channeling lincoln
In 1990, Vaclav Havel met with the Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo at the time. Havel asked for reading materialc about Democracy that could be translated into Polish. Poland had no written materials relating to Democracy at the time. Cuomo told Havel that the writings of Abraham Lincoln would be an excellent source. Much to his surprise, Cuomo discovered that no collection of writings about Democracy by Abraham Lincoln had ever been assembled. Scholars worked together, culling the Lincoln corpus for references, direct or indirec,t to Democracy and produced an annotated collection titled “Lincoln On Democracy”. The following imagined interview with a reporter and Abraham Lincoln was inspired by a reading of “Lincoln On Democracy”.
Q: Mr. Lincoln, what is democracy? A: Democracy is the idea of governance of the people, by the people, and for the people. The word “democracy” is derived from the Greek words demos and kratos meaning roughly “people strength”. Q: Mr. Lincoln, what is meant by the word “people”. A: A good question, indeed, and much disputed in our history. The Greeks used the word demos to include a number of humans within a particular place as opposed to a single human. The word is best understood in terms of its opposite, tyrranus, meaning tyrant or dictator, which was the governance by one over others, from which flows the word tyranny. Democracy was governance by many rather than one. Q: Why do you say that Democracy is an idea? A: The possibility that a group of people can form and sustain a government of people, by people, and for people is relatively recent. Most societies had been governed by single powerful rulers exercising unilateral control over their subjects. Such hierarchical, top down governance has had a very long history. Q: Is the government of the United States a democracy? A: Unlike the short-lived Greek democracy, a direct democracy, ours is an indirect or representative democracy. Our democracy is structured through a constitution. Strictly speaking it is a constitutional representative democracy. Q: Who is included in the term “people” in our democracy?
A: The best question of all! The answer has varied over time. At first, it excluded almost everyone except landowners. In my life time, it excluded women and slaves. Q: What can you tell us about your life, Mr. Lincoln? A: You ask about my life. What do you already know about it? Q: The log cabin, the Gettysburg Address, the Civil War, the rise from obscurity to prominence, the usual. A: Yes, the dumbed down, outside version of my life. From the inside, my life was more interesting. The Address was the first “sound bite” of its time. Brevity has its virtues, right? Q: Yes. Tell us about your life, from the inside, Mr. Lincoln. A: My fiercest hunger was for learning. It occupied practically all of the time I had to myself. I learned the alphabet by copying the letters from an “A B C” book. I then learned words by copying them from “Spelling Books”. Books were rare then, but I read the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, The Life of George Washington, among others. Sometimes one or another teacher taught me, but I spent less than a year of my youth with their aid. Q: Where did you get the books? A: I usually borrowed them. Practically every family had a Bible. The others were harder to find. They greatly influenced my thinking and writing as I matured. Q: Was it common, then, for young people to learn to read? A: No, not at all! But, then, I was uncommon from the start. I had an uncommonly tall body, long legs and arms, a body well equipped for axe, oar, and shovel. I never hunted for sport.
That was odious to me. Learning to me was what “entertainment” is to you. I was fiercely ambitious to learn and understand whatever I could. Q: Where are you now, Mr. Lincoln? A: I live now in words, stone, pictures, and imaginations. I enjoy companionship with many others who enjoy similar afterlives. We dialog together at night in libraries, among monuments, in museums, and inside the ideals of the still breathing. Q: Do you keep up with current events? A: Very much so. I read the news every morning and know more about you than you remember of me. Q: So, you know about the Lincoln Memorial? What do you think of it? A: Frankly, I think its over the edge. Q: But we still remember you! A: Would that you remembered more of my substance than my form.
that lives and suffers. Because I had few books, my thinking was not scattered by the number of books that deluge your century. The Bible and Shakespeare, Aesop, the Lives of our Founders focused my mind intensely and stimulated an ethical intuition and practical sense. I read them in their own words, and so mined their ores directly to inform my thinking. Had I been born in conditions adverse to the development of character in your country in your century, clearly I would not become the person in your century that I became in mine. Q: Mr. Lincoln, how would you contrast our centuries? A: I speak of my understanding of democracy and leave it to you to compare yours with mine. I had concluded that Democracy relies upon citizens of character, “civic virtue”, as it were, if it is to be a successful government for, by, and of the people. I concluded that meant people informed by history and ethically inspired. Otherwise, government for, by, and of the people declines into mob rule given the eternal struggle between right and wrong in all of its dogmatic guises and masks.
