How the wisdom of George Washington, the indispensable man, and Ferris Bueller, the lovable rogue who valued experiencing the moment, can unite to guide us through these troubled times.
“-Ism’s in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.’ Good point there.”
Ferris Bueller
Ferris Bueller’s famous quote from the 1986 classic nicely illustrates one of the key challenges of our era. Everyone is obsessed with “-isms” of some kind, and everyone increasingly demands strict adherence to their preferred “-ism.” This is partially the result of the polarization of our politics in recent years, but the root cause is likely far deeper. As technology driven by science has changed the world, from advances in the industrial age to the splitting of the atomic nucleus under J. Robert Oppenheimer, there is a deep cultural sense that everything can be explained by some grand theory or design of the human mind. Today, we have theories of economics, history, racism, feminism, governance, sociology, literature, art, and just about everything else in addition to the more traditional theories of science and mathematics. These are “-isms” whether or not they bear the specific label. Thus, adherents on all sides interpret facts according to their preferred theory, either torturing them beyond reason or ignoring them all together when they do not fit, and then argue with their opponents over the theory rather than the underlying substance, facts quickly becoming rather inconvenient things. This is how some have reached the conclusion that roads are racists. The theory they are using begins with the assumption that racism is a primary driver of the American experience, from our laws to our culture to our infrastructure, and therefore everything must be tinged with racism. Likewise, some conservatives view our limited government, pro-freedom ideology as an “-ism,” believing that there was some period in the past where the government functioned according to strict adherence to the Constitution, and if only that can be recaptured, our problems will go away. This, however, is the Constitution as a computer program, a formula, another “-ism.” The result in both and many other cases is the reduction of incredibly complex, highly contingent social and historical interactions into neat little formulas that do not begin to capture the totality of the experience. To believe an “-ism” can explain anything in its totality, one has to ignore that theories fail in even the hard sciences and mathematics. Kurt Goedel, who worked with Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ, proved long ago that no theory can ever be complete. There will always be things that cannot be explained or expected.
Nowhere is this more true history itself, where most of the prevailing theories assume there is some fundamental guiding principle that moves events forward in time, that where we are today was somehow inevitable based on where we were in the past and where we will go in the future is guided the same. It certainly might seem that way from the perspective of the present – can we, for example, imagine a modern world without the United States? – but the truth of how history actually unfolds is completely different. Every moment in time is contingent on every moment that precedes it, and every major event, outside of natural disasters, is the product of individual people making individual decisions based on their temperament, character, and personal history. If you change the people, history itself will change in ways that are impossible to predict or at times even imagine, and perhaps nowhere is that more plain than in the figure of George Washington himself, the Father of the United States. Washington has sometimes been called the “indispensable man” because he won the Revolutionary War and secured the peace with the founding of the new Republic under the Constitution. Without his presence throughout these critical events, so the thinking goes, there would be no United States. This is undoubtedly true, but it fails to capture what made Washington so unique, why he was capable of founding what would become the most powerful country in the world, while others were not. What decisions did he make and why? Setting aside Washington’s skills as a general, strategist, administrator, and commander of troops, we can identify four crucial decisions he made that might well have been different than anyone else in his unique position. The first was to sign the Declaration of Independence and agree to command the army in the Revolutionary War, lending his prestige as a hero of the French and Indian War to the effort. The second was to relinquish control over the army at the end of the war, laying down his sword instead of taking control over the country. The third was to support the Constitution and agree to be the first President, a role perhaps no one else could have played successfully. The fourth was to retire after a second term, and in a repeat of relinquishing the army, give up power once again. If Washington had made a different decision at any of these critical junctures, everything that happened afterwards would be fundamentally changed and likely for the far worse whatever America’s detractors may claim. Crucially, however, none of these decisions had to have been made, and almost everyone else in his position would have made at least one choice differently. Washington was a wealthy landowner and styled himself as something of an American aristocrat. He could easily have refused to risk his life in what seemed a lost cause to many. He was beloved by the army, and throughout history, most with troops in the field at the end of the war set themselves up as kings. One has to go back to a Roman general, Cincinattus, circa 500 BCE, to find a major figure who did not. The drafting and ratification of the Constitution was another fraught enterprise, especially when he was a proud Viriginian, the most powerful colony, and could well have lived a placid retirement under the Articles of Confederation whatever their flaws. Finally, to relinquish power yet again has no historical parallel that I am aware of.
