Over my initial handful of months at the helm of Midland, I was noticing that students’ limited experience with hard work seemed to make them them bizarrely fuzzy-headed when actual, real-world problems needed to be solved. They were regularly and troublingly flat-footed about situations in which smart, lively 18- to 22-year-olds should have had no difficulty leaning in and righting the world.
When confronted with our pampered daughters, my wife and I felt a heavy sense of failure. Somehow I accidentally taught my children, who had grown up with so much, that a functioning household air conditioner is a fundamental staple of life. I had not successfully inculcated that prior moral sense that air conditioning is a “nice-to-have” luxury, not a “need-to-have” requirement.
And yet the problems identified are problems not merely for these particular kids and parents. This crisis of idleness and passive drift is profound for every citizen of this republic. For this nation is premised on the idea that the government exist not to define and secure the good, the true, the beautiful, but rather to maintain a framework for ordered liberty — so that free people can pursue their happiness in the diverse ways that they see fit.
Coming of age has always been hard, in every society in every century. But today’s challenge is particularly acute, and especially for Americans. America is a creedal nation — that is, it depends on a shared creed or belief set about dignity and freedom. It depends not on the expert rule of a small, faraway elite class, but rather on the virtue and self-reliance of an entire republican populace. And in the midst of a radical economic disruption from single lifelong jobs to the demands of lifelong learning for flexible and changing work, solving the riddle of transmitting anew a culture of self-reliance is more urgent than ever before.
Almost everyone interesting I’ve ever met has a substantive and passionate answer to the question: “What was the first really hard work you did as a kid?” Bizarrely, our culture is now trying to protect kids from similar hard experiences. They need to know in their hearts and in their bones that suffering is not something to be avoided, but conquered. “As one grows older,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his oldest son, “the bitter and the sweet keep coming together. The only thing to do is grin and bear it, to flinch as little as possible under the punishment, and to keep pegging steadily away until the luck turns.” Let’s go one step further and say that suffering in our work is actually a character-building virtue.
Living only in the present isn’t freedom. Living only in the present isn’t even human if you think about it. Humans, unlike any other animal on the planet, remember the past. We understand our nature. And we try to build on both of them. We are an aspirational species; we look to the future.
Our goal is for our kids to be intentional about everything they do — to reject passivity and mindless consumption and to embrace and ethos of action, of productivity, of meaningful work, of genuinely lifelong learning. In other words, we want them to find the good life.
Regardless of whether you believe children should have prayer or study religion in school, the removal of those activities had the unintended consequence of removing existential questions about how the individual fits into the bigger, cosmic picture; about our life’s purpose.
How can man be so glorious and so devilish? So full of beauty and of darkness? Why does the fit between my child and the world not always work? Why does this hurt — why do we often feel hollow inside?
I’m a Christian and embrace my religion’s traditional view of fallen human nature. I worry deeply about my children’s character — I want them to struggle mightily against the self-absorbed, Adamic yearning for forbidden fruit. But I have deep and abiding respect for the optimist and enlightenment side of the Western tradition as well. For human fallenness is not the whole story. There is also pre-fall and post-redemption.
Work instability will become an even more regular feature of future experience. Contrast to our present work experiences with those of our grandparents and their ancestors: For most of human history, people did the same work as their parents without choosing it for themselves. Hunter-gathering and then farming were inherited callings. And for millennia, people never even reflected on this reality; it was simply the sea in which they swam.
Tragically, we’re in the process of abandoning our children to Neverland, blissfully unaware of their past or their future, living only in a smothering present. It’s not fair to them, and it won’t work for us. It is nothing short of a national existential crisis.
As a historian, I realize that’s a bold statement: everyone typically (and usually wrongly) believes the moment they’re living in is the most critical time in human history. Indeed, historians most often have the dreary, balloon-puncturing task of informing people that the great turmoil we are supposedly experiencing has happened many times before. After all, these kinds of challenges — technological change, unequal distribution of wealth, disruptions in the economy — though acute, have afflicted every generation in some form or another.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Anyone who has turned 18 knows you don’t wake up one morning and suddenly feel like an adult. Nobody shows up to shake your hand and present you with a signed, notarized “adulthood certificate.”
There is nothing God-ordained about adulthood beginning at the age of 18. We tend to forget that the 20th-century American convention of having most people arrive at adulthood in their late teens or early twenties has not been a permanent fixture of human experience.
