But the greatness of such leaders can always and only be tragic. Believing in the ideal is at once the condition of recognized leadership and its undoing.

This was fully apparent in Obama’s inaugural address. Loosely structured around the preamble to the Constitution, the address outlined in detail what we must do in order to sustain the American Ideal –and indeed the human civilizational project generally: change the way in which we use energy so that it does not jeopardize the integrity of the ecosystem, value wealth less and work more and empower the least among us, recognize that the purpose of our national defense is to secure our ideals, not our bodies and that such security is possible only in partnership with other powers motivated by different ideals, and to reject once and for all the claim that America is a Christian nation, but rather one in which Christianity and Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, (Buddhism and Confucianism) and unbelief all flourish best because none holds a monopoly on the public square.

And yet Obama affirmed one other point in the American creed which ultimately renders all the others moot: faith in the marketplace. Granted –and this is important— he noted that the marketplace cannot be relied upon by itself to realize our ideals. But (and this was the condition of his election, even of his candidacy) he also affirmed that there is no longer any debate about whether or not the marketplace works.

The fact is that it does not. The marketplace is agnostic about questions of value and knows nothing about the impact of various activities on the integrity of the ecosystem and the social fabric, human development or civilizational progress. It allocates resources based on the return various activities offer to investors and in the process rewards vice as often as virtue.

Socialism, to be sure, has its own problems. Investing resources more rationally, it leaves the people well fed and secure, but with few luxuries –and thus less and less willing to work. Socialism requires a degree of virtue we have not yet attained: a devotion whole and entire to the welfare not just of our children and our children’s children but to a future as yet unimagined and to dreams yet undreamed. That is why it is possible only on the basis of a political monopoly of the wise and the just which cripples the development of rational autonomy and renders the virtues of democratic citizenship moot.

And so this man Barack will not be our Moses or our Solon, our Ashoka or our Duke of Chou. Such spirits have already risen in this republic and have already fallen. He is, rather, more like our Marcus Aurelius, the worthy bearer of a worthy ideal, who will fight hard for what he believes and perhaps buy America another century and the world time to find a new ideal and new structures, but who in the end cannot save the civilization he leads.

What makes this man great is that he knows what hand he has been dealt and rather than raging against it is determined to play it well. He knows that the winter we have entered is still young and that worse storms lie ahead. He knows that it will seem to historians that he won many battles but still lost the war. But he also knows that the war for the American ideal is really just a battle in the larger struggle which is the human civilizational project. And in that struggle all battles are lost; only the war remains --the war and hope and virtue. And it is America’s specific virtues, like those of all great civilizations, which will be its legacy (and his).

We stand behind this man, in the shadows, speaking truths he knows but may not utter. For us, the present still belongs to Herod, smirking over the head of John the Baptist. We stand behind this man, speaking truths which he knows but may not utter and in speaking those truths we invoke a future yet unimagined and dreams as yet undreamed. Here, “in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive,” we speak Spring.