The Religious Roots of American Democracy
Transcript
Broadcast Date: October 26, 2006
Krista Tippett, host: I'm Krista Tippett. It's election season, and this hour we'll explore the
original meaning behind the U.S. ideal of democracy with philosopher Jacob Needleman. He
studied the religious imagination of American founders. In the beginning of the republic, he
learned, democracy was as much an inward discipline as a form of government. The pursuit of
happiness was linked with conscience. Rights went hand in hand with duties.
M r. Jacob Needleman: The freedom of speech, what is the duty associated with it? Well, if you
ponder that a little bit, you'll come to the conclusion very clearly that the right of free speech
implies the duty of allowing others to speak. That means I don't have to agree with you, but I
have to let your thought into my mind in order to have a real democratic exchange between us.
Ms. Tippett: This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us for a fresh look at the religious roots of
American democracy.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. This hour, as an election approaches, a long view of the religious
imagination behind American democracy. What did the founders mean by "liberty and the
pursuit of happiness"? We'll hear their words and the thought-provoking take of philosopher
Jacob Needleman on the American soul.
From American Public M edia, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about
religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, "The Religious Roots of American Democracy."
Jacob Needleman spent decades writing wise books on things like time, the cosmos, love, and
money. Then he turned his attention to what he calls the idea of America.
M r. Needleman: My whole work as a philosopher was to try to find the bridge between this great
vision — spiritual vision that was at the heart of all religions, and a bridge between that and all
the real aching social, political, psychological, cultural problems of our era. And about 10 or 12
years ago, I realized one of the great aching questions of our time was: What is America? What
does it mean? Who are we?
And considering the enormous, incredible impact and influence of America on this planet, this
question had to be faced. And I gritted my teeth and went back to American history, thinking I'll
just get a — I'll just look and see, you know, I won't be able to like any of it, but it's a question
that has to be faced. And to my amazement, I found a whole new meaning in life in the founding
fathers of the country, in the origins of the United States and the people and in general. M ost of
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used in any media without attribution to American Public Media. T his transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part
without prior written permission. For further information, please contact [email protected].
the founding fathers, most of the really interesting ones, were deeply interested in spiritual
questions.
Ms. Tippett: When the insightful Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, traveled through America
in 1831, he, like Needleman, was fascinated by a religious energy at the very core of this
democracy.
Reader: "Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be
regarded as the first of their political institutions. I do not know whether all Americans have a
sincere faith in religion — for who can search the human heart? — but I am certain that they
hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not
peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of
society."
Ms. Tippett: One hundred and seventy years after de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Jacob
Needleman published The American Soul. Needleman explored the inner beliefs of iconic figures
in American history, a Thomas Jefferson, of course, but also a Frederick Douglass. From the
onset of his study, he found the basis of what he calls the conscience of American democracy in
spiritual principles, even in places he least expected them.
M r. Needleman: Starting with George Washington, who I really gritted my teeth there. I said,
'Oh, this is going to be really boring. Oh, my God, the bad teeth, the cherry tree, who cares?' I
was stunned when I started reading Washington, his own words and about him, that this really
was a great man, and that was great joy, to find that.
Ms. Tippett: You know, I think I'd like to just trace that story that you started learning, I mean —
and as you — when you write and as you describe what you learned in this project, you know,
when you talk about George Washington, you start to identify American ideals and aspects that
Americans consider to be part of our national character, that really are given a new meaning by
what you saw in the lives of these men.
M r. Needleman: Yes. Well, certainly George Washington, what stands out in terms of the myth
of the character of Washington, what stands out is, of course, the phenomenal fact that he turned
away from power. He could have had more power than practically anyone in the world after the
Revolutionary War, and he could have been — as one observer had said, he could have been
king of America. But he stepped down as the head of the Army and he stepped away from
political life, and simply surrendered his power. Very few leaders can you find throughout
history who have voluntarily stepped away from power like that. He represents, to me, the
sacrifice of one's own personal egoistic desires for power for the good of the country.
