“LET FREEDOM RING!” — the cry of democrats throughout the centuries now echoes round the world. What do aggrieved peoples want? Freedom. When do they want it? Now. That, at least, is the story of the recent past. From Tiananmen Square to Wenceslas Square the rhetoric of protestors, dissidents, and new citizens is cast in the idiom of freedom. But democratic freedom is a very particular sort of freedom, tempered by centuries of hard wisdom that stretches from ancient Attica to the modern Western metropolis, decocted civic lore that tells us that human beings are not only capable of great deeds of courage and selflessness, they are also tempted by power, corrupted by greed, seduced by violence, and weakened by cowardice. It is easy enough to understand why Plato believed, and Aristotle suspected, that human beings were ill-suited to democracy, in large part because they seemed altogether too well suited to licentiousness and anarchy and unscrupulous power-seeking.
Recall, briefly, the generous bounty of troubles I discussed in earlier chapters: the growth of cynicism and the atrophy of civil society; too much privatizing, acquisitive individualism that translates “wants” into “rights”; an increase in disrespect, even contempt for, the rule-governed practices that make democracy work, from the franchise to due process; a politics of displacement that disdains any distinction between public and private and aims to open up all aspects of life to the harsh glare of publicity; a neglect of practical politics in favour of rageful proclamations of one’s unassailable and un-assimilable identity as a member of a group; impatience with democratic citizenship and growing enthusiasm for identities based on race, gender, or sexual preference over that of the citizen; a waning of our ability to transmit democratic dispositions and dreams to succeeding generations through education. This is not a pretty picture. It would seem that our prospects are bleak.
Have we, then, lost the res publica? Is the drama of democracy in its last act on the stage of the West? Will democratic prospects elsewhere collapse under the weight of nationalism or religious fundamentalism? My answer is a cautious no. Democracy may be in peril, but democracy also remains vibrant and resilient, the great source of political hope in our troubled world. Hope, as Hannah Arendt insisted, is the human capacity that sustains political being. Should hopelessness triumph, then and only then will it rightly be said that democracy is forlorn. But that is not where we are at, by no means. The practical realm of democratic civil society, the daily habits that this realm sustains and embodies, may have grown brittle and a bit withered from disuse, but hope remains.
The fact that democracy in its very particular constitutional and representative form is now the dream dreamt by democrats everywhere is, in and of itself, remarkable. For it was not always so. In a 1963 book contrasting the French and American revolutions, Hannah Arendt lamented the fact that it was the French Revolution that young political activists turned to for inspiration rather than the American. Marxists had little use for America’s robust yet cautious democrats with their constitutional wrangling and their detailed and very particular Bill of Rights. The French Revolution ended in disaster, bloodshed, and aggressive nationalism. The American Revolution ended in a remarkably steady world of politics without end, a politics resilient enough to withstand the bloodiest civil war the world had known up to that time. But the American Revolution, by contrast to the French, seemed to the reckless and the romantic to lack colour and panache, including the grandiosity of vast lurchings and wrenchings of the sort the French Revolution displayed in full.
Before Arendt penned her elaborate defence of the American revolutionary tradition, Albert Camus had warned about celebrations of the French Revolution, much in vogue in post-World War II Europe, with that revolution recast by Marxists as a class war and a glorious example of justifiable revolutionary violence. Camus cautioned against the mystique of the proletariat, and the attempt by Saint-Just and Robespierre and, later, Marx and Lenin, to fit the world into a theoretical frame that deified a notion of the undivided “will of the people” as a substitution for God himself. Camus excoriated a passion for unity that saw any opposition as treason.
For his efforts Camus was virtually excommunicated from French intellectual life by Sartre and his minions in Les Temps modernes.50 Where Sartre and other latter-day revolutionaries explained away Soviet terror and colluded with reinforcing the power of the state if it was a “people’s state,” Camus stressed “le dialogue” as the form human sociability takes when it appears as politics. Revolutionary politics destroys that sociability, making it impossible to say that “I rebel, therefore we exist.” That sounds altogether too moderate if what you want is storming the barricades, terrorizing the bourgeoisie, and taking over the state. That is what revolutionaries seemed to want, proclaiming themselves on the road to a true and perfect democracy by contrast to the paltry, timid form embodied in the American republic.