Q: Mr. Lincoln, how did you survive the adverse conditions of your youth?
Q: Mr. Lincoln, are all people created equal?
A: The conditions of my youth were incalculably less adverse to the development of character than is thought two centuries later.
A: In my time, that statement was obvious, though it proclaimed only the obvious, namely, that every instance of the species human is human speciation-wise.
I had plenty of fresh air, quiet nights in which to sleep, the most healthy exercise of physical labor, first-hand contact and interaction with nature.
Q: Besides species equality, are people equal?
I was exempt from the multitude of modern stimulations and distractions that superficialize the life of the young in your century. My conditions promoted calm strength, patience, and a deep sense of unity with all
A: In every other way, particular instances of the human are unequal: size, form, shape, appearance, natural gifts, development, health, strength, intelligence, accomplishment, environment, age, time in history, etc., etc., etc.
Q: But don’t we say that all instances of the human have equal rights?
Q: Can you be more specific about the analogy you see.
A: Democracy admits to equal rights, though the rights so admitted constitute freedom from impediment to development rather than positive advantage. In my time, I understood that people have an innate right to develop their potential to the fullest without external impediment, although within the ethical and civil norms necessary for a viable democracy.
A: A chapter and verse explication of my understanding of the analogy would be tedious. Permit me to sketch the bare outline, a skeletal conversation on the similarity of the troubles.
Q: Mr. Lincoln, in our time external impediments, unethical and uncivil norms are common.
Q: Go ahead, Mr. Lincoln! A: Let me first focus on division, the exact opposite of union. In my time, the division was between the Northern and Southern States over the issue of laws about slavery.
A: That also happened in my time and can happen at any time. The survival of democracy is an eternal struggle, resembling nature’s struggle toward cosmos over chaos. Nature has pulled it off, culture has not done as well.
Q: Was slavery ever legal in the country?
Nature’s cosmos (order) is achieved not by tyranny but by a homeostasis of energies. Democracy depends on self governing energies rather than external energies. Lacking them, it is extremely vulnerable to chaos or devolution into tyrannies of all types. I realized in my life that the necessary self governance of a people is only possible through ethical and rational education about civic responsibilities and rights.
Q: Go on, Mr. Lincoln!
Q: Mr. Lincoln, how would you compare the troubled country you faced with the troubles the country now faces? A: The troubles are analogous but not identical. In my time and yours, the question is still whether the people want a "more perfect union" to test whether the proposition of a "government of, by, and for the people" is doomed to fail or can long endure. Perhaps you remember or have memorized my remarks on these points.
A: Since you are not as acquainted as I was with the history of slavery, perhaps in its history you may see an analogy here and there between my troubles and yours.
A: In the early seventeenth century in both the North and South, colonial courts ruled that Africans, unlike white indentured servants, were slaves for life, owned by their masters and inheritable property. You remember of course that contributors to the seminal documents of the country included slave owners. Jefferson, no doubt, springs to your mind. Q: Were blacks the first slaves? A: Hardly. From the first syllable of recorded history, probably even before, it existed on every continent and all peoples were potential masters or slaves. Q: What is at the heart of slavery? A: Mastery over. Power over. Q: Do you remember your first exposure to that idea?
A: Indeed, I do. I learned the word at a young age from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. I used the Bible among other books, to learn to read. I noted that the first master was said to be the Creator and that mastery was delegated, in some instances, by the Creator to the two earth-formed, breath-animated creatures. Q: Yes, of course, power over the birds, fish, vegetables, etc, for purposes of nourishment necessary to sustain earthly existence. A: Simply put, young man, and apparently selfevident. However, even then I realized that the narrative assumed a hierarchical, political organization of creator over creature. The creator was the monarch and legislator, having mastery over his own creation. This assumption has long endured. Q: Anything else you noted in the narrative? A: I noted rebellion against the monarchy and the monarch’s heavy hand on the revolutionaries. As I remember, the punishment was hard labor and the introduction of the ideas of better and worse into the calculus of the human mind. The addition of birth and, necessarily, death topped it off. It was at that point that I began to wonder whether the story was about the creation of man in the creator’s image or vice-versa. It was a question that has haunted me all my life. Q: It appears to me that you read the Bible often, Mr. Lincoln. A: Yes, I knew it and its language well. However, I read it as one might observe an ant hill, trying to discern how it worked. Q: How does the Bible work, in your opinion, Mr. Lincoln?
