In the summer of 1893, Professor Katharine Lee Bates was teaching in Colorado Springs, Colorado. At the end of the term, she rode a prairie wagon to the top of the 14,000-foot-high Pike’s Peak. The view was so stunning that she was inspired to write the poem “America,” which is more commonly known as “America the Beautiful.”
Most Americans are familiar with the first verse of that poem, which celebrates what Bates saw high atop the Rocky Mountains:
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!”
However, many Americans are not familiar with the poem’s second verse, which contains perhaps its most important lines:
“O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.”
“Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.” Here, Bates moved beyond the notion that “America” was its landscape and put her finger on what once was a well-understood and essential part of the country’s success: self-control or, put another way, virtue.
Across the nation, virtue, like untrampled wilderness, is unfortunately in short supply. And that should be the most important issue of this year’s 2024 presidential election.
As with the verses of Bates’ excellent poem, in 2024, most Americans are entirely unaware that built into our system of government is an essential and assumed relationship between virtue, expressed as faith and self-discipline, and the functioning of our country. The first citizens of the United States, both men and women, held a deep faith in a divine natural order that governed all existence. This belief was so deep and foundational for them that the Declaration of Independence justified separating from the British Crown with an appeal to the “Laws of nature and of nature’s God,” pointing out that our right to govern ourselves was made plain by “self-evident” truths. They had such faith in the existence of a divine order that they believed that such an order needed no proof, no argument or debate.
As representative of the first American citizens, the Founders of our country assumed that this natural law extended to all humankind certain fundamental rights, most importantly those of life, liberty and property. They also believed that the only way that we could ensure the benefits of this Natural Law for ourselves and others was through the virtues of faith and self-discipline: Faith in a divine order and the rights given to everyone by that order and the self-discipline needed to gather information about the world around us wisely. Minus the exercise of these two essential beliefs and behaviors, our Founders fear that we, the American citizens, would fail to make reasoned decisions about ourselves and our leaders, and we would be unable to resist the emotional manipulation that comes with politics and the business that is media. Perhaps most importantly, our Founders knew that for our system to work, we must develop the faith and self-discipline needed to do the right thing, not simply the thing we wanted at a given moment.
In 2024, not only is the demonstrated practice of faith and self-discipline in short supply in America, but many people (could we even say most?) are unaware that our system of government, our country, and even communities cannot function without them. John Adams, our second president, put it best in 1798 when he wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Among all the issues—immigration, inflation, abortion and talk of “rights”—that have dominated the 2024 election cycle, what is missing is a frank conversation about what we must know about the absolute need for faith and self-discipline and their relationship to our political system. Without this awareness, we are hopelessly blown from one extreme to another by the consumption-driven information blizzard that is life in the 21st century.
Changes in communication technology, such as printed books or the telegram, have always changed the nature and function of societies, and our present-day societal changes, brought on by digital communication, are no exception to this rule. However, the speed at which the changes move is unlike anything from any point in our past. The available information from the Internet and the World Wide Web is multiplying at a rate that even experts in the field cannot keep up with. This multiplication of information challenges the cultivation of virtue for two reasons: First, by way of diffusion of authority, the World Wide Web and media found there on make it increasingly hard to know what sources of information to trust and who (or what) to believe. Second, contrary to expectations, the Internet is not bringing us closer together but driving societal fragmentation. In 2024 more people are watching fewer, selective sources of information than a generation ago. This trend is being driven by media companies and content providers that narrow their information streams by using clever, automated programs that show us what types of media we want to see. The reason for this is simple: showing us what we want to see plays to our biases, and the more comfortable we are, the more likely we are to buy what’s being sold through the media.
But here is the rub: leaning on bias is a poor starting point for cultivating virtue. Operating from the point of bias, not gathering impartial information about the national issues and a candidate’s proposed solutions, leads to impulsive, emotionally-driven behavior, the exact opposite of virtue, the heart of which is self-discipline, that the Founders of our country hoped we would develop and carefully guard. Additionally, bias encourages us to see each other as separate groups with competing interests and little in common. The Founders of our country understood the threat that social and political fragmentation posed to the survival of our nation. That is why, as early as 1782, “E pluribus unum,” (Latin for “From many, one”) was adopted as the motto of our country.
If we have any hope of re-emerging as responsible and effective citizens, we must cultivate virtue and confront our tendency to promote feelings above thinking, especially when it comes to our political process. This will take some work because the drift away from a public focus on virtue started in the middle of the last century and not with the advent of the Internet or the World Wide Web.
At the end of the 1950s, when commercial television was not yet a decade old, those in the industry knew something not-so-good was happening to the country. One of them was the great World War II radio broadcaster and famed 1950s television commentator Edward R. Murrow. In 1958, Murrow delivered a speech at the Chicago Radio-Television News Director Association annual meeting. He titled his speech “Wires and Lights in a Box.” During this speech, which is worth reading in full, Murrow acknowledged that while a career in radio and television had been very good to him, he was “seized with an abiding fear” about how the media was being used and what it was doing to “our culture and our heritage.” Specifically, Murrow was alarmed by the fact that commercial television of the late 1950s seemed to believe that to serve its advertisers best was to best serve its viewers. An awareness, let alone a discussion, of the importance of virtue and civic engagement was being pushed out by the selling of “decadence” and “escapism,” activities that turned off the thought process and mentally cut off Americans from the hard realities of the world that they lived in. The issue was so serious, said Murrow, that with characteristic sarcasm, he suggested perhaps all commercials might have just one unifying slogan: “LOOK NOW, AND PAY LATER.”
Murrow’s talk that night was received with polite applause, but the many advertising agents and studio executives who were in the audience fumed with disapproval, and Murrow’s speech is widely acknowledged to have ended his career.
His speech and subsequent sidelining should serve as a warning to us. Virtue, which requires reflection and restraint of personal passions, is hard work, an ongoing and drawn-out process that does not lend itself to the present-day demands for a quick, easy fix. I try to avoid pessimism in all things, but I pray that we as a nation still have the fortitude to undertake this difficult work. Time will tell.
Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Washington and many more of our Founders understood that the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were ours by virtue of divine, Natural Law. But they also understood, as we must also understand, that we could only sustain those rights if we remained virtuous, faithful and disciplined citizens. If we hope to remain a free people and continue to build a more perfect Union, then we must grow our virtue, our faith in God and our faith in one another. We must trust each other enough to allow each citizen to exercise his or her rights. We must each be disciplined enough to garner the trust of our fellow citizens, and we must never cease our appeal to the grace of almighty God because, simply put in the words of the very disciplined, learned and faithful St. John Paul II, “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”