Links to those before us broaden our perspective, provide us with a sense of place in time and make us part of a larger narrative and a shared experience.
We begin to sense a tradition worth preserving and passing along to those who come after us.
Tocqueville made this point in “Democracy in America” by distinguishing between instinctive patriotism, rooted in custom and a sense of belonging based on place and personal loyalty, and reflective patriotism, based more on the opinions of free citizens, who understand their common liberties and their shared responsibilities with their fellow citizens.
This latter, more thoughtful form of patriotism, Tocqueville argued, is shaped by the exercise of individual rights within republican institutions and by what Tocqueville called “self-interest well understood.”
Indeed, one of the reasons Tocqueville admired America so much was that it bred both types of patriotism, a spirited attachment to American self-government as well as a reasoned devotion to the general principles of natural right and human liberty.
Tocqueville concluded that a patriotism in which particular loyalties and universal purposes reinforce each other was the source of the community bond and national cohesion needed to perpetuate democratic societies.
Without patriotism — instinctive patriotism for sure, but especially reflective patriotism — democratic peoples would become preoccupied with narrow, private concerns and come to neglect their civic duties.
The result is social division and civic apathy, as formerly self-governing citizens become themselves passive subjects in a modern, impersonal nation-state.
Without this dual patriotism of both the heart and the head, America’s thriving republic, Tocqueville famously warned, would be overtaken by a new form of democratic despotism that flattens the human spirit.
Today, patriotism is often misunderstood and criticized as an unthinking allegiance to chauvinistic urges.
Yet it is a love of country that is thoughtful as well as passionate — not “the impostures of pretended patriotism” Washington warned us against — that stands confident against the cultural relativism that plagues our society and undermines the defense of liberty by its disingenuous embrace and tendency toward despotic self-assertion.
Patriotism, rightly understood, has always been the civic antidote to what C. S. Lewis called “the poison of subjectivism.” //
Having rejected the Old World’s rule of accident and force in favor of government by reflection and choice, the Founders understood education — heretofore an elite privilege of the upper class and often a tool of state control — to take on a new civic role in service to popular government.
In a republican regime, built on equal rights and the consent of the governed, education not only shapes the private character that allows the individual to govern the self but also imparts the principles necessary for those individuals to practice the arts of self-government.
The student is transformed into the citizen through the expansion and deepening of the natural attachments as well as the cultivation of the civic knowledge necessary to perpetuate free government.
“The Education of youth is, in all governments, an object of the first consequence,” Noah Webster wrote in opening his 1788 essay on the topic. “The impressions received in early life, usually form the characters of individuals; a union of which forms the general character of a nation.” //
Education begins at home, when the habits and manners are established, first by parents, who have the primary responsibility for the upbringing of their children, and then by family, church, community and the first lessons of early instruction.
Like in the great nations of Europe, Webster maintained the formal educational system to be adopted and pursued in America should focus on the foundations of knowledge: reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as a basic understanding of the sciences and the outlines of geography and history.
But in republican America, Webster argued popular education must also “implant, in the minds of the American youth, the principles of virtue and of liberty; and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government, and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”
At a young age, this inculcation was especially to be done by teaching history: “every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.”
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison concurred in a report they authored as commissioners of the University of Virginia.
Beyond improving the faculties and morals, the objects of a general education should be for the student “to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either,” and “to instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens.”
The objects of “the higher branches of education” — the colleges and universities scattered around the country — were “to develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order” and “to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves.”
American higher education should “form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.”
Colleges and universities, too, had an obligation to make good citizens.
And the document around which this citizen education was to be constructed, the creed of America’s civic life and political identity, its temporal scripture and its epic poetry, was the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration is the defining act of the great drama that is the American founding.
When Jefferson and Madison outlined an educational curriculum with “especial attention to the principles of government which shall be inculcated therein,” their first reading was the Declaration, which Jefferson called “an expression of the American mind.”
It is what the ancients described as the prelude to the laws, meant to define the regime and animate what is to come.
Although a “merely revolutionary document,” the Declaration of Independence contains, as Abraham Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” put there “that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
Lincoln also said once that public opinion “always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.”
America’s central idea is the Declaration, and everything else radiates from that. //
By defining our common loves — our native country and our common commitment to republican government based on equal rights, political liberty and the consent of the governed — the Declaration unites our hearts and our minds in a civic friendship of enlightened patriotism.
We must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.
From the new book “The Making of the American Mind: The Story of our Declaration of Independence.”