Ms. Tippett: What about Thomas Jefferson? What did you learn about Thomas Jefferson that you
didn't know before, that's not part of our stereotype?
M r. Needleman: His ideals about democracy, of what the democratic process is supposed to be, I
saw were very sophisticated psychologically. And I think what Jefferson brought, we need to see
in the light of very ancient spiritual traditions about what it means — what human beings owe
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used in any media without attribution to American Public Media. T his transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part
without prior written permission. For further information, please contact [email protected].
each other in terms of how they relate to each other's ideas, views, and opinions. He was, I think,
a master at understanding the process of coming to a consensus, coming to a communal
understanding, of listening to the other, of relationship of one human being and one group and
one party to another.
Ms. Tippett: Where do you see that at work in…
M r. Needleman: Well, in his writings. You see it very often in his letters, about the problems of
the democratic process and the difficulties that are going on between one sect and one party and
another. No doubt in his life he was also very ambitious, not always a sweet, virtuous guy. He
didn't get to be president just by sitting around and preaching good tidings. All these guys were
great political — very clever political people at the same time. But you see it in his writings, in
his speeches, in the profession of his ideals, and, of course, we all know, with some help, he is
the great articulator of the Declaration of Independence and the one who insisted — when the
Constitutional Convention was being concluded, who insisted to M adison and to others that we
have a Bill of Rights put in. He was the representative of human rights and we need to say
something at some point about human duties that go with the rights.
Reader: "The unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America. When in the course of
human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have
connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and
equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the
separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to
institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness."
Ms. Tippett: I have the Declaration of Independence in front of me. I mean, you know, this
phrase, "the laws of nature and nature's God," which is the only time the word "God" appears…
M r. Needleman: Word "God," yeah.
Ms. Tippett: …as such, it's "nature's God." Open that up for us.
M r. Needleman: This is an Enlightenment concept, the Age of Enlightenment, which is very
profound in a way. It's been trivialized by many people, but the idea that by looking at nature,
looking at the universe, looking at the laws of nature, just observing it, just understanding that
we're part of nature independent of any religious teaching, we can conclude by looking at nature
that there must be a creator. Nature has laws and principles and forces in it that are moral as well
as physical. Nature operates by laws that point to the good as well as to what is true. And
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used in any media without attribution to American Public Media. T his transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part
without prior written permission. For further information, please contact [email protected].
Enlightenment thinkers, most of them — the best ones — wanted to be free of the tyranny of
religious dogma and so they tore away from their forms of religious dogma, and church, and
ritual, and imposition of faith on the human mind, and said, 'Just by the independent activity of
the human mind, looking at nature, we can conclude there is a God and we can draw conclusions
about our moral life from that.'
Ms. Tippett: And I think this is an important point, too, because the way the Enlightenment has
come down a couple centuries later is as something diametrically opposed to religion, right?
M r. Needleman: Yeah.
Ms. Tippett: I mean, to any kind of spiritual observation like that.
M r. Needleman: That's a complete distortion of what many of the greatest Enlightenment
thinkers believe, starting with — well, if you take the great German philosopher Kant, a deeply
religious, spiritual man, in his very profound writings shone through the existence of God. It just
wasn't the God of any particular biblical dogmatic teaching, that's all. Today people associate
religion with some of the most surface, superficial, and some of the most degraded aspects of
religion, and that's a terrible mistake. And part of what I want to show in this book is that a
deeper understanding of religion shows the spiritual dimension of America in a way that is not at
all what people think of when they think of religious America.
Ms. Tippett: Philosopher Jacob Needleman. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith
from American Public M edia.
Jacob Needleman says that in early American culture, deep spiritual conviction merged with a
vigorous life of the mind. He also points out that contemplative traditions like the Quakers
flourished along with many religious and experimental Utopian communities.