A: I noticed that it must have been a work of many hands over many centuries and so a historical document. I was an avid student of history, particularly noting how the past influenced the future again and again. Q: I see. How did slavery fit into your reading of the Bible. A: Slavery was a built in assumption, a corollary to the assumption of the hierarchical organization of creation. The Tenth Commandment assumed slavery when it prohibited covetousness of another’s “servants”, a polite translation of the word “slaves”. Q: That point escaped me when I read the Bible. What else did you observe? A: Slavery assumes that one can own and another can be the property of another member of one’s species. The history of the idea of ownership is interesting. The Creator as maker is assumed to be the owner of all creation, a “you make it you own it” riff on the Pottery Barn “you break it you own it” rule. If you own it you can market it, right? A market assumes a contractual transaction between buyer and seller. The Creator entered into such a contract, then called a “covenant”, wherein the seller promised to provide benefits within the seller’s prerogatives as Creator to the buyer under conditions set by the seller, particularly the seller’s monopoly on goddity for the buyer. I also noted that the hierarchy was inherently patriarchal, mastery passing down to the first born male, etc. I realized that the Declaration of Independence was essentially a rebellion against the human patriarchal system, maintaining the patriarch god but creating a new covenant between humans. A delicate balance. Q: You seem to have read Scripture in an unusual way, Mr. Lincoln.
A: Yes, I did. I developed my own understanding of it rather than being taught what others understood about it. When I read Aesop, I knew that animals who talk don’t exist but that Aesop told his fables to teach wisdom, not animal husbandry. So when the snake spoke to Eve, I avoided the assumption that I was reading history. I did read much history, of course, mostly the lives of Washington and Jefferson.
A: Exactly.
Q: I see, Mr. Lincoln. Did your uncommon understanding of the scriptures cause you any problems.
A: It is generally agreed that to govern, the duty of a government, is to conduct, control, influence, or regulate the persons, actions, or events of a nation.
A: A good question. I never said anything about my beliefs or participated in a denominational religion, though I was often asked why I didn’t. Later, when two sons died at a young age, I was disconsolate and now and then attended a church service. Sometimes I drew consolation from the experience. Q: Was the non-establishment clause important to you? A: I considered most religions antithetical to the idea of democracy. In the history of religion, the “free thinker” is usually considered heretical and disposed of by the group. Democracy attempts to enable freedom of thought and speech, as a natural right. Culture tends to stratify, subordinate, and differentiate people in various ways. The idea of a union of people freely constituted was revolutionary in my time and remains an eternal struggle to actualize in every age. The weight of history and the human stain of individual self-interest that seeks the assumed better and avoids the assumed worse without consideration of the many militates against it. Q: So, for you, Mr. Lincoln, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is always an ideal under attack?
Q: May I press you on your comment that our government is an ideal always under attack, Mr. Lincoln? A: Please do! Q: What do you mean by “government”, Mr. Lincoln?
