Big Enough to Be Inconsistent

I could take this for my motto. Such is the praise lavished by W.E.B. DuBois on Abraham Lincoln (and Again, Lincoln). I find the remark to be a great compliment perhaps because I strive to be a big man, accommodating and generous and full of contradictions. The pun works in my case as well as Lincoln's because of sheer size and, I like to think, because of character and personality. Not that I fancy myself being president, even if my colleague Dr. Pfau always says I have the gravitas and dignitas required.

The point is DuBois': We should be careful not to paint humanity or particular humans as all good or all evil. I have always been struck by Lincoln's gnosticism. I've always admired his Second Inaugural. What troubles me lately is Lincoln's willingness to dissemble, to foster inconsistent understanding of himself in the eyes of others. Was he racist? Did he maintain white supremacy because he believed it or merely to get elected in Illinois? "Must a government, of necessity," Lincoln asked, "be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?" That he wanted to hold the union together is true, but that singular goal does not mean he was never inconsistent about slavery, race, war, &c. As George Frederickson writes in his book, Big Enough to be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race:

Before 1864, he had been a cautious, somewhat reluctant emancipator - certainly no advocate of an immediate, uncompensated emancipation without a link to colonization, which was the abolitionist's dream. But the fulfillment of that dream was what he ended up presiding over. Lincoln was thus able to realize his longstanding hope of extinguishing slavery and thereby earned and deserved the title of Great Emancipator.
But a troubling question remains. Did Lincoln, as some historians have contended, go beyond abolition without colonization to endorse civil and political eqaulity for blacks? . . . . [Such] is a question that is difficult to resolve because of the paucity of evidence directly bearing on it and because of the fact that Lincoln's thinking about race may have been in flux at the time of his assassination.

Some things remain a mystery. Some people are big enough to be inconsistent.

Turning the Other

Protecting the country's security is "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business. These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek." - Dick Cheney

H.J. Massingham's The Tree of Life was originally published in England in 1943. Its central argument revolves around a profound dual loss: the loss of the love of the land for its own sake and the loss of the Christian religion. For Massingham, the two go hand in hand. There is a distinct paradox at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon experience, for they are they who have written the greatest poems in praise of nature and have done the most destruction to the face of the earth. Massingham reckons this was partially the result of a failure to appreciate the centrality of nature to Christianity, the fundamental unity of heaven and earth. The culmination of that failure is war, including the Second World War.

From the later Middle Ages to the present day the history of Western Europe has been that of the intensification of war, first religious and then economic wars, until the whold fabric has come to the point, unless some drastic rehabilitation takes place, of total collapse as the consequence of total war.

Now, the total collapse of western civilization has been predicted many times. It may yet be upon us and may yet come from total war. One important question to ask ourselves repeatedly is where do we stand on war. I am the first to acknowledge the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, but I long for a world where those distinctions are unnecessary.


It seems reasonable to me that the laws which govern individuals should govern nations. J. Reuben Clark, a prominent attorney and religious leader, thought along the same lines. In an interesting article on Clark's Isolationism in the journal Dialogue I discovered that Clark, like Cicero, considered treaties absolute. For Clark, the 19C efforts to "lessen the evils of war, and especially to relieve noncombatants . . . from the ravages of war" were one of the most significant developments of public policy. There is no justification for the wholesale bombing of cities, destruction of property, and the indiscriminate killing of women and children. The world, Clark wrote, had "gone back a half millennium in its conduct of international relations in time of war. . . . no nation has to bear a greater blame for this than our own." He called the use of atomic weapons on Japan "shameful," and declared that "we are now living under the law of the jungle where in cataclysms every beast fights to the death of his own life."

Clark opposed military establishments and standing armies, advocating instead moral force. "We must have a world organization for the purpose of deliberation, but not for the purpose of waging wars and imposing sanctions," he wrote. Given a world where power politics will fail, Clark recommended the U.S. role be two-fold:

1. To foster international communication, including trade and commerce, while shunning political involvement.
2. To support the cause of peace by working for the settlement of international disputes by mediation and arbitration.

The enemy of human freedom is war; the friend of human freedom is peace. In addition to this two-fold mission, America and the world's hope, for Clark, was in learning and practicing "the divine principles of the Sermon on the Mount. There is no other way." The only way to govern is by good will, not physical force. "We have lost, at least for the moment, the temper to live at peace with our brethren of the world, our fellow children of God."

Perhaps nations and individuals, myself included, could try turning the other cheek. It isn't easy, but it is compelling.