BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
401
John Silber:
Our final panelist is Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:
I think we've
all
benefited from Stanley Crouch's
witty and eloquent paper, and from the commentary of Gertrude Him–
melfarb and David Frornkin. I would very much endorse and herewith
appropriate Stanley Crouch's fine phrase "tragic optimism." That, indeed,
seems to me to express both the mood in which the United States was
founded and the essential hope and meaning of democracy. The United
States was unique or almost unique among countries. It was founded on a
creed, explicitly adopted.
It
was defined not by common ethnic origins
but by common adherence to a set of principles. This, as they say, made it
exceptional among nation-states. The principles were those appropriately
summed up in the phrase "tragic optimism," the ideals of the Enlighten–
ment, the rights of man, the common vision of humanity -
Enlightenment ideals modified and enriched by a Calvinist sense of hu–
man frailty and corruptibility. The United States was not based on
illusions about the perfectibility of man. As Bryce said, the Constitution
was "the work of men who believed in original sin and were resolved to
leave open for transgressions no door which they could possibly shut."
They believed, therefore, that a proper government must guard against
the weakness, against the corruptibility, against the self-destructiveness
and self-pride of the human ego. Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up in that
mighty sentence, "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible,
but man's inclination towards injustice makes democracy necessary."
The people who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 saw themselves as
engaged in an experiment against history. History told them of the
"republican" cycle. The republics of the classical world instilled a sense of
an irreversible cycle where austerity led to wealth and wealth to corrup–
tion and decay. They felt themselves engaged in an experiment against
that history. The word "experiment" recurs in the discussions of the era,
in George Washington's first Inaugural and in the
Federalist Papers.
It
was
an experiment was founded on what they conceived as democracy's ca–
pacity for self-correction.
The Constitution proposed certain standards of rights, certain prom–
ises explicit and implicit, and it also set up a legal structure that would
enable those who felt themselves to have been wronged to claim their
rights. It set up therefore an abiding and inherent tension between our
ideals and our behavior, between our professions and our performance,
between, as Stanley said, our aspirations and our discontents. Gunar Myr–
dal, in his great work of half a century ago,
American Dilemma,
wrote that
Americans are engaged in an abiding struggle for the American soul. That
struggle derives from our continuing efforts to make our performance live