This new formula of “much school, little work” until age 18 would have felt strange to Americans in the centuries before the Civil War. Our ancestors didn’t talk about age this way, partly because they often didn’t know their own ages. The celebration of “birthdays” is a recent, Victorian practice. Many people prior to 1800 simply didn’t know precisely when they were born; in some communities, almost no one recorded it. Few legal categories surrounded age. The questions were whether someone could complete their work; whether he or she was mature enough to marry; whether he or she was perseverant enough to navigate the challenge of adulthood.
Children in colonial times and in early years of the republic were treated less as “precious” and more as little workers who were just not yet very good at their work.
Resilience didn’t come naturally; it had to be cultivated. Unlike the Romantics, who associated childhood with purity and innocence, the early Americans adopted a fairly realistic view, emphasizing children’s intransigence, willfulness, and obstinacy.
Man young American males have played more than 14,000 hours of video games by the time they turn 21. That’s 583 days, or 1.6 years.
Many young people delay or reject marriage because they are themselves the products of broken homes and say they want to be absolutely certain before they make a lifetime commitment. But many others simply privilege their schedules and express disinterest in a “burdensome” partner. Some think the pool of marriageable mates is unattractive. Others worry about their financial well-being, not liking the idea of becoming tethered to someone with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Women frequently articulate a desire to marry only a man who is gainfully employed. That is less achievable when more young men are struggling to find employment.
Six out of ten of the emerging adults we interviewed said that morality is a personal choice, entirely a matter of individual decision. Moral rights and wrongs are essentially matters of individual opinion, in their view.
The American experiment depends on engaged, informed, fully participating citizens — what President Eisenhower called the obligatory “part-time” political calling for all of us in a republic. Yet among our young, nearly half now profess an indifference even to whether they live in a democracy.
Ultimately, this movement yields “a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”
Many of us are accidental “helicopter parents,” hovering over our children, making sure they’re safe and protected, never bored, and on schedule.
Practically nothing is taboo or off limits. Because television doesn’t know or care who’s watching, the medium effectively “adultifies” children while infantilizing adults; it doesn’t judge its viewers, nothing is shameful. Postman argues that childhood’s innocence is lost and the idea of shame becomes “diluted and demystified.”
Kathleen painfully labels millennials “the Peter Pan Generation” and “the Boomerang Generation” for their reluctance to become independent and for their tendency to rush back home after trial runs venturing out.
Add in a more global society and an economy increasingly rewarding innovation and “disruption” and it’s not hard to see why some youth look out and see “boundless potential.”
The problem, unfortunately is that Smith’s team also found a dark underbelly to this “fun and freedom” of early adulthood. For most young people, this boundlessness is actually experienced as a kind of loneliness. The dominant feelings are not hope but “personal struggle, confusion, anxiety, hurt, frustration, and grief.”
Education reformers went through a regular cycle for decades: utopian optimism, failed new programs, a return to theorizing, and then renewed optimism.
“Do we really need school?” The answer is probably yes, but if so, we should be able to explain why and what for. Just forced schooling for six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? School can’t possibly solve every societal problem, so we need to know precisely what we’re expecting from our school. Too often, for too many kids, school accidentally becomes a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
The main consequences for students are: emotional confusion, social class disparity, indifference, passivity, intellectual dependency on experts, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance by those in charge.
A rising tide of mediocrity threatens out very future as a Nation and a people. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
He understood that not everyone would agree on the answers to these questions. But, he argued, competing ideas, and competing models, will be not detrimental but rather constructive to more effectively tailoring our offerings to more of our kids.
As a 27-year-old working at a hedge fund, Khan began tutoring his niece from afar in algebra on the internet, recording short video lessons in math and then science to her to consult.
They fail to acknowledge the Socratic insight that at a certain age, learning cannot be force-fed; it needs to come in response to genuinely asked question by genuinely curious people. Experts can’t educate your kids until the kids have the desire to be educated.
Teens need to appreciate the joys of birth and growth and the tragedy of pain and decline. The most natural and obvious way we’re limited is by our own mortality. Death is the hardest reality all of us must confront — the “last calling,” writers used to label it. It’s typical of young people to think of themselves as indestructible. That’s always been true. The difference today is that our emerging adults are cut off from older generations and the reality of human frailty. They’re immersed in a culture created by their peers. If your experience is limited to spending time only with people roughly your own age, then your understanding of life and joy and pain and suffering — and death — will be severely attenuated.