Camus renounced the claims of politics to aspire to the absolute. Democratic politics must chasten this aspiration, not capitulate to it. For a politics without limits destroys democracy itself. Arendt makes moves similar to Camus’s when she distinguishes the rights of freedom and citizenship from the generic “rights of man” proclaimed by the French revolutionaries. Unlike Saint-Just, Robespierre, and the others, the American founders were realists, aware of the fact that human beings will always fall short of some absolute ideal. It follows, according to Arendt, that “the only reasonable hope for salvation from evil and wickedness at which men might arrive even in this world and even by themselves, without any divine assistance,” must be the imperfect working of government, the flawed actions of citizens among citizens.51 Mindful of human limits, the American revolutionaries shored up means to check the urge to unlimited power. Their new government did not promise a future perfect world once all enemies were removed, traitors silenced, and the pure goodness of the people’s will articulated; rather, the American democracy held out for a partial redemption only: political hope by contrast to earthly salvation.
Dependent on selectively assimilated memories from antiquity, the French hommes de lettres who made the Revolution pursued extreme theoretical abstractions to terrible concrete conclusions. Their “conscious thoughts and words stubbornly returned, again and again, to Roman language, drawn upon to justify revolutionary dictatorship.” Oddly the various metaphors “in which the revolution is seen not as the work of men but as an irresistible process, the metaphors of stream and torrent and current, were still coined by the actors themselves, who, however drunk they might have become with the wine of freedom in the abstract, clearly no longer believed that they were free agents,” notes Arendt. Prisoners of history, the makers of the French revolution plunged headlong into an orgy of repetitive destruction.
In the twentieth century, when the objective conditions were supposedly ripe for the Bolshevik Revolution, what Lenin and his comrades drew upon was a rhetoric and a historic teleology forged from lessons they claimed they had learned from the French Revolution. The trouble, Arendt claims, was precisely this: “those who went into the school of revolution learned and knew beforehand the course a revolution must take.” It must defeat open opponents. Then it must ferret out and destroy hidden enemies. To do this it must centralize power, enhance the police, create a layer of spies and functionaries. It must liquidate hypocrites. Finally it must forfeit some of its own. This is a “grandiose ludicrousness,” Arendt avers, for its automatic adherence to the claims of revolutionary necessity is compulsive and robotic, unlike the uncoerced actions and reactions of free citizens doing the work of practical politics.
Arendt also taxes the French revolutionaries for the way they promised to solve the social question, problems of poverty and misery. It worked in the following manner. The people were deemed abject and silent by definition. They required spokesmen and champions. But having construed the problems the Revolution was meant to solve in nigh-eschatalogical terms, the dynamic set in motion restlessly sought targets for correction, reproof, or extinction. Absolute ends require means without limit. Revolutionary pity is boundless in its bathetic force so long as the suffering are faceless, a mass. Distinguishing this abstract pity from genuine compassion, Arendt writes: “For compassion, to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious, and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related.” One feels compassion, or comprehends it, only in and through the particular. The moment one generalizes, this specificity is lost and boundless pity comes into play: hence Robespierre’s glorification of the poor.
Pity for is not the same as solidarity with. Those who pity without limit develop a thirst for power and gain “a vested interest in the existence of the weak.” Abstract pity invites cheap sentiment and confounds any possibility for genuine political freedom. “Since the days of the French Revolution,” writes Arendt, “it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular, whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their ’principles/or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as such.” Virtue without limits is evil. The real poor, in their human distinctness, are lost.
To say that all power resides in the people and that the people are all who suffer is to understand power as a kind of natural, pre-political force. In contrast, by distinguishing violence from authentic power, the American rebels rejected the notion of irrefutable necessity and the need for force, believing instead, in Arendt’s words, that power comes into being when “people … get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges; only such power, which rests on reciprocity and mutuality, was real power and legitimate …” The American revolutionaries at least appreciated this grammar of action, the action of citizens in their plurality, not a mass in its anonymity.
