Copy Book Warriors,
I address you as warriors, because when it comes to maintaining freedom, we are all warriors. Freedom isn’t free, as the popular saying goes, and to be worthy of it, we have to contend for it. Either we’re warriors every day or one day we will be serfs. This isn’t an overstatement. It’s precisely what our founders called us to beware of even as they warned us to sustain the revolution that they fought and won, to sustain the Constitution that they wrote to order our revolution and our republic. They gave us the sustaining mission; to be warriors for our republic so that we could sustain freedom. That is wisdom in my opinion.
The way they described it was simple enough. A “frequent recurrence to foundational principles” was the language of wise men like Patrick Henry, James Madison, and James Monroe. Actually Henry put it best:
“Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”
There’s a lot of wisdom in that. Conveying wisdom is one of my purposes in beginning this new website. Indeed the very title of my website, Copy Book Warrior,” refers to the need to embrace the proverbial wisdom of the ages while rejecting the folly of latter day thinking that would lead us away from our republican form of government, away from a free market economy, indeed away from the virtues derived from faith that the founders thought vital to equip us to be worthy of self-governance. But as Rudyard Kipling warns us in his poem “The Gods of the Copy Book Headings,” modern minds frequently reject the wisdom of the past in pursuit of the social “progress” of the present and future.
In truth, what passes for progress today—as opposed to real progress like abolishing slavery or establishing universal suffrage—isn’t progress at all. It isn’t “progress” when our rights are sacrificed to comply with some trendy notion of political correctness or to submit to governmental overreach that assumes the government knows best how to run our lives. It isn’t “progress” to assert that the government should care for us economically from cradle to grave and in the process condemn our children and grandchildren to overwhelming national debt. It isn’t progress to banish from the public square the free expressions of faith and the virtue that derives from it. Latter day “progress” can amount to present day oppression and that is not wise at all.
Not far from where I’m now writing at our retreat on the Potomac River is the estate of 20th century American writer and thinker, John Dos Passos. In his 1941 essay, “The Use of the Past,” Dos Passos makes an observation about the wise ones who have gone before us.
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from ourselves, their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it.”
Dos Passos’s brilliance on this matter over a half century ago is clearly relevant to us today as we seek, learn, and teach the transcendent lessons of history, not only for the sake of our progeny, but for our own use as we confront the challenges that swirl around us in the modern age, including COVID-19. He speaks to challenges like that as well.
“In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.”
That would be wise indeed, unimpeachably wise, and in keeping with the founding vision.
PS: I hope you will purchase my new book Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf a and also visit my book pages on Amazon and Goodreads, write a personal review, and give it your best rating before the big national release of the book on May 19th!
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