It’s not by strength or speed or swiftness of body that great deeds are done, but by wisdom, character, and sober judgment. These qualities grow richer as time passes.
Three hundred years ago, nobody commuted to work. People worked where they lived — downstairs, upstairs, or just outside the house or tent. Everybody in the family was engaged in activities for the betterment of the family and possibly the village — hunting, farming, fetching water, gathering firewood, barrel-making, butter-churning… Separating work from the home — taking the artisan out of his shop and putting him in a steel mill, for example — was a stark shift in not just economic but also social and family life. Children who had grown up around their parents’ world of work were now divorced from it. In the process of the economy shifting from farms to factories, and Americans moving from the countryside to cities, habits changed, and the family culture was altered. Children didn’t see adult’s gainful employment up close anymore. Apprenticeships waned.
We tend to focus on our children’s lack of motivation to work, but at least as large a hurdle to developing a work ethic is their simple lack of exposure to different kinds of work.
Over the last 30 years, Americans’ “discussion networks” — a fancy term for the people in whom actually confide — have declined substantially. Do you bare your soul to anyone? Do you have friends?
Perhaps only chains like Starbucks transcend intergenerational divides, anchoring the corner curb of the strip mall and the lobby of the megachurch.
Mr. Killian took a deep breath. “You’re right — sort of,” Melissa recalls him saying. “Most of the time, it’s very hard. But, I’ll tell you, she often wakes up in the middle of the night and asks me for water or she’ll need help to the bathroom. And for ten minutes, perhaps two or three times a month, she’ll know who I am again. I could never miss those moments. I can’t not be there for her, for that.”
Channeling Bob Dylan’s 1970s soul-searching, we ignore the hard questions and just prefer to think of ourselves — to delude ourselves — as “Forever Young.”
Death is the hardest question, and in an age that gives short shrift to the transmission of wisdom from old to young, it is not surprising that death is the single most obvious fact of life from which we constantly insulate our kids. We have, to our detriment, created a cult of denial about our own mortality. Life needs to be lived and prioritized with the understanding that it is limited. An awareness of one’s mortality makes life richer because the important can be emphasized and the trivial marginalized.
I refined the move, and finally, one Saturday morning when I was 16, the student bested the master. It was in no small way a turning point in my life, a true rite of passage.
But almost as quickly, a feeling of dread rushed over me: This is horrible. It meant my dad — my provider, my protector — was starting to decline.
What might rouse younger Americans from their slumber? Teddy Roosevelt was a charismatic figure who believed passionately in determining the most important things and then tackling them head-on. Unsurprisingly, he never blinked in the face of death.
Roosevelt in his Autobiography tells of the first time he hunted dangerous game. He doesn’t recommend it for amateurs. He conceded that he was only a mediocre marksman because of poor eyesight and had several near misses with wild animals, including one charging elephant. The risk, he says, is the nerves of an inexperienced hunter when game first comes into view. “Any beginner is apt to have buck fever, and therefore no beginner should go at dangerous game,” Roosevelt writes. “Buck fever” is a state of intense nervous excitement “which may be entirely divorced from timidity.” Imagine the thrill and anxiety of doing something for the first time: your first trip to the zoo, first visit to the dentist, first time behind the wheel, your first kiss. Roosevelt mentions the first time speaking in front of a large audience and the first time in battle. That’s “buck fever,” and there is really only one cure, “habit.” “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self-mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control.”
Contemplating the end brings into focus the chasm between the righteousness of the eternal law and our own unrighteousness and inadequacy. Some part of us fears what comes after life. The prospect of the infinite and the unknown is daunting. Confronting it doesn’t require courage so much as humility.
Powerlessness to forestall death has a cousin in admitting our weakness before worldly powers. Even a modest understanding of tyranny puts our petty worries in perspective and engenders gratitude. My wife and I work to inculcate in our children thankfulness for our many freedoms in America.
If we recognize that we’re going to die someday, the least we can do is to prepare to die well. “Why is it that the wisest amongst us die most calmly,” Cicero asks, “while the foolish die in the most distress? Isn’t it that the soul of the wise man, with a keener and clearer view, sees that it is setting out for a better world, whereas the foolish soul with its duller vision cannot see where it is going?”