Q: To what extent do you think government should conduct, control, influence or regulate the persons, actions, or events of a nation, Mr. Lincoln? A: The scope of government has been discussed continuously since the nation’s beginning and continues to lie at the heart of the philosophy of democracy, particularly in respect to the administration of government. Q: Yes, Mr. Lincoln, the discussion has been reduced to the simplification of “big” or “small” government. A: Agreed. I have noticed your generation’s tendency to simplify the complex then contest the simplifications in partisan attacks to the extent that the discussion loses all nuance and balance. Q: How would you contribute to the present discussion? A: I’d have to quote myself, I’m afraid. Within the last generation, a collection of my thoughts on democracy has been assembled. I enjoy reading it, myself, as it brings back memories of my life and times. Q: Very few can quote you these days. The young used to memorize your address at
Gettysburg, but it is the rare young person that memorizes anything older than a popular song or lyric dated later than the day before yesterday. A: I have noticed the diminishment of the people’s attention span. Your attention seems to be diminishing right now. Q: Returning to the scope of government, Mr. Lincoln… A: Yes. Remember, I cut my baby mental teeth in the humanities and grew my mature teeth in the law and, as you may not know, in the logic of Euclid whose works I read on my own as a Senator. Euclid begins with axioms, propositions which are either self-evident or must, of necessity, be decided upon to proceed logically. Q: Yes, Mr. Lincoln, the first words of the Declaration of Independence articulate an axiom, self evident, not an object of debate, a proposition for the beginning of a new political geometry. The definition of the terms of the axiom, however, have been subject to much interpretation over the years because the abstractions of mathematical geometry cannot be easily converted into the particularities of individuals. A: Therein lies the rub. However, we are focused at the moment on the scope of government and you have asked for my understanding on that issue. Q: Yes, please go on. A: Permit me to state, in effect, my understanding of my propositions touching upon the scope of government. I cannot direct you to chapter and verse, but I expressed them sometime, somewhere, and their expression was noted by one or another secretary or reporter. Q: Understood. Please share them, briefly, now.
A: First, government should not interfere in all that individuals can do well for themselves as individuals. Next: Government ought to act when individuals, in their separate capacities, cannot do well for themselves as members of a community. In this instance, I secretly rued the lack of a Bill of Responsibilities to balance the Bill of Rights. Q: Are you assuming the the individual is not self sufficient in all instances of doing well? A: Isn’t that self-evident? One cannot either give birth to oneself or bury oneself. Start there and interpolate. The individual is never totally independent of other persons, places, and things. Q: What must the government do regarding persons, places, and things which individuals cannot do by themselves? A: I understood two general areas. The first concerned wrongs, whether criminal or civil, that could not be adequately addressed by individuals alone and second those things which by their nature require combined resources and action, notably community goods such as roads, highways, schools, etc. Hence, even if no one ever did another wrong, there would still be some, though not so much, need of government. The best framed and administered governments are necessarily cumbersome, most of them by reason of errors in framing and misadministration. Nevertheless, the largest class of objects to be addressed by government springs from the criminal or civil injustice of the citizens of a nation. Q: You were the first Republican Party President, correct?
A: Yes, for better or worse. Q: Why so? A: The framers of the Constitution assumed an organic, interactive, counterbalancing of powers, legislative, judicial, and executive constrained by equality of the rights of people. They created two legislative bodies, one with greater representation of the many, one with greater representation of the few, hoping that symbiosis of the two might result in homeostasis. Events proved their framing insufficient to balance deep disagreements about persons, places, and things. Q: Can we turn your attention to the phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people?” A: I intended to propose an ideal for a democratic nation, not a recipe for it. I saw no alternative to the proposal of an ideal since constitutional democracy was an innovation without precedent. Our particular recipe for such a democracy had a good beginning in the Constitution although some of its assumptions needed growth that time and history provided. Q: Which assumptions? A: The exclusivity or inclusivity of fundamental words such as person, place, and thing. In my time, the nation was a mess. I dreaded the prospect of one nation becoming two, a precedent for even more nations to develop on our continent out of disagreement over definitions rather than the divisions of Europe that developed over differences of ethnicity and culture. Now, two hundred years later, as the past has given birth to an unexpected future, the essential elements of disagreement at the time seem clearer to me now. Q: Please share your hindsight conclusions with us, Mr. Lincoln!
A: Remember, the founding fathers were men, in particular, landowners, Anglo-Saxons funded by English investors who hoped to profit from the resources of a new continent but who were angry about the taxation on their profits by the English. Assume, therefore, that their self interests motivated the revolution. The Constitution was crafted by the same actors with the same intent. Q: Admittedly, Mr. Lincoln. Please go on. A: The minds of Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were more fertile and broad than other less fertile and narrow minds among the founding fathers. Those three sowed the seeds of a revolution in human governance that had the potential to become even more revolutionary than the Revolution itself. The words “all”, “people” and “equal” were the tinder that the future would ignite. Q: Could you return to your comment on the definition of persons, places, and things? A: Yes, thanks for reminding me of the path I was treading. The first settlers came from one place to this place but they brought most of the assumptions of the former place with them. The new place offered them opportunities denied them in the former place. They quickly began to claim ownership for what land they could conquer or claim for themselves. Ownership was a concept foreign to the indigenous people whom they slowly marginalized and killed. Nevertheless, the assumption of the “ownership” of things was part of the baggage they carried from the former place, along with war, conquest, and indeed slavery. Eventually they assumed that they were manifestly destined to own the whole of this land.