Political power doesn’t grow out of the barrel of a gun, or flow from the dripping blade of the guillotine. Rather, it comes into being, it makes its appearance, when men and women, acting in common as citizens, get together and find a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities. Consider the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. There are observers that fault civil rights activists for doing too much — taking to the streets, boycotts, and mass demonstrations seem uncivil to them — or for doing too little: refusing to attack whites, or refraining from admitting forthrightly that, “This is about power, pure and simple. Whites have it; blacks don’t; we want it.” But narrowly juridical treatments of the civil rights struggle miss the boat—it was about laws, yes, but it was about much more than legal change.
A modulated politics whose practitioners opened their hands in gestures of anticipated fellowship to all persons of goodwill, white or black, rich or poor, offends those who want a totalistic and revolutionary politics. Hate is easy; arousing the regressive urges of one’s fellow men and women requires little more than a capacity for spite. What is difficult, what is the most daunting task of the political imagination, is to fight the allure of hate, particularly when it comes to us in the name of revolution.
Martin Luther King understood this. He knew very well what an experience of “the political” was all about and how it rested uneasily within the confines of a wizened conventional politics of mere proceduralism, on the one hand, yet stood as an alternative to a politics of revolutionary violence, on the other. A recent historian, Richard King, talks of the “repertory of freedom” embraced by the civil rights movement. He observes that freedom in Western political thinking involves at least four basic meanings: legal freedom, freedom as autonomy, participatory freedom, and freedom as collective deliverance from a subjugated condition. Here once again Arendt’s insistence that political freedom is public, open, and involves action helps one to appreciate the hope embraced by, and expressed in, the identities and actions of civil rights citizens, those tens of thousands of ordinary folks who found within themselves the courage to act in behalf of each “I” and in so doing helped to create a “we.” Protestors did not seek pity; they were not Robespierre’s abject, silent mass. They did, however, embrace a politics of compassion that could draw out from others a spirit of renewed hopefulness and commitment.
The action of a free citizen is not just any form of movement or behaviour; rather, rooted in hope, such action marks new beginnings, generates possibilities that once seemed foreclosed. Thus, “Like most great movements of historical change the civil rights movement was a great surprise,” notes King.52 As I already suggested, the politics of civil rights cannot be confined within the primacy of self-interest, as many contemporary political scientists claim. They spin out their own version of cynicism in advocating so-called rational choice theory, a formula that reduces citizens first, last, and always to calculators of marginal utility. It is not that civil rights citizens denied such motives altogether. But a politics of self-interest captures only one moment, and not the most important at that, of the rich idea of freedom animating King and his cohorts. Freedom as collective liberation from bondage, throwing off the nonrecognition lodged in a denial of the dignity of rights-based citizenship, was vital. Equally important was the “necessary transformation of the self experienced by those actively engaged in direct action” as free citizens.53 To see such solidaristic freedom and self-transformation as merely peripheral to “the explicit goals of liquidation of racial segregation and black disenfranchisement” is to lose the ethical power and historic complexity of the civil rights struggle.
Civil rights protestors, like the Athenians gathered to hear Pericles extol the glory of their city and remind them of why she was worthy of their sacrifice, shared a repertoire of beliefs and ideals. They recognized that powerful ethical convictions are fungible in a democratic culture — they can be turned to transformative civic purposes. The freedom they yearned for flows from the lexicon of liberty and political equality. But it certainly owes a great deal, as well, to the conviction that every person is unique and irreplaceable, a child of God. The Christian’s biblically grounded belief in the equal worth of all souls in the eyes of God profoundly transformed received notions of political equality, putting the stress on human dignity by contrast to equal power to rule and to be ruled.