M r. Needleman: There's a faith that the human mind really works deeply and, at its best, will
come to spiritual truths and be able to apply them to human life as the basis of morality. It's true
of many of the early — even before the founders, of course, many of the communities that came
and settled in America were deeply spiritual communities — very, very religious, some of them
— and also were very thoughtful and very intelligent. Even our modern science was rooted in a
kind of spiritual vision of God's ordering of the universe.
Ms. Tippett: Something else that's very interesting that you point out is the importance of
Quakerism, even among people who weren't necessarily practicing Quakers. But you say that
there was a kind of communal mysticism that infused the founding of our democracy.
M r. Needleman: Well, there were many spiritual communities, not just — the Quaker was one
which we know about and that was, of course, surrounding everything in Philadelphia, but there
was also many that we don't talk about or know about so much. There were some German
mystical communities that came to America before the Revolution, and they were in different
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used in any media without attribution to American Public Media. T his transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part
without prior written permission. For further information, please contact [email protected].
parts of America but a lot of them were in the Pennsylvania area, and they had a very powerful
influence on many people and brought something — a kind of a mystical — "mystical" is one of
those bad words. They brought a spiritual vision of community that I think we need to rediscover
what that was all about because our own Constitution and our own laws of government in some
ways can be seen to echo a deeper meaning of human equality. It's not that everybody so much is
entitled to the same vote or something, that's one aspect of it. But it's that everyone is equal
under God, and that means, deep down in the human essence, we all are part of some common
greatness that we need to respect in each other and rediscover in ourselves, and that the human
problem is that we have fallen away from contact with that greatness in ourselves. This may
sound mystical, but it's very pragmatic, and communities were set up throughout America,
particularly the East Coast and particularly in Pennsylvania, which tried to pursue that with some
diligence in a very well-structured communal setting.
Ms. Tippett: All right. So the way you describe that, that sense of — that equality is something
that happens before God and that in each of us, also presents a kind of contrast to, let's say, the
value of individuality that we cherish in modern America.
M r. Needleman: Very good point. Individualism and individuality have to be separated.
Individualism can take a turn where it's a kind of egoistic, selfish thing: M e, me, me, me, and
what I want and what I care, what I think and what I like. Oh sure, we need to have the liberty to
express all that, but a real individual is a different thing. And to be truly one's self is to be truly in
contact with this great self within, this divinity within. And the paradox of true individuality is
that the more you are in touch with what all human beings have in common under God, the more
you are uniquely what you, yourself, are. And that's why I say we need to bring back the
obligations that go along with the rights in order to understand the depths of what the human
rights really mean.
Ms. Tippett: OK. Was that sense of holding freedom and obligation together a central aspect of
the founders' way of thinking?
M r. Needleman: I think so. A democratic citizen is not a citizen who can do anything he wants.
It's a citizen who has an obligation at the same time. And just to give you an example, if I may,
the freedom of speech, what is the duty associated with it? Well, if you ponder that a little bit,
you'll come to the conclusion very clearly that the right of free speech implies the duty of
allowing others to speak. If I have the right to speak, I have the duty to let you speak. Now, that's
not so simple. It doesn't mean just to stop my talking and wait till you're finished and then come
in and get you. It means I have an obligation inwardly — and that's what we're speaking about, is
the inner dimension. Inwardly, I have to work at listening to you. That means I don't have to
agree with you, but I have to let your thought into my mind in order to have a real democratic
exchange between us. And that is a very interesting work of the human being, don't you think?
Ms. Tippett: I do. And I think that that theme, this idea of democracy being something that is an
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without prior written permission. For further information, please contact [email protected].
inward process and act as well as a set of outward structures and laws and rules is something that
resonates all the way through your work.
M r. Needleman: I hope so, because it's the only thing that's going to really revitalize our vision
of what we are. When I talk to students in university these days about what I'm trying to say in
this book, they're all angry about America, of course, many of them are. And when you go into
the depths of their ideals of America, like we're trying now in this conversation, their anger —
it's not that they lose their judgment against things that America may or may not be doing, but
their anger is replaced by a deep interest in the meaning of America.
Ms. Tippett: Philosopher Jacob Needleman.