Why did he make these choices that few if any would in his position? Obviously, we cannot travel back in time and ask him or read his mind should he refuse to answer, but perhaps one aspect of his character stands out more so than anything else. Washington, unlike many of his fellow Founders, was a pragmatist rather than an intellectual or an ideologue. Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton, for example, were all incredibly deep thinkers, immersed in the history of Europe, philosophy, literature, art, science (especially in Jefferson’s case), and more, along with the various theories that accompanied these intellectual pursuits. Washington was an extremely intelligent man, obviously, but he professed no special expertise beyond his military and administrative skills, which necessarily required an acknowledgement of the reality before you rather than the theory. Wars are won on the ground, and people are managed based on the situation confronted in real time. While Madison might lecture for hours on the strengths and weaknesses of the various democratic governments formed in Ancient Greece, coming to certain conclusions about why some succeed or others failed, or Hamilton could write tens of thousands of words on the application of monetary theory to the new Republic, Washington looked at the facts as they were and made the best possible decision he could independent of any theory, or fixed worldview beyond the embrace of liberty and the role of government in preserving it. As such, he could have in his cabinet the two great political rivals of the day, Jefferson and Hamilton, representing the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists (irrespectively actually), and yet fully subscribe to neither, taking what he believed was best from both and discarding all the rest. In other words, Washington subscribed to no particular “-isms” beyond a fundamental belief in liberty and that the government’s primary purpose was to safeguard freedom for its citizens. We can find almost incontrovertible evidence of this in his immortal Farewell Address, published on September 19, 1796, shortly before he left office (and referenced in my post just yesterday). In it, he almost steadfastly refuses to tell his fellow citizens and politicians what to do, embracing no ideology of any kind. Instead, he warns everyone about what not to do to preserve the country and safeguard their liberty in something close to a modern State of the Union Address in reverse. He identified national unity around our founding principles as of critical importance above and beyond politics, that “The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”
From there, he proceeds to define both the benefits of this unity and the almost uncountable number of ways that unity might be threatened. The benefits in his mind are obvious and exclusively apolitical, “The North, in an unrestrained intercourse with the South, protected by the equal laws of a common government, finds in the productions of the latter great additional resources of maritime and commercial enterprise and precious materials of manufacturing industry. The South, in the same intercourse, benefiting by the same agency of the North, sees its agriculture grow and its commerce expand…The East, in a like intercourse with the West, already finds, and in the progressive improvement of interior communications by land and water will more and more find, a valuable vent for the commodities which it brings from abroad or manufactures at home. The West derives from the East supplies requisite to its growth and comfort…While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined can not fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations, and what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same governments, which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and imbitter.” The threats are likewise apolitical, not stemming from any particular ideology, but instead capturing universal truths that are at times prescient, as if the speech could be delivered today with some of the more ornate language removed and a few of the labels changed. He warned against a military establishment a full century and a half before President Dwight D. Eisenhower labeled the “military industrial complex,” “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” Washington could scarcely imagine that the military would spawn a security state that quite literally spies on everyone and claims its for our own protection, but that only makes his words all the more accurate when he asks a fundamentally pragmatic question and provides an equally practical answer. “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole, with the auxiliary agency of governments for the respective subdivisions, will afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full experiment. With such powerful and obvious motives to union affecting all parts of our country, while experience shall not have demonstrated its impracticability, there will always be reason to distrust the patriotism of those who in any quarter may endeavor to weaken its bands.” In other words, there will always be detractors, those who have ideological or factional motives who seek to undermine the whole, but “experience” and “experiment” are the best guides, that is making every decision as best you can at the time for non-partisan or ideological reasons.
Washington reserved perhaps his most extreme ire for regional and other factions that would “excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views.” In language that should be familiar to everyone today, he claimed they would do so by “misrepresent[ing] the opinions and aims of other districts. You can not shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” Later, he warns of the “baneful effects of the spirit of party generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” The language might different than what we use today – factions and districts as opposed to ideologies and parties – but the effect is the same, misrepresentation and alienation that divides us on the relatively small number of things a large percentage of the population agrees upon rather than uniting us in this broad agreement so that we may compromise over the few differences. How many times have you had an actual conversation with someone you thought you disagreed with vehemently only to realize the disagreement was much smaller than you’d believed, that there was more in common than different? While Washington believed parties and factions were inevitable, and he certainly knew that better than most given the founders of the two original parties were leading members of his own cabinet, he urged people to “discourage and restrain it,” then he continued in another prescient look at the modern era. “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion…A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.” It is difficult to find a more accurate description of the current state of affairs, from fears of Russia, Russia, Russia to the unrest in the streets that has resurfaced since the summer of 2020 and culminated in January 6th, much less one written in 1796.
As it was in Washington’s day, however, these conflicts are driven by “-isms” and there is no easy answer, except to resist the temptation to define ourselves by the differences of our regions, parties, and ideologies. The solution, in his view, was to embrace the principles upon which the government was founded and the mechanisms in place to improve it as needed because both were the product of a free people making free choices for their collective betterment. Washington makes a subtle connection, rarely discussed, between the liberty we prize and the need to follow the laws we have enacted, believing that liberty is based on security and a smooth operation of the agreed upon powers of the government. “This Government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty.” This does not mean that we should abandon our passions or cease fighting on behalf of our beliefs, the ideas we have which we believe will make a more perfect union. It means only that we restrain these beliefs to the framework of our free society, channeling our passion into the betterment of the country as a whole rather than the advance of any “-ism” for the sake of an “-ism.” This will prove exceedingly difficult to do in the zero sum game of politics, but whenever the likes of George Washington and Ferris Bueller agree on something, we should all take note.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 