BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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belief in the abilities of elected officials and those whom they represent,
had insights into the nature of humanity as it makes itself felt in social
terms. Their tragic sense was that we have to be able to reassert our ideals
whenever the lower sides of humanity appear in the forms I am sure be–
devil all societies and economic structures - folly, corruption, mediocrity,
and incompetence. Those lower sides have nothing to do with democ–
racy itself; they are built, mysteriously, into the species. The naive among
us are those who assess democracy - or capitalism or both - by the short–
comings of humanity itself, while failing to recognize that our social
contract, our governmental structures, allow us to perpetually redress
those things we find lacking. Our governmental structure allows us to re–
define our aspirations when we become discontented, when we discover
that something we might have thought was correct, or that our prede–
cessors might have believed was basic fact, is found to be - or thought to
be - all wrong. Essential to our social contract is the belief that we can,
eventually, handle the abuses of power, that we can move beyond our
prejudices, that we can redeem our society by improvising into policy
those ideas that we find to be true, those ideas that take us closer and
closer to our ideals and may, finally, go far beyond what the founding fa–
thers themselves thought about the world. Yet the tragic consciousness,
founded in the perpetual possibility of readjusting our policies, acknowl–
edges that these problems will forever appear in different forms.
There are those who make much of the prejudices of the Founding
Fathers and of the fact that they weren't thinking about women or so–
called minorities when they drew up those documents that have had such
extraordinary impact on the nation and world. This creates a dangerous
kind of cynicism and disillusionment in our young.
It
is a vision that ap–
peals to young people especially, because it is a very immature way of
assessing American history, one that fails to recognize that the form of our
government, as I observed, allows us to redeem ourselves.
It
is because
our social contract allows us to extend the human meanings of democracy
beyond a single race or sex that it is of no consequence at this point what
those brilliant men may have thought about the opposite sex or about
people whose racial ingredients made them look somewhat different from
all whose bloodlines led back to Europe. Their gift to this nation and the
world wove together a social philosophy and a governmental form that
could rediscover itself, as prejudices that were once thought of as fact
were found to be no more than superstition, xenophobia's foundation of
fear, loathing, and condescension. What might have seemed an essentially
poetic vision of humanity was actually structured in a way that would al–
low us to make the most of the rational, as our beliefs were empirically
and scientifically adjusted.
