Gratitude on the 4th of July
A time for optimism (even when it might be hard)
This morning I was out with my son on a run (while he rides his scooter), and I had the 4th of July on my mind. Not just the plan to go watch fireworks later this evening, though that'll be a good time.
But I was thinking about the origins of the our particular independence: the Declaration, the Founders, its origins, and what makes our implementation of self-rule distinct and important.
(Yes, somehow I was able to be thinking about this even with him asking me random questions every 30 seconds.)
Something unique about the American Founders' flavor of revolution was that it was the first (only?) of the revolutionary movements of the past 300 years that took human nature into account. Many of the revolutions in the time since — the French Revolution, those of the 1840s, the Russian Revolution — had toppling despotic authoritarian regimes in mind.
In that respect the American Revolution shared a causal relationship in what brought it about.
Where the American version differed, though, was not in its origins, but its ends. It sought to replace an oppressive monarchy with something rooted in bottom-up individualism. A republican (small r) system of government that accepted human fallibility: one designed around the unchangeable essence of the "crooked timber of humanity."
Checks and balances, separation of powers, pitting faction against faction — mechanisms devised by the Founders designed wit the assumption that "good" people won't always occupy the seats of power. They knew we needed a system that could survive the contemporary leadership, one that didn't need a leader "enlightened" in the ways of the moment to survive and thrive.
They built a system designed to accommodate gradual change, one that would incorporate new good things, reform the flaws, evolve with the times.
Our system doesn't look to jump to the future or destroy what does work in pursuit of perfection. It's patient, accepting of contradiction. We seek to be a little bit better every day.
Counterpose this with the utopian, root-and-branch "redesign" of the French Revolution. What started as a noble attempt to stop the king's despotic rule morphed into an attempt to tear down the entire societal status quo, to design top-down a new vision for the future. It had respectable origins, but its means and goals went sideways. A few years in and you've got Robespierre, "La Terreur," and guillotines. One type of despotism replaced by another kind, a totalitarian purity cult twisting revolution for utopian ends.
In an impatience for improvement, it tried to force the issue.
If one accepts human nature as inherently flawed (the "constrained vision"), the path of the French aligns totally with humanity's tribal instincts: desire for control, for power, for influence. Humanity's factory defaults.
The "exceptionalism" of the American founding was that it took these flaws into account. It took these flaws as given, unchanging.
The Founders accepted and worked around the imperfections rather than casting them aside thinking they could socially-engineer their way around them.
The American founding understood the need for reform rather than the same "raze the status quo" model the French ended up pursuing. They knew it was necessary to break from the English and the monarchical tradition, but didn't throw out the entirety of its inherited cultural infrastructure like the French revolutionaries attempted to do.
It didn't seek to remodel all of society's norms from the ground up.
The American model appreciated that some things need changing, but many things didn't. The Founders sought a system designed around reform rather than replacement.
American culture, even if unstated and "in the water," is rooted in this appreciation for retaining the hard-won victories that took centuries to achieve.
In their fervor to behead the monarchs and replace them with something better, the French got overzealous and threw the baby out with the bathwater. They went too far and tore to pieces many of the invisible-yet-valuable elements of the culture.
In America we do this differently. We have optimism for the future, to build new things and improve our lives. But we do so in a way that doesn't jeopardize what we've earned through difficult victories over centuries of work.
There's a gratitude for this that lives deep in the American mindset, even if we don't think about it every day. Granted, there’s not enough gratitude, and too often we take these achievements as givens.
We should use the 4th of July as a time to bring out this gratitude, to remember all the great things we've achieved, the hard things we've recognized and gradually surmounted, and the confidence that we can fix, reform, and get beyond the problems we've still got.
Happy Independence Day!