Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism
Recommended by: Duncan Newcomer
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln
Purchase →Can morality and reason persuade people or can only interests, power and violence?
John Burt turns to his working knowledge of literature (he is a professor of English at Brandeis University, executor of the estate of Robert Penn Warren) and then to his mastery of political philosophy (Harry Jaffa and John Rawls) and then to the rhetoric and history of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The first twenty-six pages can be your Global Positioning Device as we verge on the edge of our conflicts. The next nine chapters are exquisite detailed maps of the history and thought of Lincoln and Douglas as they crisscrossed Illinois in 1858.
Can Democracy really adjudicate major moral issues, and can democracy survive the polarization that grows around opposing moral universes?
To Lincoln slavery was a subset of a larger moral issue: the equal right to self-government. Could that democratic ideal sustain itself when people stopped restraining themselves politically? The irony, of course, was that self-government allowed the extremes to go beyond self-restraint.
This was Lincoln’s tragic dilemma: democracy had allowed slavery and democracy could not find a way, short of war, to end it.
But despair not. Lincoln thought and fought his way through that cratered wilderness. His rhetoric, his spirit, and his actions, define a way for our looming civil strife. As a literary critic, philosopher, and historian (he only claims the first) John Burt maps the fight. The battleground was laid out in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Those events are the set-pieces of Burt’s epic, generational, book “Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism”. Not only is this a work of political philosophy in search of meaning, the book can also be a handbook for how to find and define the rules for the fight within the bounds of liberal democratic virtues.
The victory and the glory at the end would sound like this (and it would not sound like the Battle Hymn of the Republic):
“Lincoln had to hold both love and rage at arm’s length.”
“Lincoln had that hardest to understand of gifts, the ability to fight a great war without self-delusion, without self-congratulation, without truculent self-righteousness, and, most of all, without destroying through uncritical love the values in whose name he waged war.”
The method of liberal politics as Burt boils it down is that it is “an expression of the conviction that citizens have a crucial moral investment in each other’s ethical freedom….”
The ironies of American history are many, as Burt will reveal, among them that our values unspool themselves over time and spread out tapestries of newly woven and enhanced versions of their earlier forms. Another irony is that values often lead to actions that seem to conflict with themselves, such as a war to make a union.
Another and haunting irony comes with the Humanitarian Principle: that our opponents should be listened to “as if” they were telling the truth. Without that mutual assumption from our opponents as well, we are lost. (Jonathan Lear points out the value of this principle in his book on the Crow Indians and the theme of “Radical Hope in a Time of Cultural Devastation.” Harvard University Press. 2006. A slim volume of equal weight with the case study of the collapse of the Crow Nation.)
Burt’s book is not for the faint of heart. It is a massive and in depth study, analysis, and expression of the very plight we once were in that led to war and which we are now nearly in again. As a case history study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates you can glean version after version of how democracy, freedom and morality can be staged and scripted. The debates are like a fabulous television mini-series, each one worthy, and the impact of all astounding. The Prologue of Burt’s book, itself, is an inspirational and instructive guide to the problems and the answers needed for a politics and a culture of consent where we surely will not always know what to do but often how to do it, and in light of an unrealizable principle.
“Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence as making promises of equality that the Founders were not in a position to keep but wished their successors to remember.” That is a maxim for “persuasive engagement” indeed. Burt’s light at the end of the tunnel is a flickering one: “We cannot know in advance whether we will find a way out of this contradiction, although we know of similar occasions in which others have managed to do so.”