Pollsters and other readers of tea leaves are already claiming to detect the first signs of war weariness at home, and the press daily reports calls from abroad for a quick end to the fighting. While such voices remain a decided minority, we would do well to ask ourselves how prepared we are for the inevitable day when they become much harder to ignore.
Great effort, and great sacrifice, will be necessary if the United States is to sustain the effort to place the global-terrorist threat under permanent control. Not the least portion of this effort will be sustaining our resolve in the face of increasing resistance at home and abroad. The greatest threat will most likely come in a period of months or years without successful terrorist attack, tempting us to believe that the job is done. In fact, initial success will bring precisely this danger – that we will reduce the apparent terrorist threat to the point that it becomes insufficient to sustain our resolve to finish the job.
What will keep us going then, through the years of difficult decisions, inevitable casualties and necessary imposition of American will on reluctant allies and quietly hostile enemies?
Such moments come in any great moral effort, but particularly those that begin with an explosion of righteous passion. With time passes also the passion, however. The factual basis for our cause remains, but it is a fact of human life that outrage can spend itself, or simply fade. The attack on the World Trade Center is on its way into the history books, along with the presidential-election dispute of last year and numberless other events that once stirred multitudes to action, and now are forgotten and impotent to move the soul of nations.
Because the fading even of righteous passion is a fact of human nature, it can be considered, and even counteracted, by another fact of human nature – our power of rational reflection. In fact, a 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln did just that in a speech addressing a similar challenge in the life of the young American nation. In 1838, when Lincoln spoke, men who had been 20-year-old soldiers at the close of the Revolutionary War were, if still living, 75 years old. In words that describe eloquently the America of late September 2001, Lincoln recalled the early Republic, in which the memory of the founding struggle was fresh and active in the souls of patriots:
… the jealousy, envy and avarice, incident to our nature and so common to a state of peace, prosperity and conscious strength, were, for the time, in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive; while the deep-rooted principles of hate and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against [the adversary]. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest of causes – that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.
Such indeed are the days when national struggle, however painful and deadly, gives as well a taste to every man of what must be the intoxicating sweetness of holiness. In such a brief season, duty summons us to do the very things we most passionately wish to do, to do them alongside the brothers and sisters we suddenly and joyfully discover all around us, and to give and receive the highest moral praise for precisely these deeds we so willingly do. The beginning of a righteous war, like young love, can feel with good reason like a taste of heaven. “Such must be,” we practically say to ourselves, “how the blessed angels feel as they execute the justice of the Almighty.” And we are not entirely wrong to think so.
But, alas, the story cannot end there, at least not on this earth. Lincoln continued: “But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, had faded, with the circumstances that produced it.”
It is a hard truth, but one we must face if we are to do our duty unto the end, and to deserve the higher, yet more human satisfaction, of persevering in a task of justice, whose goodness is revealed clearly to our moral reason even when our passions fade.
While our outrage is fresh, let us by all means be inspired by it to do what is necessary. As it fades, let us thank it for giving our nation a good start in this necessary work, and turn for more permanent strength to the advice of the young Lincoln:
Passion has helped us but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws …
