Open Letter to the Youth and First-Time Voters of this District
I would like to take this moment to share some thoughts and perspectives with you, and to try to make some sense of the last few days. Not everything I say will be easy to accept, but I ask you to read and consider carefully these stark observations.
"We are facing the greatest period of political upheaval and economic uncertainty since the Great Depression."
I believe that the political viability of American Conservative political, economic and legal thought, will be severely tested for the next few decades. I also believe the inevitable assault on Conservative thought will tempt many people of your generation to embrace the long-ago discredited ideas about the role of government in our society, which actually prolonged the Great Depression, and which created and harmed a class of citizens who were dependent on government for generations.
Unfortunately, my generation has not prepared itself, let alone prepared your generation, for what we are now facing. Quite frankly, we Baby Boomers, as a generation and regardless of our political affiliations, never grew-up; so we've never asked you to develop the skills of discipline and sacrifice that help an individual to mature.
We have never matured beyond our youthful pursuits, and we have let those pursuits swallow our lives. At the same time, we believed we were smarter than any generation that had lived before us, and blithely rejected learning the lessons handed down from centuries of "dead, white, European males"-and so we also never asked you to learn these lessons. Rather than understanding liberty as freedom from government or an anointed elite, we have tried to re-define it as a freedom from everything and everyone but our government. We have made our politics purely emotional and immoderate, and the consequences now endanger the fabric and future of our society.
My generation said that "the 'personal' is the 'political'." However, the truth always has been that the 'personal' is personal, but the character formed by the "personal" directly affects the "political". By not growing-up, our generation has not formed the collective character capable of dealing with the many serious issues that now confront us.
For example, we continue to politicize issues like who we have sex with, when and how we can have sex, what we do with the many consequences of the act of sex, and whether we can change our sex. By never growing-up enough to develop the character to deal with these issues appropriately on an individual and private basis, we have thrust them into the political arena. Our pre-occupation with these issues is ridiculously unserious in the political context, and has squeezed serious political dialogue away from the public square. In many ways, our haughty, yet clueless effort to reject history and re-make our society's institutions into protectors of "lifestyles without consequences" is reminiscent of the generation C.S. Lewis warned us about in The Abolition of Man.
Ultimately, I believe the lesson to be learned from these times is the lesson that mankind periodically has had to re-learn throughout history- Character matters, in all human relationships and in all human endeavors. Our founding fathers understood the fundamental relationship between individual character and the viability of self-governance. In the last sections of the Virginia Declarations of Rights, George Mason and James Madison wrote the following a month before the Declaration of Independence was signed:
"…no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. …it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other."
This quote shows that the founders intended to create a government and society that rested on the development and preservation of our inherited Western, Christian character; or as Lincoln would later put it: "the better angels of our nature."
How then, is individual character central to the basic concept of America? The United States of America, rather than being a geographic spot on the globe, has always been an experimental idea -- a proposition -- to which people came from all over the world to share. It was dedicated to resolving the ultimate challenge of Western Civilization: to balance the acceptance of the gift of liberty with the admonition to love our neighbor. To accomplish this balance, our founders intended to form a society in which government provided a safe and secure environment within which we each were to exercise our liberty to pursue a life well spent, and pursue a life well spent by fully engaging in the life of our neighborhoods-we were to be independent from government, but interdependent with each other.
To fully engage in the life of our neighborhoods we were to learn, then practice, the character traits essential to live a disciplined and virtuous life. These character traits, once learned and practiced, would affect the way we pursued our self-interests, as well as our public interests. Although the founders eventually built checks and balances into our structure of government because they knew that avarice and ambition would inevitably arise from our human weakness, they believed the fundamental protection from our worst instincts would be our continued attempt to learn and practice the traits of sound moral character. The society perpetuated in this way would serve as a beacon to light the rest of the world. Whoever was born as, or chose to be, an American accepted the obligation to preserve and protect our proposition, and to pass it to future generations. This experimental idea is truly exceptional in the history of mankind.