As encoded in law, democratic rights make reference to this idea of a dignified individual. Although Americans sometimes grow weary of “rights talk” — as I indicated in a previous chapter, just about anything anybody wants gets bruited about as a right in America nowadays — it remains the case that rights as immunities, as the way we express what governments are not permitted to do to us because we are persons with political standing and human dignity, is both a precious reality and a precarious achievement. For the vast majority of the world’s people, “human rights” is the name they give to a persistent yearning. These are lessons I learned or, perhaps better put, came to remember as I listened to the powerful and terrible stories told me by mothers who have become public citizens — in Argentina, Central America, Israel and the West Bank, the Czech Republic, and the United States. Because it was the stories of those “political Mothers” called las madres, the Mothers of the Disappeared, that I heard first and that jolted me out of my own complacency about rights and public freedom, it is their saga I will recount briefly. The Mothers of the Disappeared are Argentine mothers of sons and daughters who were “disappeared” in the terrible years of Argentina’s so-called Dirty War, from 1976 to 1982 when Argentina was ruled by three successive military juntas. To be a desaparecido, a “disappeared,” is to be abducted, usually tortured, before being killed and buried anonymously.
As backdrop to the story of las madres, it might be useful for me to indicate what I brought to the hearing, recording, and interpretation of the Mothers’ tales of grief and defiance. In a 1982 essay, “Antigone’s Daughters,” I recalled the transgressive words and deeds of Antigone as worthy of consideration by contemporary feminists skeptical of state-dominated politics and determined to position themselves against a public identity subsumed entirely within the extant terms of a juridical notion of the citizen and a self-interested notion of politics. I recalled Antigone and her defiance of Creon, King of Thebes and her own uncle, when he denies burial honours to Antigone’s slain brother and Creon’s nephew, Polynices, a traitor to the city.
I cannot here repeat the many themes I found in the play that seemed an appropriate feminist parable for our own time. Primarily I wanted to show that conflicts between duty to family and the requirements of civic order are not so easily resolved. Private life and public life alike suffer if one gives everything over to a single sphere or dimension. As well, I was unconvinced by the “oppressed group model,” analyses that saw in women’s traditional identities only victimization, thereby denying women historic agency and authority. Those who accepted this view found themselves celebrating the statuses and identities of successful and dominant males—an unwittingly ironic posture for a feminist, I thought. The critical point was my insistence that to construe the careerist public world as the only sphere within which individuals made choices, exercised power, or had control meant that the private world remained shrouded in a presumably un-chosen, unthinking condition of mere necessity. As well, democratic politics got reduced to a vehicle aimed at securing one’s private ambitions.
Positioning women as social actors in the world, I aimed to pit them against imperious public power and petty private demands, even as they struggled to sustain public identities as citizens and embraced worlds of intimate obligation and promise. Both worlds, public and private, are social locations. Breaking out of a rigid public-private dichotomy, but recognizing and seeking to preserve some version of a public-private distinction, is a complex task but a necessary one. Or so I claimed.
Jane Addams, a great American public citizen and social thinker, is usefully drawn into the story at this point. In one of her early essays, “Filial Relations,” which appeared in a collection called Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams described the conflict between familial duties and dependencies and the responsibilities of the individual to the larger social whole. She saw this conflict as necessary and sometimes tragic. “The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to ethical life.”54
Addams understood that women could not ongoingly play out the drama of ethical life in the private sphere or family alone. Addams raises to an explicit concern questions of female identity and political purpose. Women, too, must undergo a struggle for identity and recognition. The family claim is a claim: we are duty-bound to answer. But it is not the only claim and cannot absorb the whole of us. We must hold in fruitful tension the “I” of the self, the “us” and “ours” of the family, and the “we of citizens” of the wider democratic civic world. No theoretical abstraction has authenticity, she argued, unless it is rooted in the concrete human experiences of familial and wider social claims. That is one of democracy’s enduring promises.