Reader: From George Washington's farewell address delivered September 19th, 1796: "In
looking forward to the moment which is intended to terminate the career of my public life, my
feelings do not permit me to suspend the deep acknowledgement of that debt of gratitude which I
owe to my beloved country. Let it always be remembered, to your praise, that in situations in
which want of success has countenanced the spirit of criticism, the constancy of your support
was the essential prop of the efforts, and a guarantee of the plans by which they were effected.
"I shall carry it with me to my grave, as a strong incitement to unceasing vows that heaven may
continue to you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that your union and brotherly affection
may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly
maintained; that its administration in every department may be stamped with wisdom and virtue;
that the happiness of the people of these States may be made complete by so careful a
preservation and so prudent a use of this blessing as will acquire to them the glory of
recommending it to the applause, the affection and adoption of every nation which is yet a
stranger to it."
Ms. Tippett: This is Speaking of Faith. After a short break, more conversation with Jacob
Needleman on spiritual principles that are embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
At speakingoffaith.org, find all the readings in today's program and the history behind them, and
subscribe to our free weekly podcast so you can listen to this and other archived programs again.
Listen when you want, wherever you want. Discover more at speakingoffaith.org. I'm Krista
Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public M edia.
[Announcements]
Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion,
meaning, ethics, and ideas. I'm Krista Tippett, today with philosopher Jacob Needleman. We're
talking about what he calls the American soul. He's explored the moral and spiritual sensibility
that formed American democracy at its genesis. His historical insights offer perspective for an
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without prior written permission. For further information, please contact [email protected].
election season and for a moment in history in which the United States is engaged in promoting
democracy around the world. Here's a passage from Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet Common
Sense, written in 1776:
Reader: "Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no
distinction between them, whereas they are not only different but have different origins. Society
is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness. The former promotes our
happiness positively by uniting our affections; the latter, negatively, by restraining our vices. The
one encourages intercourse; the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron; the last, a
punisher. Society is a blessing. At best, government is a necessary evil."
Ms. Tippett: My guest, Jacob Needleman, contrasts the modern approach to democratic values
with the spiritual sensibility that ran throughout the founders' vision. For example, he says, take
our cherished idea of individual freedom.
M r. Needleman: It's become so trivialized, freedom. It's wonderful to be able to go where I want
and do what I want and buy what I want, buy and buy, and get and get, and talk and talk, and I
have no constraints. We certainly need external liberty. God knows that's one of the most
precious things this country has to offer the masses of humanity who have come here. I don't
mean to put that down in any way. Without that, without that, the rest is just academic. But
without the inner meaning of freedom and liberty, we have to ask, 'Well, what is this freedom
for?' It's not just a freedom to get a big house and a big car and a lot of goods. So inner freedom
is an idea that has gone out of our conversation. Inner freedom means inwardly to be free from
these egoistic, selfish cravings, which make our life turn around into chaos. It's an interior
freedom which maybe you can say is mystical or certainly spiritual, but without that dimension
to the idea of freedom, the idea of freedom becomes purely external and eventually selfish.
Ms. Tippett: But is there a place within our democratic structures or elsewhere in our common
life to cultivate that kind of inner freedom?
M r. Needleman: There is. And the point is really that we are free to search. We have the liberty
to gather together in communities, to study, to work, to find our own relationship to the spirit of
conscience, which is what makes a human being really a moral and free human being. Thomas
Paine and others have made a very important distinction between government and society.
Government protects society. Society is the realm where people relate to each other in subtle,
aesthetic, ethical, sensitive, spiritual ways. It can't be legislated. It's where the real inner moral
life of human beings takes place. Government is an external armor, an external structure that
allows that and protects society. So the great purpose of America is to provide a place where
people can search to become fully human in themselves. Now, we have a strong military, we
have a strong Constitution. We have all — with all the warts and all the things wrong with us, it's
still possible to say that America is the guardian of the possibility of human beings to search for
conscience. Not every country in the world can say that.
