Might and right

Finding ourselves suddenly in a war that we must win, we are fortunate that we have the might to ensure that we will win. Might does not, cannot, make right. But right can make might. Grounded in the moral strength of America’s heart are the multiplying and mutually reinforcing practical strengths of a great nation. American economic and technological superiority are the fruit of our dedication to the spiritual foundation of our national enterprise. Pursuing happiness in free association, and in the light of truth and its Author, we have succeeded in material terms well beyond the dreams of other nations and other times. We are proud of this success precisely because we understand that our wealth, and our ever increasing power to shape our world, are the natural fruit of the just pursuit of human happiness.

Much of last century was darkened by a struggle between the free world – America’s world – and the world of communist tyranny. By the end of that century, America had led to victory the cause of freedom. Among the many causes of that victory was the indisputable fact that the right of private property was an essential prerequisite for prosperity. In America, and wherever they were left alone by their governments to provide for themselves, decent free people created a bounty of mutually beneficial enterprise that left the planners and bureaucrats of socialist countries gasping in awe.

For most of the century, rootless intellectuals and ambitious tyrants waged a propaganda war to convince us that such success was impossible without the paternalistic guidance of the state. Meanwhile, the American example of the right to property exercised by a people of moral integrity and noble ambition settled the argument. Billions of people were lifted out of desperate poverty not by government, but by the astonishing energy, intelligence and creativity of the common man’s efforts to provide for himself, his family and friends, and his posterity.

The communists told us that his success was a trick, and that it rested finally on the dark motives of exploitation and personal greed. But Americans know better. We know that enduring economic success is rooted in our capacity to devote ourselves cooperatively, and trustingly to the common project of providing the things we need to live well. Economic success is a part of self-government. The great wealth of America has not been “extracted” from anyone else – we have created it together, as friends and fellow citizens, to use it in the service of higher things.

Indeed, the free and cooperative creation of wealth in America has drawn on the very virtues that have made our life of political freedom possible. As in politics, so in economics, we agree on the fundamental things: sanctity of contract and promise; respect for merit and character; confidence that what benefits one man need not come at the expense of another; faith that free cooperation produces greater fruit than seeking clever advantage in private. These are the true sources of American economic fruitfulness.

Our great businesses and corporations are different in many ways from the humbler cooperations of family and friend. But, finally, they have succeeded just in the measure that they have faithfully pursued their tasks in the spirit of self-government and common friendship. America is wealthy because we have respected the highest ends of our national life. We are the most successful nation on earth because we have been a nation of people most confident that we serve our personal interests best when we seek first to supply what others want and need.

Our technological supremacy arises as well from the pursuit of higher things. Our soldiers will go to battle armed with weaponry that is, by any standard of world history, miraculous in its capacity and effectiveness. These weapons, like the astonishing array of peaceful technology that pours from the universities, research institutions, great corporations and entrepreneurs of America, are made possible by our national belief that the God of nature has made the world intelligible. We strive to make sense of the natural world so that we can know it and use it for noble purposes. Created by Wisdom, the world reveals the Creator’s wisdom to us, if we seek it in humility and awe. And because we believe we have a duty to make the best use we can of our knowledge of that world, we strive always to expand our power over nature in the service of human happiness and God’s will. From such motives have arisen the wonders of American technological advancements – medicine, engineering, communication – the armaments of the forces of justice.

Technology is the set of instruments that God has hidden in the nature He made that we might use them in the service of justice. We are a people whose political life began with the prayerful search for the political laws embedded by God in human nature. We have sought to accomplish His will by searching as well among the laws of nature to learn what other powers our Author intended us to have. It is most fitting that the enemies of God’s law for man will be defeated by weapons derived from our respect for that law.

If we remember the source of our wealth and our power, and the evident purpose for which Providence has given them to us, I believe that God will continue to bless our national ventures with success. There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe we are seriously tempted to forget these things. The current war will be won by the might which flows from American right. We may pray that the war will also be the occasion of a firmer recollection of that right by all Americans, and of a firmer resolve to preserve it in our national life.