He who learns must suffer. Against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of enduring pain. Suffering can be virtuous, nothing worth doing well can be done without a bit of strife.
The goal is to develop character that’s resilient in the face of adversity yet humble, cool-headed, and tempered by self-control.
It’s a terrible disservice we’re doing. Studies indicate that those who seek only short-term pleasure through sex tend, over time, to find the most pain. Conversely — and contrary to attitudes perpetuated by pop culture — people who take sex’s first two purposes seriously also tend to be the people who enjoy the most pleasure in sex.
Birth, like death, forces us to face fundamental human questions. It’s a humbling reminder that life is larger than you. As King Solomon counsels in Ecclesiastes, we’re all participants in a majestic odyssey of infinite length.
Whether or not you know them, there were men and women who made you possible. You stand in a line. You yourself might make possible the lives of countless men and women — and most of these descendants of yours will probably never know your name. But in witnessing birth, you have the honor of being alive, if only for a fleeting moment, to touch history and the future.
Our brains when most alert are constant prediction machines; they are trying to solve puzzles and to make sense of things. And almost all of the work your brain does is either analysis or synthesis. Your are always either cutting something into smaller chunks to understand it or putting things together to make sense of how each part fits with the whole. By and large, the specialization of our modern work and the plural plenty of our rich material lives drive us to frenzied distraction with seemingly infinite events and ever-accelerating speed. Our whole lives sometimes seem to be either analysis or distraction — but no synthesis. No pause, no peace, no wholeness.
Composers provide “musical landmarks” so we can quickly determine the part of a song even if our attention wanders. Ideally, he writes, “it would be fascinating to hear a piece of music with fresh expectations and truly innocent ears, as though we were Martians. But such objectivity doesn’t exist. All listeners approach a new piece with ears that have been ‘trained’ by prejudices, personal experiences and memories.” In other words, we constantly synthesize our knowledge, experience, and memories — and incorporate what we hear into the greater tapestry.
Unless you are dead or in the process of withering away in front of your screen the way so many millions of us do, there’s an imperative in your soul to unpack life and its endless mysteries. This is an active, not a passive, pursuit. For people who are alive, really alive, their brains are in motion. “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” That’s just homeschooling 101. If you’re doing it right, you’re awakening your kids, and they are alive. Curiosity is the mental mortar for building strength and resilience.
If you’re alive, then boredom is impossible.
“Who cares? What the hell else were we going to do?” McCain grunted when I asked how long it took to devise their system. “We had infinite time.”
Alcohol is another escape, as is smoking. Many escapes can enslave if they cease to be tools in service of deliberation and reflection, conversation and bonding — and instead become compulsions.
Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more if you nap and then return to working.
They did not regard it as extraordinary. Why did I want to hear that story again and again? To them, it was no big deal; there was work that needed to be done, nobody else was going to do it, and that was that.
This chapter aims to persuade you that there is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption. Indeed, a hallmark of virtuous adulthood is learning to find freedom in your work, rather than freedom from your work, even when work hurts.
As one NYT story about millennials in the workplace put it, managers struggle with their young employees’ “sense of entitlement, a tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on insubordination.”
Long hours, lots of stress, I smelled like bad citrus and stale beer most of the time, I had to miss Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve with my family and friends, but I jumped at the opportunity. And all of a sudden, after about a year, I was making enough money to live. And after several years, I was making enough money to live well.
All of this was afforded to me not in the first month I was working at a restaurant, but after I put in the hours, made the sacrifices and sucked up my pride in order to make ends meet and figure out what I wanted to do and how to do it. I was gracious and thankful and worked as hard as I could even if it was a job that sometimes made me question my worth. And I was successful because of that.
Americans believe in work. There is not dignified versus undignified work, nor important versus unimportant work; there is only useful versus useless work.
Fitzerald wrote his daughter, “Nothing any good isn’t hard.” Therefore, he explained, it was intentional that “you have never been brought up soft.” Edison wanted to make sure the adolescents around him firmly understand that he “never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident…. They came by work.”
We think it’s important for our kids to learn how to suffer. Some might hear that phrase as unloving but it is actually the opposite. Because very simply, neither our children nor your children will grow up to be free, independent, self-respecting adults if we hand them everything without the expectation of something in return. It isn’t the way the world works, and it is thus irresponsibly unkind. And so we need to be investing more of our time and energy in finding ways to help them learn the meaning of duty by going through little episodes of suffering — and emerging with more molded bits of scar tissue, also known as character.