Ms. Tippett: What did the founders mean when they used the word "conscience"?
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M r. Needleman: For the founders and for all spiritual teachers — and by "founders," by the way,
I want to broaden the founders to include people who came later, including such people, of
course, as Lincoln and also — what people may find strange — Frederick Douglass and people
like that who spoke very powerfully of conscience. Conscience is an absolute power within the
human psyche to intuit real values of good and evil and right and wrong. We are born with that
capacity. It's not just socially conditioned into us. This is what the great traditions teach. This is
what I think. But it is covered over by a lot of the egoism and chaos of our unfree inner life.
Ms. Tippett: The words in the Declaration of Independence, giving — you know, this right,
unalienable right that Americans have claimed since then to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness, you know, in some ways that's such an extraordinary phrase. And also I wonder if it's
a phrase that stands in contrast to spiritual values and spiritual impulses. Has it gotten us into
trouble?
M r. Needleman: Well, it may have gotten us into trouble. You mean that phrase, has it gotten…
Ms. Tippett: Yeah, the pursuit…
M r. Needleman: Well, it may have gotten…
Ms. Tippett: …of happiness at the center of our national life.
M r. Needleman: Yeah, that may have gotten us into trouble because we haven't had a lesser view
of happiness. What is happiness to us? People say, 'Oh, well, I don't know. I just — I don't know,
it makes me feel good.' Well, feeling good, having nice things, it ain't happiness.
Ms. Tippett: What do you think Thomas Jefferson understood in that phrase?
M r. Needleman: He meant there's no happiness without virtue. You can't have happiness until
there's virtue. And so for Jefferson, it didn't mean having whatever — just whatever you want. It
meant well-being in the traditions that they studied. They were very highly educated in classical
thought. Happiness — a better translation of the word is "well-being," and well-being doesn't
mean continual or lots of pleasure. It doesn't mean egoistic satisfaction. It means being what you
are supposed to be as a human being. So happiness implies a relationship to a truer self within
yourself, and I think Jefferson meant that. And I think if you look in the nature of the great
spiritual traditions, how they look at and understand human nature, it's part of the essence of a
human being to love, to feel care for others. And we have a very impoverished set of ideas about
the human self being just a complicated animal with a complicated brain who evolved out of the
slime. That is not a vision that is very profound of what a human being is, nor is it very logical.
Ms. Tippett: And, again, I want you to come back to the connection you've made between that
struggle to understand what it means to be human, to be fully human, and the structures and
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functioning of American democracy.
M r. Needleman: You know, I think we need to look at our structure of our Constitution and look
at the spiritual principles that are embedded in it without — not calling attention to themselves as
spiritual. The whole idea that you have to listen to each other, you have to come to a harmonious
reconciliation, that you have a structure where parties can come together and hear each other,
and perhaps a third principle, a third reconciling force can appear that brings together both of the
parties. You have this brilliant compromise of the structure of the House and the structure of the
Senate. You have this ancient vision that was modern, adapted by M adison and all the others of
the Constitution, of the three parts of the government — the executive, the legislative, and the
judicial — that they are independent of each other. That is fantastic, how those three work
together. But in principle, it's a highly ancient spiritual principle that these three — this echoes
an ancient law of the threefold nature of reality, that all processes have three forces working
together. You can see a lot of metaphysics in the Constitution if you study the metaphysics of the
spiritual traditions, which our founders studied.
Reader: From The Federalist Papers by James M adison:
"What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were
angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor
internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the
government to control the governed and, in the next place, oblige it to control itself."
Ms. Tippett: Is there something in the way we understand and practice democracy in our time
that makes it hard to hear or see what you call spiritual strains in our very Constitution?
M r. Needleman: I think so. I think we're way, way off the base now and — we're still
correctable, but I mean — I may sound arrogant, but we need to think about our country. We
need to think about our ideals. People don't think. They don't on the whole — now, I may sound
very stuffy, like an old philosophy professor, but…
Ms. Tippett: Which you are.
