SUSAN DUNN
AND
ROBERT F. DALZFLL,JR.
655
the particular blend of racism, imperialism, and militarism found else–
where in Europe in this century, just as Americans were fortunate that
Lincoln's brand of collectivism aspired to nothing more nationalistic than
a joint struggle to forge a just and free society. For in truth nationhood
based on the sanctity of the people with its implied faith in collective
emotion remains a disturbing if not an ominous concept.
When emotion is a society's basis, it will also be the final arbiter of
conflicts. Addressing this problem, Karl Popper explained that, if a dis–
pute arises in a society which accepts the primacy of emotional values,
once the appeal to constructive emotions has been made and has failed,
the community can appeal only to other, less constructive emotions -
fear, hatred, envy, and ultimately, violence. Popper concluded that no
emotion, not even love, can replace the rule of institutions controlled by
reason.
While he was writing The
Open Society
from 1938 to 1943, Popper
saw with the rest of the world the apocalyptic consequences of a war
waged by a nation whose citizens had sacrificed themselves for the
collectivity, lost their identity in the group, abdicated their critical fac–
ulties, and submitted to the will of a demonic madman. But again, in
post-Revolutionary America and France - no less than in modern Ger–
many - citizenship has not been just a rational affair, a delicate Madiso–
nian balance of egotism and altruism; far more heavily than
liberte
and
egalite
it has stressed that strange and indefinable third member of the
trinity: intangible,
mysticalfratemite.
And this even though fraternity - the
emotional bond among citizens, the basis of so many forms of humani–
tarian ideology - may be at bottom at odds with freedom.
Well might we ask whether the legacy of reason and individualism
inherited from the Enlightenment was finally not enough for
nationhood - or whether it was too much. Is rationality lacking some
essential element, or is it simply too great a burden? Did two
Revolutions set free our critical faculties and endow us with responsibility
for our own fate, only to have us cry out later for relief and yearn to
submerge ourselves in the group, in the belief that love for one another
offers a higher form of experience and insight than rational thought? So
it would seem. Can we live by reason alone? Whatever the final answer -
or the dangers - may be, the fact is that we have not and do not. Nor
can any amount of commemorative rhetoric transform us into direct
heirs of the Enlightenment. At most we are distant descendants, the
residuary legatees of a complex and difficult inheritance shaped as much
by 19th-century romanticism as by 18th-century reason and revolution.
