“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
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—John Adams’s letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 1798
As we approach our country’s 250th anniversary, the Adams quote above remains an enduring summary of what the Founders envisioned for We the People. Yet the long march through our institutions has sought to produce a different kind of people, characterized by President Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
As a professor at a small American college, I can attest to the fruits of this effort. In my less optimistic moments, I observe my students doom-scrolling before class and struggling to read (or pronounce) Plato and Descartes in class. When they do engage, it is to correct Aquinas or Mill with what they have been told that Marx and Nietzsche said (as opposed to what they actually said). The bottom line of our Social Contract — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — is pop-cultured into “I’m right, I get liberty, and you do, too, if you agree with me.”
Okay, that’s a bit of a hasty generalization. In some cases, students submit truly engaging, non-A.I. essays in which they express a genuine desire to do better but struggle to do so. In a word, they want virtue but aren’t even sure what this means. For these students, I provide the following comments, which apply to my students’ youthfulness and, I believe, to the youthful age of our nation as well.
Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” an emendation of John Locke’s “life, liberty, and property,” was a first step toward addressing the immorality of owning humans as property. As such, the Declaration foreshadows the Constitution’s larger mission of forming “a more perfect union.” The rights and structure contained in these foundational documents portend a future society in which the right to pursue happiness belongs to all citizens.
I find that most students resonate with this historical correction to the critical theory fire hose from which they are made to imbibe in most other courses.
Some astutely wonder aloud what we are to make of “happiness.” It is an excellent question. For Aristotle, happiness is an “activity of the soul in conformity with virtue” (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. M. Oswald). Individually, it is a life that actively utilizes time well for the purpose of reinforcing habitual wisdom. Societally, it is a collection of virtuous adults who intentionally train the next generations in the habits necessary for wisdom. Taken as a whole, we can appreciate the Founders’ vision: As time and the country go on, noble generations will craft American society into that which reflects the virtues of valuing life, cultivating liberty, and pursuing happiness.
Regarding politics, Aristotle states that the “main concern … is to is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”
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The problem is our current definitions of “good” and “noble”; increasingly, our society is lining up on two very different sides of this debate. Some see the American system as the best means of promoting individual “good” in terms of character development and individual freedom. Others insist that it is a quagmire of oppressive systems inseparable from our laws and customs. The anti-oppression voices in my classroom typically demonstrate little restraint when it comes to loudly proclaiming their view (the correct view, of course). Their pierced nostrils flare if any other perspective gets equal time.
Somewhere along the way, my young students have lost (or have yet to gain) sight of one crucial point: They are young. According to Aristotle, “A young man … is not versed in the practical business of life from which politics draws its premises and subject matter,” an underdevelopment due “not to lack of years but to living … under the sway of feelings.”
Being young is not a moral transgression; it is a simple reality. And if I am tempted to fault my pink-haired students for their oppression obsession, I am (hopefully) quick to remind myself that I too was once like them — swayed by feelings over reason. After all, when I was their age, I pulled the lever for Dukakis, and he wasn’t nearly as eloquent (or double-tongued) as Obama. (How they justified their Biden ballot is another matter entirely.)
But again, I see hope, primarily because of Aristotle’s qualifier of virtue pursued over the big-picture course of “a complete life … characterized by rational action.” At age 61, I am in the fourth quarter of my life, and if I lack virtue, that fault rests squarely on me. My students, though, are just starting out, and the opportunity to learn virtue is always before them. As their lives go on and their tax bills increase, they will have the same opportunity we elders have had: to reject childish feel-goodism and pursue hard won but heart-satisfying virtue.
The same applies to our country. This 250th Fourth of July, will our federal, state, and local governments seek to “engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions”? Will our young people learn to move beyond emotion to reason and virtue? Will we together play our part in the ongoing “complete life” of our “more perfect union”? Much of that depends on the habitual choices that We the People — or more specifically, Each of Us the Individuals — make every day.
A notable time marker for our nation is upon us. May it be a reminder, individually and collectively, that age is no guarantee of wisdom. May the allure of maturity, rooted in liberty and the pursuit of happiness, be our focus in our coming week and remaining years. And along the way, may our young people catch this same timeless vision of virtue.
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