What We Aim For
On the triumphal arch that bestrides Washington Square Park run words that Washington (likely) said at the Constitutional convention:
“It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. But if, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hands of God.”
In other words: let’s set standards we’re proud of. We don’t know if we will achieve them for the outcome “is in the hands of God.” But what we aim for rests in ours.
The sentiment behind the “event is in the hands of God” brought me to Washington Square Park this weekend. I came to attend a group tribute to and prayer for my third-cousin, musician Alon Ohel, the 22-year-old grandson of Holocaust survivors. Hamas seized him from a concert 100 days earlier. Alon was not among the hundreds massacred on site, and as a hostage, perhaps Alon might still get to live, still have days ahead to play his now famous yellow piano. His plight far exceeds my puny individual power. The event is in the hands of God.
For all of us, life makes bare our powerlessness. Illnesses incapacitate our family members. Mental afflictions send friends in and out of treatment. Drugs devastate a neighbor’s life. A friend takes their own life. Violent murders by neighborhood gangs, international terrorists, and drunk drivers take young people away from us. In our time, as in all times in human history, tragedy and loss prey upon us. The event is in the hands of God.
And yet, the other element of Washington’s insight, speaks today, too: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” We control our standards. Choosing what we will strive for is perhaps the main way we exert our power in the world. We do not have to accept the world as it is. We can picture a better future. Washington encouraged the members of the constitutional convention not to settle for mediocrity, but rather to aim high. The outcome was a working constitution whose endurance is now 29 times longer (and counting) than its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation. The standard was set high. A better reality followed.
At the tribute to Alon, one musician played “Bring Him Home,” the musical Les Miserables’s ballad of war and loss and youth. The grand piano player worked the pedals, elongating the notes that echoed off the bushes and the trees and the pigeons and the dogs.
“Bring Him Home,” testifies to both elements of Washington’s maxim. Events live in God’s hands: “God on High, Hear my prayer… You can take, You can give.” And, at the same time, that we have the power to believe in and aim for a better world, a world we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for: “If I die, let me die. Let him live. Bring him home.”
The idea that we can change ourselves and the world for the better is at the core of French writer Victor Hugo’s purpose in his 1862 novel, Les Miserables (which the musical is based on). As Hugo wrote, the story is: “a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.” Or as a three-year-old once told me: “Javert doesn’t believe people can change. But Valjean does change.” Valjean, the ex-con, dismissed as a degenerate, aims high for what his life can be, and achieves moral excellence. For Hugo, all of society’s poverty and violence can be ameliorated by people, if only we believe in and aim for the moral heights.
Born in 1805, just three years after Hugo, the French philosopher and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville similarly observed the power of beliefs to shape human society. After his 1831 visit to the United States, Tocqueville noted that geography, laws, and customs are the:
“three major causes [that] serve unquestionably to regulate and control American democracy but if I had to range them in order, I would say that [geography] contributes less than legislation and legislation less than customs. I am convinced that the luckiest of geographical conditions and the best laws are unable to uphold a constitution in the face of poor customs.” Customs “can still turn even the most unfavorable conditions and the worst laws to advantage. The importance of customs is a commonly held truth and we are constantly brought back to it through study and experience. I find that it occupies a central position in my thought and all my ideas lead me to it.”
Customs includes norms, beliefs, habits, and values, and one of its most salient features is social standards – the agreed upon expectations to which we will hold ourselves and others. These standards determine what will be tolerated in our society.
Today, questions about what will happen to American society abound. Fear grips three in four Americans concerned that their free society will collapse. The causes driving the perceived peril are simple: faction. Americans fear their fellow citizens. In the last several decades, tens of millions of Americans have sorted themselves into political factions, these factions matter more to them than before, Americans are more ideologically passionate and consistent in their views, and they dislike and fear their political rival group more. The history of classical and modern democracies provides hundreds of examples of how faction destroys democracy.
At the same time, if three quarters of Americans all love their democracy, what on earth are they so afraid of each other for? They all want a free society of equals. Just practice it.
It is here where Washington’s, Hugo’s, and Tocqueville’s beliefs in standards provide illumination. When we allow ourselves to think our fellow citizens are our enemies, we are lost. Our standards demand that all citizens deserve equal dignity. Our standards demand that all citizens deserve agency and the right to fulfill their dreams. Our standards demand that no matter how much we disagree, we are obligated to find and implement practical solutions to all pressing issues at local and federal levels: roads, schools, borders, food, jobs, housing, etc.
When an American dismisses their fellow citizens without listening to them, when they denigrate them as evil or crazy or stupid, that American tears their country apart. It’s reasonable to be fearful about illiberal leftists or illiberal rightists who reject American values of practical compromise, and individual dignity, agency, and liberty, etc. But in an effort to stop them, it will do no good to abandon the standards which we wish to champion. Jean Valjean cannot let an innocent man go to prison so that Valjean might be free. We cannot champion an equality of dignity by rejecting the dignity of those we disagree with.
“The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.” So Victor Hugo summarized the goal and journey of Les Miserables.
At times, we may feel all there is hydra. We are Odysseus watching his men being picked off the ship.
Yet, we also can choose to believe the better world is possible, to aspire to be the angel, to set standards of high conduct. If we set standards to the heights that wise and honest people would, if we strive for excellence in championing the dignity and agency of others, in listening to people we disagree with, in finding compromises, then we may bring ourselves – and others – closer to those heights. And one fine day perhaps, all people, of every background, parents, grandparents, friends, will enjoy the embrace of their children as the music swells.