Yale professor William Deresiewicz describes students at America’s elite schools as “smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost.” He suggests that although many adolescents can fill page after page of a resume, they have “little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.” Bear in mind, Deresiewicz is talking about the supposed “cream of the crop,” the undergraduates at Harvard and Yale, Stanford and Dartmouth — the likely leaders of tomorrow.
It is the sort of feeling workers everywhere know. And I hope we can instill it in our own kids — without their having to go to prison to learn the freedom of escape into meaningful work. For there’s no finer feeling on Earth than the sun shining on you as you look at your work, completed, after a long day of good pain.
He who is no contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
Hard work produces wealth, which the produces leisure. Over an individual lifetime, this seems both fair and good. But across generations, it leads to people who know only leisure and not the work or character that created it.
Our young are more insulated from necessity, from the need to work hard, from the obligation not to consume more than they produce than any large community ever. Because we are the richest people the world has ever known, our children know few limits. As a result, they breathe the air of a culture that has transformed what used to be “wants” into norms and therefore “needs.” When all of your friends have an expensive smartphone contract or a video-gaming system, it’s not surprising that you come to feel these things are necessities. If everyone else has one, why shouldn’t you?
The fear that our kids are getting soft, the haunting, aching suspicion that surplus creature comforts make a civilization fat and unambitious, is not new with us, of course. Parents and grandparents have worried about the virtue — literally, “the strength” — of rising generations in all times free of famine and war since the creation. The Spartans built an entire culture based on ensuring that the citizenry, and especially the young who would defend them in battle, would be physically and mentally tougher than their neighbors who were raised with greater material supports.
The accomplishments you have in mind have three things in common. First, the source of satisfaction involves something important. Second, the source of satisfaction has involved effort, probably over an extended period of time. You need to have invested your energy, worry, and time in it. Third, some level of personal responsibility for the outcome is essential.
Moreover, the self-described “happiness bully” teaches that is our habits and our self-mastery that most determine whether we will build and strengthen those essential relationships with spouse, children, and neighbors.
Brooks recalls Aristotle’s insight that is is not how much you possess that gives you control, but rather that you arrive at a state of self-sufficiency. We feel a sense of self-worth when we can meet our own basic needs. The “deep truth” is that work, not money is the fundamental source of our dignity. Work is where we build character. It is not in our consumption, but in the practice of offering our talents for the service of others that we find value with our lives and that we lift up our own souls.
“If you want something, you go get it.” There was not a consideration of whether our affections are rightly ordered or whether all of our appetites are necessarily healthy. Rather, they heard: “Whatever makes you happy” and (what could be the motto of our era) “Who am I to judge?”
What about the concept of deferred gratification? Self-denial? These appear to be alien approaches.
One response in particular pained me: While being essentially asked if our age is becoming too obsessed with just getting more, one young man shrugged and said, “Um, it’s capitalism.” Now, I’m a big fan of capitalism. It allocates resources more efficiently than any other economic system in history, and has thereby yielded amazing fruit in lifting humanity out of poverty and suffering. But we should not confuse effective economic production and distribution with the whole life and meaning.
We don’t study poetry to get an “A,” to graduate, to get a job, to make money, to meet material needs. Rather, we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering… these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love… these are what we stay alive for.
Most of the development of human civilization has been essentially the story of people learning to transcend scarcity, overcome necessity, and reduce the likelihood of near-term death. For the bulk of human history, mankind toiled and suffered to eke out a material living. Deprivation had always been a central fact of life. And thus overcoming deprivation has always been a central human aspiration.
For tens of thousands of years, our Neolithic forebears were abjectly poor — always less than one bad weather season from starvation. They “subsisted” — that is, they got by more than they ever really thrived — and physical life was indeed mostly has Thomas Hobbes famously described it: nasty, brutish, and short.
Old agrarian republicans denounced “luxury” as immoral, but the pressure to conform was too much to resist. As one British visitor noted, American women increasingly desire the latest fashionable “dress not only because it is becoming, but because they revolt from sinking, even outwardly, into a lower station of life than they once held.” A farmer who formerly deferred consumption to save up for more tools would now instead sometimes go into debt, even at the risk of foreclosure, “in order that his wife and daughters may dress like the ladies of Boston.”
Sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined a new term for this kind of behavior: “conspicuous consumption.” But the insecurity behind the idea is as old as civilization itself. Wherever there is wealth, there will always be wealthy people looking to show off their riches. It’s about power and status-seeking — the ultimate example of want triumphing over need.
Shorter version: It is very difficult for a rich republic to remain virtuous.
Jobs necessarily became less permanent, and consumption easier and cheaper. People were decreasingly part of shared projects, including the epic human adventure to overcome scarcity and necessity. Most of us became more absorbed with private acquisition. All of these developments produced bigger homes but also bigger loneliness. And it turns out that more stuff is an insufficient salve for feeling for isolation.
There has always been a wisely skeptical strain of stoicism in American thought. Those who take the long view have worried about the negative effects of easy creature comforts on the vigor and vitality of our adolescents.
Could we perhaps be rearing a generation that might not be tough enough to be good Americans? For a good American needs to be tough. We believe in the independence not just of rugged individuals but of persevering families. If a family — the most basic unit of community — is going to survive, it has to be able to get through hard times. The republican old-timers os Jacksonian America were not wrong to regard luxury as the “bane of republics.” And Teddy Roosevelt’s extolling of “the strenuous life” helped shape a generation. Life in the 21st century is anything but strenuous. Much of our stress now flows not from deprivation but, oddly, from surplus. It’s too easy to be pampered, and being pampered is the opposite of growing muscle — and character. Both of these come from scar tissue.
One antidote for the pampered life is a taste of stoicism. The stoic is strong enough and long-term-focused enough to not be tossed about by short-term changes beyond his or her control. Someone who is stoic appears calm under stressful circumstances — the man or woman whose internal equipoise is not dominated by external conditions.
The world these boys had inherited in rural America was good, but it was a world built for them by someone else. It was received rather than discovered. They had neither created it nor chosen it. And to embrace something fully, you need agency. You need to be making choices. You need to have more than one option on the menu in life.
That is what their early adventures were about at their core: They were learning a new way of seeing.
The old English noun “travel” is the same as “travail” — which means “trouble,” “work,” “torment.” To journey — to “travail” — then was to do something laborious or troublesome but meaningful. It’s is hard and that is to be cherished. The traveler is an active man at work.
By contrast, the tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes sightseeing. A tourist is a person who makes a pleasure trip.
Travel done right is a kind of work that takes you out of the familiar — out of your comfort zone — and offers the chance to see the world through fresh eyes.
More often, though, the well-traveled just tend to be mentally flexible — not tied to one approach or solution, calm under pressure, and thus able problem solvers. They can process present experiences and challenges by comparing them with other experiences and challenges. It is a bit like being bilingual — where the benefit is not merely getting to know the second language but also having a new vantage point from which to look back on the grammar and the vocabulary, the strengths and weaknesses, of your native tongue.
If you have companions, you have conversation and fellowship. But if you travel solo, you have your thoughts, and they grow bigger. “When the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.” In other words, traveling alone forces you out of your comfort zone, turns off much of the noise we use to distract ourselves from the lonely worries we try to deny we even have.
Travel as an escape, especially from a stifling, oppressive home, in search of freedom has been a staple of coming-of-age literature for generations.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
After one such meeting with Pakistani leaders about their war against jihadists in central Asia, I remember concluding that in the face of particularly grotesque threat, a provisional alliance — though very hard to explain — was clearly the least bad option of a bunch of bad options, at least for a time.
Done right, travel should awaken a desire to read history and geography and comparative economics.
America is a different kind of place. It was founded deliberately, by people with strong ideas about heaven and hell, about rights and responsibilities, about public and private — and about the kind of society that would promote virtuous living and serious thinking.
And it has therefore always been a magnet for the intense.
Our settlers and founders were an opinionated lot — people of controversial ideas, life-and-death ideas. They wanted the liberty to worship and to argue freely, and to not be subject to a Church of England they considered decadent.
Carrie and I worry that our kids don’t understand the glories of books enough — they don’t love them enough. What books do you want your kids to have read by the time they leave home?
A republic’s survival still depends on an informed and engaged citizenry. Conscientious reading — and therefore dispassionate deliberation — remains the key to grappling honestly with the pressing issues of time.