What Addams is about is something quite different from those preaching and practising a politics of displacement of the sort I criticized in an earlier chapter. For Addams it is clear that, when one enters the public world, one has to make one’s case in a shared political idiom: we are not little epistemological isolates, stripped-down Robinson Crusoe monads. Let us hold these recognitions in mind as I return to the story of the Mothers’ tragedy and how they took to the public square, speaking a double language of maternal grief and human rights, advocating justice and seeking recognition not so much for themselves but for the “disappeared.” The Mothers transgressed the boundary between private and public in order to reaffirm the integrity of that boundary against those who, in the name of the state, had violated it by rounding up, torturing, and killing thousands of persons, most of them young, and all of them stripped of dignity and denied political standing and recognition.
The authoritarian, militarist system the Mothers opposed, after it had seized and destroyed their children, permitted one sort of politics (or pseudo-politics) only — a politics of supplication to high authorities. All of political life was constructed vertically. But another possibility — essential to any democratic political life — had been virtually wiped out. Some have called this the “horizontal voice.”55 By this they mean the right to address others, to call forth some sort of “we,” to make manifest a political identity. It is this “horizontal voice” that anti-democratic regimes must try to destroy, yet it is precisely this voice the Mothers found in themselves. They created a “we,” they forged a group political identity on the basis of their shared experience. Condemned to silence, they repudiated the sentence of the regime, took to a great public square in Buenos Aires, the Plaza de Mayo, and voiced their grief and their outrage. Having lived a private life of grief, they found strength and political identity by deprivatizing their mourning; in fusing a language of grief with a language of human rights, they kept alive the particular realities and identities of individuals, their sons and daughters, tormented and lost to state terror, but they also issued a call to nonviolent arms to their fellow Argentines and to the wider world. Reclaim human dignity! they cried. Reclaim the birthright of free citizens! Protect Mothers and Families, yes, but embrace and protect a democratic constitution, as well.
Recall, if you will, the potent terms moving through this discussion thus far: hope and reality. Hope as that which gives rise to political being and action, for without hope the people, and individuals, perish politically. But reality, too, concrete attention to particular concerns by contrast to grandiose schemes that require anti-democratic methods in order to attain some ostensibly better or more perfect democracy — down the road a piece, after we have rid ourselves of counterrevolutionaries, of all who stand in our way. In my conversations with the Mothers, stretching over nearly a decade, I was struck by how many of them understood the language of rights in its fullest and richest embodiment as setting boundaries not only to the politics of the state but to their own politics. “We, too, must behave democratically in our movement,” one Mother told me, “if we are to advocate democracy for our society.”
To be sure, human rights language is scarcely so ancient a maternal language as that of mourning and loss. The mothers put these languages together. Human rights was, for them, a way to express the timeless immunities of persons from the depredations of their governments rather than as a vehicle for entitlements, as we Americans more and more see things. Rights gave political form and shape to their disobedience, linking them to an international network of associations. They not only breached the private-public divide of their own society in the interest of protecting the integrity of family life against wholesale destruction and definition by government, but crossed the boundaries of states, as well, astonishing themselves in the process as they gained support and inspired other human-rights-based Mothers’ movements throughout Central and Latin America.
The Mothers made it very clear to me that they sought justice, not vengeance. They opposed the death penalty. “Human beings are not robots,” Renée Epelbaum, mother of three desaparecidos, told me. “The man or people who killed my children are criminals, those who tortured and those who gave the order to torture. Human beings are responsible for what they do. They destroyed the rights, the lives, of other human beings.” Maria Adela Antokoletz added: “When justice is not fulfilled, when rights are not cherished, democratic possibilities vanish.” Renée sadly continued: “You know, we understand that not everyone responsible can be punished — that’s Utopian. But we must press forward from a sense of hope and reality. We don’t want the Mothers movement changed into a class movement. We demand justice strongly. But we are not Utopians.” Maria Adela: “What we want and think is that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo must endure forever, much more than in our own lifetimes. It has to do with having a guardian position in society in order to watch so this will not happen again.”
These brave Mothers encoded democracy in its specifically liberal and constitutional understandings, grounded in human rights construed as immunities and duties, into their political self-definition. Through their actions and deeds the ethical force of an argument from human rights helped to animate quiescent sectors of a moribund and demoralized Argentine civil society. Whatever Argentina’s future fate, these Mothers would say, human rights can never again be trampled upon with such impunity. That is their wager — one to which they have devoted their lives in the name of the lost lives of their children.