Character also was important to Adam Smith-the father of our modern economic system. Few now remember that Adam Smith was not an economist-that discipline did not yet exist. Smith was a professor of moral philosophy, who set out to write a three-part treatise on the basic morality of man, and the relationship of a moral man to his society. Today, all we remember is his second work of this treatise-The Wealth of Nations. The self-interest and "invisible hand" discussed in The Wealth of Nations was introduced in Smith's first work-The Theory of Moral Sentiment-in which he described the basic morality of man. The Wealth of Nations was intended to build on Smith's first work by describing how this moral man interacted in business and economics to create wealth for society. By reading both works, you see that Adam Smith did not believe the "invisible hand" arose in a vacuum of amoral self-interest; instead, it only arose when limited government acted effectively, and individuals acted in their self-interest in a manner consistent with their moral character.
Ultimately, character is important to our legal system. From its inception, the common-law system we inherited from England has been based on traditions and customs that apply the Golden Rule to daily life. In fact, when specific customs and traditions could not be found to resolve a dispute, disputes would be resolved through the application of the Golden Rule by special courts of equity, called Chancery courts. Reliance on the Golden Rule to order and stabilize our human relationships doesn’t work without the development of basic character traits that naturally lead people to live by the Golden Rule.
I believe that we have reached a moment that our founders warned us about, when they told us that the preservation of our society would depend on our "frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." Our mission, for the rest of our lives, must be to re-instill character in our people, even while we try to fix the immediate mess all around us.
I know that things look pretty depressing right now. But, the good news is I, for one, have seen darkness in our politics before-and we rose above it.
Although I was raised in a Republican household, I was a skeptical senior in high school back in early 1976, and I doubted whether any Republican, let alone any politician, could correct the problems then facing the country. We had just experienced Watergate, the fall of Saigon, the first Middle Eastern oil embargo, rampant inflation, and the Soviet Union appeared to be on the march again in Africa, Asia and Central America. On the weekend prior to the New Hampshire primary that year, Ronald Reagan came to my hometown in Illinois to campaign, and a friend of mine talked me into going to hear him speak. We went and heard him talk in a room about the size of a large conference room with about 50 other people in attendance, many of whom had gone to college with him in Eureka, Illinois or had come down from Dixon where he had lived as a child.
That experience changed the way I have looked at my country and politics ever since-and Ronald Reagan would come back four years later to change the world. It's true that we don't have a Reagan today (in either political party), but we have each other. If we listen to our history, we can find the age-old tools we will need to fix our character and our country.
Fixing our character will require dedication to reform of our school systems, our local governments, our state governments, and our federal governments—but, most importantly, a reform of our families, our neighborhoods, our businesses and our private institutions by relearning that it is wrong to lie, to cheat and to steal, no matter how we label our actions, and by rededicating ourselves to an interdependence with our neighbors. You see, if you are dedicated to help your neighbor, your self-interest will not allow you to lie, to cheat, or to steal from your neighbor. The very future of our system of self-governance, including the future of our legal system, depends on this rededication, because nature abhors a vacuum-if we don't re-impose these principles on ourselves voluntarily, history teaches us that a facsimile of these principles will be imposed on us by force by a government or anointed elite.
As to this final task, I see a ray of hope from my experiences during the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. While my family and home were spared, others in our area were not, and we spent most of the last week helping clean-up our neighborhood with our neighbors. This effort led the re-kindling of our neighborhood. Neighbors who hadn't said much of anything to each other for years came out and talked to each other, shared generators and tools, and helped each other clean-up. We worked, cooked, ate and relaxed side-by-side with our neighbors all week, while our children played together from sunrise to sundown. This camaraderie was a blessing.
In fact, a little depression set in when the power came back on last Wednesday night as we all sat in one of our neighbors' yard, because we worried out loud whether we would continue our contact with each other-so we agreed to meet again this past Sunday night for a backyard dinner, and to try have potluck dinners with each other at least once a month. That night we agreed to work together to make insurance claims, fix our common fences, and clean-up our local park.
In this experience I see hope that we can work together to reform our society from the bottom-up, and to re-instill the character we will need to make this reform work. Implementing these reforms is not just the immediate challenge for my generation; it will be your generation's central challenge.
Ed Hubbard