The Catholic Church had initially welcomed the appearance of Gutenberg’s Latin Bible, but authorities were less enthusiastic about competing commentaries on the Bible. Church officials preferred to have a monopoly on deciding what text meant.
It wasn’t until the mid-17th century that writers began making a case for religious and press freedom, noting that ideas cannot be extinguished by force; ideas can be countered only by better ideas. But even before it was safe to be controversial, the marketplace of ideas had been born, and the most influential thinkers almost inevitably became marketers.
How could the atypical engagement of that unique founding moment be sustained? Few of the revolutionaries spent as much time as Thomas Jefferson worrying about the challenge of perpetuating a free, self-governing republic. The author of the Declaration of Independence was among the most educated of the Founding Fathers. He began French, Latin, and Greek when he was 9, and entered William and Mary at 16. He was a voracious reader, and 6,400 volumes from his personal library served as the starting collection of the rebuilt Library of Congress.
The reading list was assailed for being comprised of mainly “DOWGs” — dead old white guys. Are we indifferent, asked the canon’s detractors, to the lived experience of women, racial minorities, and the poor who often didn’t write, and when they did, rarely had their writings preserved? Most importantly, the critics pressed: Who decides which books are in and which are out? Isn’t “classic” just another way of saying “what the powerful want you to read” to reinforce the biases that led to their hegemony?
In a republic, there is a perpetual danger that citizens will neglect our responsibilities and take our liberties for granted — or that the up-and-coming generation of Americans won’t even understand why these freedoms exist or the purpose they serve. There is a danger that we will forget our history, our shared story.
For these writers, it wasn’t being confined behind bars itself that mattered. They were interested in freedom writ large. They were writing from a place in which they had no control, and it spoke to the existential truth that none of us has total control over our lives. The context barely matters. You may be in prison, you may have a gravely ill child or spouse, or you might be stuck in an airplane on the tarmac in Omaha waiting for the weather to clear. For the vast majority of your life, you are restricted by external constraints. We always try to romanticize the “totally free” way of living, but that is not real. That’s not how people live. Prison literature offers a different way of looking at all the limits in our lives. And the best of those who write from prison here are not writing primarily about their own freedom. Self-pity is not the focus of any of these works. For ultimately, life isn’t about freedom from constraint. Life is about the freedom to act courageously within limits.
The Judeo-Christian tradition proclaims that the most primal need we all have — alongside food, shelter, and sex — is relationship with the divine. We sense a longing, gaping vacuum in the soul that can’t be filled by anything smaller. Even if you don’t share these beliefs, you will gain a better understanding of the billions that do.
Raise them as if they’ll rule someday.
Imagine you are Aristotle, an underemployed teacher, and you’ve just landed a job tutoring Alexander, who will eventually be known as “The Great”. What does Alexander need to know? Who does he need to be? What does he need to read?
America is not just a great nation; it is an idea. Ireland is a great nation, a beautiful nation, filled with great people — but it is not an idea. America is an idea.
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. Everything that we cherish — freedom of assembly and dissent, the rule of law, civic engagement, small-r republican liberty — requires constant gardening, and tending, and embrace, and revivification. This is not something that can be neglected without consequence.
We need to go back to Reagan — not because you did or did not, or would or would not have voted for him, but because he was presiding at the last moment when we talked seriously about what America means for all Americans. This is not because he was a Republican rather than a Democrat, but largely because the Cold War against expansionistic Soviet communism forced us to explain who we were and why we differed.
I believe that the First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment. The First Amendment is a roadmap for how a nation of 320 million people, with an inevitably wide divergence of opinion on theological, existential, and cultural matters, can nonetheless guard against the tyranny of the majority and can respect everyone’s dignity, everyone’s natural rights. Most fundamentally the First Amendment is a way of fostering a robust marketplace of ideas in a way that shouts: “We don’t believe in violence in the public square.” We stand together to defend others’ right to speak even when we disagree with the content of their speech. We can argue about really big issues in this land, but we don’t settle those intellectual and spiritual differences by force. That is the glorious American liberal tradition of ordered liberty.
At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
But what happens when we become collectively ignorant of this architecture for public life? What happens when the generation coming of age begins embracing dangerously illiberal views on freedom of speech and freedom of religion?
