The Better Angels of Our Nature

Posted on October 20, 2004 in Campaign 2004 Courage & Activism Myths & Mysticism Reading

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Abraham Lincoln

I went back today, after seeing it cited in Harper’s, to reread Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The reviewer of a pair of books about the history of religion and secularism in America felt it was worth reviving. Lincoln was the member of no church. He read the Bible for himself. From that reading, he formed the view that neither he nor any other human being could know the will of God. In the second to last paragraph of his speech to the nation, this theme grows like a honeysuckle as he speaks about the sin of slavery and the horror of the Civil War. The mood is uncertain as the mood of any true man of faith should be. Lincoln prays that the “mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away”. This president did not love war, but he loved the soldiers who were wounded in it. He visited them — in the field, on the parade grounds, and on the battlefield, never pretending to be a soldier or a general, always just the tall man in a black suit and long, long stovepipe hat. The war started, he indicates his lack of control over the outcome:

[I]f God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…

he is prepared to be at peace with the state of affairs. So, too, must we say of the awful circumstance which we face now, the greatest constitutional crisis of our lifetime when millions of our citizens are ruthlessly disenfranchised. The Electoral College, that relic of the Age of Enlightenment, must go. It has undone the majesty of the popular will. This election, too, is Civil War, albeit a nonviolent one where the only deaths occur in the registration lists. The descendants of those who were held in bondage — who made the early wealth of the nation — pay the dearest price, but there are others who do as well. I hope that the battle ends at the ballot box, that we are not in the throes of replaying the 1850s when concession after concession was made against the will of the majority to the slaveholding interests. If it does spawn violence, then it will be neighbor against neighbor. But this president and his political handler don’t seem to care. If the situation does begat violence — if the nation falls apart — then it will be good to recall the passage that Lincoln cites, that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

We can only hope it does not come to that. We must do all we can to see that it does not come to that. I, for one, now debate whether I should accept the invitation of Democracy for America and go to Nevada to knock on doors. I have done this before, but never have I felt the urge to go so desparately. Just now I wrote a letter to the organizer: can she get me a room in the Las Vegas area?

It’s an act of faith. I hope that you, too, are prepared to undergo the Unknown Will of God — what true American and lover of its democracy is ever cocksure? — with me and help on Election Day.

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Then, too, we must be prepared for what comes afterwards. The work of reuniting America must continue whether Bush or Kerry wins. It will be harder if it is Bush with whom we must deal with, but we must not give up. Lincoln forsaw the difficulties of his election when he wrapped up his First Inaugural Address with the words:

We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

That is what we need to bring when we face the aftermath. Those proverbial, mystical, powerful “better angels of our nature”.