M r. Needleman: …it — which I am. We need to be able to think together about what these
things mean. People don't think. They use words — freedom, liberty, representational
government, etc., etc. — but if you stopped and asked them what they meant by these things,
they're tongue-tied or they just shout. On television, people think shouting is thinking. Shouting
is not thinking. "Come let us reason together," the prophet says, God says to Isaiah. What this
country — I don't want to sound like I'm on a soapbox but what this country needs is thought,
and I think it's — I really think it's possible. There are no…
Ms. Tippett: You do think it's possible.
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M r. Needleman: Oh, yes. I think the moment you start thinking together with someone,
immediately their eyes light up. They say, 'My God, I'm thinking. I haven't done that for a while.'
I must confess I spoke to — I won't say who, but I spoke to some members of Congress not long
ago. We had a very quiet evening together and we started opening up, just what you and I are
doing now. And they said, in effect, you know, 'We never get a chance to do this. We're in there
trying to, you know, speak to television cameras or make points with electorates or with lobby
groups, but we never…' I said, 'You mean you never come together and just reflect together?'
And they said no. To me, that's the dirty secret of America at the moment. That's the problem.
Ms. Tippett: So as a philosopher and as someone who has immersed himself in this, what's the
question you would pose for people to think about?
M r. Needleman: Well, what are the duties — that was one of the great questions that takes us all
back, and if we can separate it out from all the right- or left-wing rhetoric, just step back into our
independent mind for a moment and don't worry about whose side you're on or who's good or
bad. What are the duties that are implied by our rights? We know the rights we have. We know
their words. What duties do we have? That is a question I would invite people to think about
without any political agenda in their mind. And when you think about that together — and I
think that's the thing I would say we really need is — from each other is philosophical
friendship, we need that people come together to think. Not action groups. Those are there,
waiting. But thinking groups. Because out of good thought will come right action.
Ms. Tippett: Philosopher Jacob Needleman. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith
from American Public M edia. Today, "The Religious Roots of American Democracy." This is a
setting of a poem by Thomas Paine called "Liberty Tree." It was first published in 1775, but
became popular in the early 19th century with this music.
Reader: (singing) "In a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came;
Ten thousand celestials directed the way,
And hither conducted the dame,
This fair budding branch, from the garden above,
Where millions with millions agree;
She bro't in her hand, as a pledge of her love,
The plant she call'd Liberty Tree."
Ms. Tippett: a reading from Jacob Needleman's book The American Soul.
Reader: "When we speak of the idea of America, we are speaking of many interconnected ethical
ideas, both metaphysical ideas that deal with ultimate reality, and ethical and social ideas, which
all together offered hope to the world. The idea of America, with all that it contained within it
about the moral law, nature, God and the human soul, once reflected to some extent the timeless
ancient wisdom that has guided human life since the dawn of history. America was a new and
original expression in the form of a social and political experiment of ideas that have always
been part of what may be called the great web of truth. Explicitly and implicitly, the idea of
America has resonated with this ancient, timeless wisdom and has allowed something of its
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power to touch the heart and mind of humanity. It is necessary to recover this resonance, this
relationship, however tenuous and partial, between the teachings of wisdom and the idea of
America."
Ms. Tippett: From Jacob Needleman's book The American Soul. He asserts that iconic figures
like Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin never conceived of democracy solely as an external
form of government. Democracy was also inner work. But I asked Needleman how far modern
people can take the idea of the American founders as models of virtue? We face complexity,
which they could not imagine. At the same time, we know things about the human failings of
figures like Jefferson, for example, that were not in all the history books of our childhood.
M r. Needleman: We don't know the inner struggles that these people went through from time to
time. We don't know inwardly what Washington went through when there were so many defeats,
when it looked like the war was hopeless, when there was even mutiny sometimes in the troops
when they were all starving and hungry and ragtag, when they were facing this overwhelming
force of the greatest army in the world, the British army. We don't know inwardly what he had to
go — there was some stamina there. It wasn't just bullying through in order to win.