Faced with such stories, how can we citizens of relatively secure, ordered, and well-established democracies lose heart? The Mothers did not see themselves as heroes. “We have been courageous, that is true. We have always acted with dignity. But we did it because of our children. We had to do it.” This stress on a simple moral imperative — we had to do it — is typical of stories of democratic courage and perseverance. “We” had to, “I” had to, not because it was mandated, not because it was in conformity with what had been drilled into me through years of martial severity, as in Sparta, but because I had to. We hold these truths to be self-evident, I hear echoing in the backdrop to such affirmations of the burdens of free responsibility.
A remarkable freedom from bitterness and rancour, from the corrosive force of resentment, characterizes these brave democratic exemplars. The issue, remember, is democratic possibility and the robustness of democratic yearning in our complex world as it lurches and lumbers toward the end of the twentieth century. I want to suggest that political actors all over the world are busy writing new acts for, and enacting scenes from, an ongoing drama of democracy, often as a form of dissent and disaffection from an undemocratic order.
Take a rather different example, Václav Havel, who showed as much courage as the Mothers when he found himself, on several occasions, in Communist prisons for his dissident crimes. But even in rebellion, Havel insists, there must be limits. Freedom is not the working out of a foreordained teleology of self-realization or political prophecy; rather, freedom comes from embracing that which it is given one to do in one’s own time and place. Democracy is the political form that enables human beings to work out freedom as responsibility, in service to the notion that there are things worth suffering for. Note the distinction here: one may accept, as the burden of free responsibility, suffering from prison or torture. But one does not mandate suffering for others and one does not feel a wholly abstract pity toward those who suffer.
For Havel, hope, responsibility, freedom, acceptance of paradox are all of a piece. What makes Havel such a fascinating performer of democratic political thought is that, from a stance of compassion rather than sickly pity, he provokes the complacent, mocks the smug, tweaks the arrogant, and suffers without excusing the weak. In his rejection of the petrified politics deeded us by the legacy of the French Revolution and a century of total wars, Havel helps us to move into the future disillusioned hence paradoxically free. I think he would agree that a central task of political philosophy for our time lies in recognizing, for what it is, what has happened in Europe since 1989. What has happened is the definitive collapse of an attempt to rebuild human society on some overarching Weltanschauung. Europe, Havel noted, has entered the long tunnel at the end of the light. This is a wonderful metaphor for the democratic drama more generally. There is the light — the glorious light of public freedom, individual liberty, and political equality — and then we move through that long tunnel, a world of politics without end.
Havel’s arguments continue in this vein: the world is possible only because we are grounded. If this world of “personal responsibility,” with its characteristic virtues and marks of decency, both public and private (justice, honour, friendship, fidelity), is ruptured or emptied, what rushes in to take its place is politics as a “rational technology of power” whose exemplar is the manager, the apparatchik. Humans play God and the wreckage grows. Man finds himself in the “rut of totalitarian thought, where he is not his own and where he surrenders his own reason and conscience …”56 Man lives within a lie; he gives himself over to the “social auto-totality” and he or she who does so surrenders identity and responsibility falters. The totalitarian society counts on this and requires it. The democratic society, in its mass, consumerist forms, may give rise to a similar mentalité, and should this grow apace, shared responsibility for the civic world will fade there, too.
Well, we have come rather far — from Pericles’ Athens to Havel’s Czech Republic, from the Mothers of the Disappeared to American civil rights protestors, from counsels of cynicism and a politics of resentment, to a politics of hope and reality. Perhaps I may introduce just one more theme—our ongoing dialogue with the dead. In anti-democratic societies, whether a twentieth-century totalitarian or bureaucratic authoritarian state or, further back, in revolutionary cataclysms of the French sort, one’s ancestors are pretty much reviled and repudiated. We are starting brand-new, anti-democrats proclaim. We will not be bound by the past with its petty and benighted ways.
