Liberty Papers (2) — Philadelphia Evening Post
To the People of the Tri-State,
It was said, and is still repeated, the idea that we find ourselves at the end of history. That our ultimate political goals have been reached and our liberal democracy, or some mixture thereof, will spread across the globe as the final stage of historical development. I would argue rather we are seeing the disconnection from history and a disintegration of liberal democracy. Generations growing up in the information age face a unique problem — the constant flow and overflow of information. This constant revolution of ideas in such rapid succession is wholly new for human beings and its subtle effects can be seen everywhere in our political movements. We no longer think of systems as a whole, but instead focus on the various parts, disconnected atomized little parts. In the information age, we never have to struggle with not-knowing. The result of this is our inability to ask the right questions. We get our information piecemeal and mostly on an as-needed basis with little or no context. We are contented with tidbits and slogans, causes of the week, and carelessness as a measure of cool. What religion did to unify the Middle-Ages, Liberty did for the Enlightenment, but today we no longer value principles as such. We no longer express a love of Liberty as valuable in itself. This disconnection from history is the result of streams of information ceasing to eddy and brook. As dams are built, the spheres of our lives get narrow and we lose touch with the rivers that carried us here. The past is a great reservoir of information from which to draw. If only we weren’t so acclimated to the hunt and peck method of study, we would find all kinds of connections to problems we face today. America is in the midst of an identity crisis; we are inexorably divided on fundamental issues and all of our political notions are awash with contradictions. This mixture — philosophy à la carte — will never produce a viable system. We must rediscover our basic principles and carry them under one banner. Friends of liberty and popular government must again be united.
“Bury in Silence all the Causes of your separation. Recollect that explanations may be proper between lovers, but are never so between divided friends.” Benjamin Rush to John Adams: regarding Thomas Jefferson, Letter in Philadelphia December 16, 1811
Politics is not a sport. Politics is an extension of philosophy applied socially — the ethical rules that govern appropriate action in our relationships with each other writ large. We may easily forget that our Constitution was forged out of and dedicated to philosophy; that American is the only national identity someone can choose to be a part of and is not solely the result of such accidental causes as place-of-birth. We are better to recognize our place in history, not at the end but the beginning, at the start of a new epoch. We do not by our Constitution create new truths, the declarations and amendments merely serve as reminders, an acknowledgement of ultimate truth: we are all value-driven in our pursuits and are free to pursue our own values. In the current waves of identity politics, we need a “cultural federalism” where all individual cultures are respected and practice mutual forbearance in view of higher connections among people. We are not our class differences; we are not our religious or racial differences. It is not enough to go on repeating the truisms of our founding documents; instead we must go out and discover the truths of those propositions for ourselves. For it is our responsibility, in our time, to seed the ideological connections of history toward a future steadfast in Liberty.
+Hamilton
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