We don't know what Lincoln inwardly felt. We know he was an ambitious politician. We know
when he was elected, he came out of the presidency by the time the Civil War was well into its
— where it was going. He became humbled by power, which is one of the most interesting
things about Lincoln, not just his face, which I write about, as being…
Ms. Tippett: Yes, you do.
M r. Needleman: …a face which emanates a human presence, humanness, but when he comes out
at the end, it's not — people get very cynical sometimes, think, 'Oh, it's just political speech.' But
if you read the second inaugural, the famous lines about "With malice toward none," how do you
come out of a war like that and are able to say to the enemy, 'We are all part of one nation, with
malice toward none'? What does it take inside one's self to be able to actually say that and, I
believe, to mean it, which I think he did mean it.
Reader: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives
us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to
care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which
may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
M r. Needleman: It's hard to talk about the inner struggle that people went through, what a
Jefferson went through.
Ms. Tippett: And you know, so Jefferson — now we have all this information, which has
become — which has come to light. We have a very strong sense of the contradictions, let's say,
in Jefferson and — well, let's just say his full humanity.
M r. Needleman: Well, yeah. M aybe he did have an affair with Sally Hemings. But, you know —
and maybe he did have slaves…
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Ms. Tippett: M aybe he did have slaves, yes.
M r. Needleman: …which he didn't sell. Of course, he did, as did Washington, although he
released them after his — they were released after his death, largely. But many — and it's not to
whitewash anything, it's just to retain our heroes, our symbols. M ost of the great reformers of
mankind were sensitive to the problems they were reforming, precisely because they were living
in the midst of a social situation in which they themselves were guilty of the crimes that they
were trying to reform people from. They were immersed in it. They saw it. It's when you
experience it in yourself, as St. Augustine did when he saw his own particular sins and crimes.
It's when you experience the forces in yourself that you then become more sensitive, and a great
man is not someone who hasn't committed the sin, it's one who understands it and is speaking out
against it and is trying to articulate it for others.
Jefferson, we don't know what he was — he understood what slavery was. He wrote about it, he
understood the crime that it was. And he forged the language and, to a large part, the concepts by
which we are judging him. If it weren't for Jefferson, we might not have quite the language,
which we so easily use to say he was wrong. So it's too easy — for example, if somebody were
to say to a person today, 'Do you believe in destroying the environment?' they would say, 'No, of
course not.' 'Do you drive a car?' 'Of course, I do. I can't help it.' We don't know what the forces
were on him. It's easy to say — we don't have any slaves now so it's easy to say he was bad. The
point is not to whitewash him or to condemn him, but to try to retain the symbol that the man
represents, the symbol of the freedom of the mind and the freedom of every human being.
Of course, the Constitution couldn't admit slavery. Had they tried to do that, the 13 Colonies
would never have come together. Of course, they were blind to the position of women and they
couldn't carry that through. But all those things have been corrected. The fundamental thing
about the Constitution is that it allows the United States to correct itself. It's always been a mess.
America's always been a mess. It's always been full of contradictions. There's always been graft
and greed and injustices throughout this huge country, but it's always been correctable. It still is
correctable.
Ms. Tippett: One of your most pressing points is that you say we must re-mythologize America,
and I think the answer you just gave me gets at something that's happening in our time. It seems
like we set up heroes simply in order to topple them.
M r. Needleman: Yeah, absolutely.
Ms. Tippett: Why does the word "mythology" not only have legitimacy for you, but why is this
something that you think can be part of the salvation of American democracy, if I can put it so?
M r. Needleman: Well, myth is a way of speaking about great ideas that touches the heart as well
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as the mind. In all the world's great spiritual communications, traditions, almost always it's been
through symbol and art, music and image and story. Myth is one meaning nowadays that means a
lie, a fable, something wrong, something you shouldn't believe. That's a cheapened meaning of
the word and certainly it's the way it's used now. 'Oh, it's only a myth.' But real myth is a way of
speaking in symbol in a way that touches — it opens the feelings as well as the thought.