I recall a stroll in a lovely town in France’s Berry region with good friends of mine several summers ago. With one of these friends I entered a Romanesque church dating, I believe, from the ninth or tenth century. I noticed that a number of the sarcophagi offered a curious spectacle — the heads of saints and angels and other representations of venerated persons had been lopped off. I looked around and found that all sorts of lovely if, by now, somewhat decrepit statues and figures had been beheaded. Being an American, I thought of youthful vandalism on a drunken Saturday night. But I asked my friend, “Who did this? Who would do a thing like this?”
He answered matter-of-factly, “Revolutionaries.”
These defaced relics had fallen prey to eighteenth-century political zeal. It was a breathtakingly simple response, and it reminded me, once again, of why I am not a revolutionary convinced that I have the right to destroy that which others, past and present, hold dear.
In America today we hear pitiless assaults on the past: all was oppression and domination and racist or sexist horror. But what happens to our obligation to the dead? Are we modern democrats not thus obliged? Wholesale assaults on the past enjoin and legitimate a vulgar willfulness of the present moment. That is not what the drama of democracy is all about. Rather, it is about permanent contestation between conservation and change, between tradition and transformation. To jettison one side is to live either in a sterile present-mindedness or an equally sterile reaction. Let me offer as an example of what I have in mind a passage from a novel by the great American writer Willa Cather. The novel in question is called A Lost Lady. Cather’s protagonist, Neil Herbert, discovers the classics and the classics provide him a way into a new world and a way out of the town of Sweetwater, Nebraska. Cather describes Neil Herbert’s discovery of the past, the past of his own culture:
There were philosophical works in the collection but he did no more than open and glance at them. He had no curiosity about what men had thought, but about what they had felt and lived he had a great deal. If anyone had told him these were classics and represented the wisdom of the ages, he would doubtless have let them alone. He did not think of these books as something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures caught in the very behavior of living, surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. He was eavesdropping upon the past, being let into the great world that had plunged and littered and sumptuously sinned long before little western towns were dreamed of. Those rapt evenings beside the lamp gave him a long perspective, including his conception of the people about him, made him know just what he wished his own relations with these people to be.
In novels Herbert finds a living, breathing, socially embodied tradition. This is the excitement I hope to convey — I hope I have conveyed — about the drama of democracy. For democracy invites us into the complexities and possibilities of a heady tradition. We are always part of a tradition or part of the fragments of many traditions. There is no point denying this fact: that will not make it so. As Arendt taught us, the French revolutionaries who fancied themselves untrammelled as they proposed to uproot one world utterly and create another totally were, in fact, drearily stuck in the dead hand of a teleology of historic necessity. A tradition with many voices — and that is the democratic tradition — leads us out of ourselves, out of previously unthought perspectives into worlds at once more self-aware and less predictable. To think a tradition is to bring matters to the surface, to engage with interlocutors long dead, protagonists who never lived save on the page, and through that engagement to elaborate alternative conceptions through which to apprehend one’s world and the way that world represents itself.
“Home is where one starts from,” writes T. S. Eliot in his poem “East Coker,” but, the poet goes on, “As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / Of dead and living.” Faithfulness to this complexity without slavish adherence to the past, including our own and that of our society, that, too, is central to an enduring democratic promise. But above all, be not afraid, our democratic forefathers and foremothers would tell us. Democracy is an unpredictable enterprise. Our patience with its ups and downs, its debates and compromises, its very anti-authoritarianism, may wane as we become inured to more and more control — all in the name of freedom. We must be on guard.
The task of the democratic political imagination is possible if civility is not utterly destroyed, if room remains for playful experimentation from deep seriousness of purpose free from totalistic intrusion and ideological control.57 For even when equality and justice seem far-off ideals, freedom preserves the human discourse necessary to work toward the realization of both. One day as our children or their children or their children’s children stroll in gardens, debate in public places, or poke through the ashes of a wrecked civilization, they may not rise to call us blessed. But neither will they curse our memory because we permitted, through our silence, democracy to pass away as in a dream.