Who Are We Today?

Who are we today? Are we different than who we were yesterday? Wilfred M. McClay attempts to answer these questions and others in his excellent article, Who Are We Today.

McClay begins his examination with the questions that we all are asking ourselves as this election draws closer. It does not matter who you are voting for because all of us are asking the same questions about each other.

"Why are we this way? Perhaps we can thank (or blame) those fiercely introspective New England Puritans, who made soul-searching into an art form with their copious diaries and gloomy declension narratives and thundering jeremiads, all animated by a profound sense of mission, of an “errand into the wilderness” that could not be permitted to fail. Or J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, whose proclamation that the American was to be a “new man” amalgamated out of the elements of the old ones offered a vision of America that has run, in various forms, like a brilliant ribbon through the nation’s entire history.

Or perhaps we should look to the lofty expectations of the Revolutionaries and the Founders, who proclaimed a Novus Ordo Seclorum, saw the new American nation as a successor to Rome, and wondered, with Alexander Hamilton, whether it was “reserved to the people of this country” to decide for all humanity “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Or to Abraham Lincoln’s more pithy description of his nation as “the last best hope of mankind,” a phrase suggestive of a secular errand just as fraught with ultimate significance as the Puritan one."

Have we really changed or are we the same as we have always been?

"Human nature has not changed. The human heart is filled with endless chaotic yearnings, most of which point toward mirages and dead ends; but what it most yearns for is something that will give it definition, direction, meaning, focus, something that brings the formlessness of life to the sharpness and clarity of a point—that brings redemption to life’s wasted time. The illusions of popular culture will never provide that, and some people will eventually be driven to look elsewhere. There are needs that one can’t understand, or even see, until the moment is ripe for them; and then they emerge. That is part of the mystery of character, and of new beginnings.

It is also important to recognize that many of our current problems arise out of distortions and misuses of otherwise good ideas and things. Multiculturalism takes a generous inclusiveness and makes it into a hard-and-fast principle of social separateness. Postmodernism takes a healthy skepticism and makes it into a dogma of weightless agnosticism. Dogmatic secularism reintroduces the very ideological coerciveness it once claimed to rescue us from, and thereby undermines the genial tolerance that is the chief virtue of a secular state. Openness to immigration and to the peoples of all nations has long been one of the defining features of American life—but not when that openness comes at the expense of the very idea of American citizenship and of a coherent and historically grounded national culture. Even our astonishingly toxic and corrupt popular culture tends to be defended by reference to gold-plated principles: free markets and free expression."

So, what is his point?

"The point is that without the right countervailing or balancing forces at work in our society even the best principles may become pernicious. The corruption of the best can give us the worst. And in all cases, the countervailing forces that we need are fundamentally conservative ones, deriving not from clever abstractions or legalisms pulled out of the air, but out of a high respect for the accumulated wisdom of previous generations and the sheer momentum of lived experience—which is to say, from common sense. "

You must read the entire article to capture its brilliance! Happy Reading!