So we need — we have these people in our psyche. We have Lincoln, he's there in our mind; we
have Washington, we grew up with Washington and Jefferson, and people are growing up with
Adams, and people should be growing up with Frederick Douglass, who was an immensely
important figure. Gosh, what discovery it was to read who Frederick Douglass is and what he
meant to the country. Why he's not…
Ms. Tippett: Say a little bit more about that.
M r. Needleman: Well, Douglass — the story of Douglass, at most, there were dozens and maybe
hundreds of self-freed slaves who escaped, so Douglass is one of many. But his struggle to just
overcome his own — to escape, to run away, to overcome his slave masters, to run away through
the wonderful Underground Railroad — which we also need to understand more — and to
become the most stunning articulator and orator and the conscience of American in the 19th
century. If you read even those little snippets that I put in the book, they blow you away with
their power.
Ms. Tippett: Philosophy Jacob Needleman. Here's an excerpt from a speech delivered by
Frederick Douglass on July 5th, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, in celebration
of the 4th of July.
Reader: "Americans, you boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization and your pure
Christianity while the whole political power of the nation is solemnly pledged to support and
perpetuate the enslavement of three million of your countrymen. You invite to your shores
fugitives of oppression from abroad, but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt,
arrest, shoot and kill. You're all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland but are
as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You can bare your
bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a 3-penny tax on tea, yet wring the last hardearned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country.
"You profess to believe that of one blood God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of
the Earth and have commanded all men everywhere to love one another. Yet you notoriously
hate all men whose skins are not colored like your own."
M r. Needleman: What's interesting about Douglass, why he should be an icon for all Americans,
is that he saw, more clearly than any of us could, the evils of slavery since he was a slave, and he
didn't hate America. He loved America and he hated what America was doing with the slavery.
Nowadays people who see what's wrong with America wind up hating America, and people who
are loving America, don't want to see what's wrong with America. In my book, I'm trying to say
that America is — the ideals of America can be re-mythologized, can be expanded and deepened
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in such a way to include both our great triumphs and the hope we brought the world, and also the
terrible crimes we've done. So let's all have Douglass in our educational system as well as
Jefferson.
Ms. Tippett: You pose a question near the end of your book, I believe, your book The American
Soul: Is America necessary?
M r. Needleman: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: What's your answer to that question?
M r. Needleman: It's very necessary. America now in the world is very necessary, if it only stays
what it's meant to be, which is the guardian of the search for conscience, the search for goodness
in people. As long as it has that going on as what it's protecting, even if the presidents and the
Congress people don't know about it, then it's needed in the world because the world needs
people to develop into men and women of conscience.
Ms. Tippett: And you really — you know, just to underscore this, you really feel like conscience
is at the heart of our democracy.
M r. Needleman: Yes, I do. Without — yeah, it has to be. Otherwise we'll — America may last
and be strong, but it'll perish very, very soon, because no nation, no community can exist for
very long unless it really finds a place for conscience. This is the message handed down for
thousands of years, through all the prophets and teachers of the world.
Ms. Tippett: Jacob Needleman is the author of The American Soul and many other books. His
forthcoming book is Why Can't We Be Good? He's a professor of philosophy at San Francisco
State University. Needleman includes visionary figures like Walt Whitman in his list of founders
of American democracy, and he quotes at length from Whitman's essay Democratic Vistas,
which was written following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. These ideas, he suggests,
might also have resonance for contemporary citizens. Here's a passage from that work.
Reader: : "I say the mission of government, henceforth in civilized lands, is not repression alone
and not authority alone, not even of law, nor the rule of the best men, but higher than the highest
arbitrary rule, to train communities through all their grades beginning with individuals and
ending there again to rule themselves. To be a voter with the rest is not so much. And this, like
every institute, will have its imperfections. But to become an enfranchised man and now,
impediments removed, to stand and start without humiliation and equal with the rest, to
commence the grand experiment whose end may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman
— that is something."
Ms. Tippett: A reading from Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas.
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