For much of human history, people have been governed under the principle of “might makes right.” The king has a monopoly on violence and he could do whatever he wanted. And everyone else? They weren’t citizens, but subjects — and they were dependent upon the king. Even with a generous king, the passive assumption for subjects across history remained prohibition, not permission. If the king didn’t expressly permit something, it was assumed to be forbidden. That was the rule whether you wanted to start your own business or worship as you pleased.
America’s Founders stunningly, arrogantly, looked at history and at kings, and retorted: We don’t believe this is right. We don’t believe government comes before people; we believe government is a tool that people create for themselves. We believe that people are created free, and they come together to fashion a government to secure their rights and to secure their liberties.
The Declaration proclaims that America is much bigger than government. Governments are just about power — but the American founding moment screams that America is not fundamentally about power or coercion. America is first and foremost an idea. It is not an idea only for Americans. But it is an idea that Americans would proclaim on the world stage. Our forefathers and mothers spoke of self-evident truths and unalienable rights, they spoke not about blood and soil and tribe. To be an American meant sharing in this proposition laid out in the Declaration about where rights come from. You could be born an Englishman or a German or a Frenchman. But Americans are not just born; we are made.
But wait… How do we then make sense of our rights as they are explained in the aptly named “Bill of Rights”? Isn’t this the government claiming authorship for our rights? No. The first ten amendments of the Constitution are basically good-natured reminders, as opposed to an exhaustive delineation of what the people are free to do. The Founders very intentionally did not enumerate any rights inside the Constitution proper. They instead enumerated only the powers that the sovereign people were giving to the government. They understood and feared that government inevitably want to grow, and to gobble up more power, especially at times of crisis.
The First Amendment became, by design, a giant laundry list of guarantees: the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press and the right of redress and grievances — which basically means that even lobbyists have a right to exist and legitimate work to do. But these five rights are are all listed as the “First” Amendment because you can’t unbundle this cluster.
It would be meaningless to talk about freedom of religion without having freedom of speech. It would be ridiculous to talk about freedom of assembly without someone’s being able to report and promulgate and persuade other people what was said and what happened via the freedom of the press. And so the beating heart of the American idea turns out not to be in the Constitution proper. It is rather in this enumeration of rights that does not end. That’s why when you get to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the framers had the wisdom to say, in effect, “All of the rights we didn’t list here, the people still retain all of those. And, by the way, all the powers we didn’t specifically give the federal government in the main document here, only states and local governments could ever exercise those powers. Got that? Do you hear us clearly? Good.”
This is poetry.
He found America in its mediating institutions and in its civil society. And he understood why Europeans were confused. For Europeans had an inherited framework about how life is lived — by orderly planning based on the decisions of the powerful. They believed in the more traditional view — that government is the nearly exclusive context in which people choose to build projects together.
It turns out, Tocqueville explained, that Americans believe different, almost unbelievable things. They believe in the heart. They believe in the will. They believe in voluntarism. Americans believe in self-control, rather than other-control or government-control. They believe in community. They believe in persuasion. They believe in virtue. That is the meaning of “democracy in America.” It is a set of shard assumptions — he called it republican culture — that is well upstream from politics.
What made America great is not its politicians. America is not great because it has the best governing bureaucracies. Rather, America is great when its people share a belief in the Rotary Club and the PTA, the synagogues and churches, the small businesses and local town meetings — all the places where free people freely assemble to serve and to build lives together. All of those things are moved by the democratic spirit that Tocqueville brilliantly chronicled. That spirit, he wrote, “creates opinions, gives birth to sentiments, suggests usages, and modifies everything it does not produce.”
“I believe that in all governments, whatever they may be, baseness will attach itself to force and flattery to power. And I know only one means of preventing men from being degraded: it is to grant to no one, along with omnipotence, the sovereign power to demean them.” That antidote is the best habit of self-discipline, self-restraint, and adult self-control.
Because hard problems are never solved by fighting about competing solutions before first defining precisely what problems we seek to solve.
Because the heart of the problem we are tackling in this book is well upstream from politics. We are a drifting and aimless people — awash in material goods and yet spiritually aching for meaning.
In the UK, the terms “public” and “state/governmental” are better distinguished — such that bars and restaurants are “pubs,” meaning that they are not private clubs with limited membership, but rather establishments that anyone can enter to eat. Obviously, they are not governmental, but they are still public.