In my time, that assumption was working its conclusions out, as the nation was being defined as larger and larger. The place had been, at first, thought to be the property of England but the revolution and war against England determined that England no longer owned it. The revolution introduced, however, an ideal of government that had not existed in England or Europe. An entirely novel proposition about the equality of people. Unfortunately, at the time people were narrowly defined as male land owners. Other people were defined as things that could be owned. Things do not have freedom. Initially the laws of the land validated the ownership of people as things, i.e. slavery. Laws have a history of change over time and in my time the nation was having a dispute over the assumption that a person can be owned and treated as a thing, an argument about the definition of “person” in the light of the democratic ideal. The dispute was deep and broad and threatened to divide one place into two. Q: Was the Civil War a symptom of the eternal struggle that you posit is the challenge of democracy? A: A question well put, Sir. The answer, necessarily, must be less concise. Democracy strives for the common good, the good of the many rather than the few, the “people” rather than the “powerful”. Power can take many forms and in the Constitution power was constituted to be the “balanced” interplay of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. The idea of a “balance of power” was novel and meant to be a corrective to the conventional dynamic of power, which attempts to expand itself without limit. Monarchy and Empire are historical examples
of the dynamic. Governance, the imposition of power, was thought to be capable of being muzzled by the interplay of the many in Congress, the fewer in the Senate and the Nine in the Supreme Court, a branch balancing the others with the advice and consent of both the Executive and Legislative branches. Those states in which slavery was legal expected to extend that legality to newly emerging states. Those in which slavery was illegal expected to extend that illegality. We were a house divided. I sensed that a “house divided” could not remain one nation. The war was a contest of force to determine which legality would prevail, a joust about the rule of law in a nation dedicated to the “balance of powers”. The war wounded the democracy, the scar tissue of which is still noticeable. I had hoped that the pursuit of the common good rather than force would decide the issue. It was not to be. You can draw your own conclusions about the dynamics of your time. Ask yourself if the Constitution is served when the Congress or the Senate represent the common good or represent the good of those few holding whatever form of power prevails in your time. Democracy is never dull. That’s what I meant by the words “eternal struggle”. War by other means. Q: One last question, Mr. Lincoln, as I know you need to attend the Meeting Of Minds seminar. What do you consider the future of the United States to be? A: My responsibilities to our “Meeting Of Minds” seminar require my proximate presence and attention. I have no definitive answer to your question. I lived in a time where expansion, extraction of natural resources, and development was still a
goal to be achieved. In your time, you have almost exhausted the resources and expansion of the country. Expansion has been replaced by consumption. You are facing limits I never had to face. In my time, I spoke of a house divided that cannot endure. In your time, you live in a world divided that cannot endure. You live in a world of limits whose limits you deny. You are reaching for Empire, or at the least, hegemony, the very same evil we opposed in our days. Certainly, you are at a crossroads. Government of, by, and for the people is in jeopardy. Government now appears to be shining the shoes of Corporations. The argument I faced was far different than the one you face. Nevertheless, what Dr. King expressed as a way of evaluating a people, was noteworthy. In his case he contrasted the color of one’s skin with the quality of one’s character. May I suggest that Americans contrast the quantity of their assets with the quality of their character and judge by the latter. In my time, the Emancipation of Slaves was heresy. In your time, the Emancipation of Consumerism is a heresy. I imagined an alternative future in my time. Your politicians seem unable to imagine an analogous Emancipation. Empires come and go, inevitably. The “national self interest” of the American “super-power” is not exempt from that dynamic. As a country, your older generations will cling to the past, your younger generations will work toward a new future. I wish you the best. Not optimistically. I was assassinated, after all.