Articles

When Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year, it set off alarm bells. Some in society rushed to assure us that in actuality we “cannot be post-truth”[1]; while others sought to explain “how we arrived in a post-truth era, when ‘alternative facts’ replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.”[2]

Wheatley Institute fellow Dr. Loren Marks wrote an article for Public Square Magazine about the importance of mutual understanding and empathy in relationships, particularly across religious or political divides.

Among Toqueville’s most discerning insights is the civic tension arising from the largely incompatible aims of freedom and equality.

Wheatley Fellow shares lessons from the life of Union general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

“In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western…They tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection”. George Washington, Farewell Address.

The Constitution stands as the best one might expect of words that would guide a self-governing people.

No careful examination of those members of the Founding Generation will fail to record the broad and deep command they had of history and of the principles exemplified by successful and also failed republics. In his famous speech on Conciliation delivered on 22 Mar. 1775, Edmund Burke reflects on this: Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our colonies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education…This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.”

When Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard’s Commencement in June 1978, he titled his address, “The Exhausted West.” He was talking about a culture—Western culture generally—in moral decay. In doing so, he acknowledged that he had been exiled from his homeland for four years, a land he described as having been in the captivity of Communism for his entire life. The exhaustion of which he spoke is a spiritual one, where the bounteous freedom, well-being, and availability of material goods led those in the West “to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment,” resulting in few people willing to “risk one’s precious life in defense of common values” (p. 22). According to him, the West had come to make something more fundamental than the common values that had produced the freedom and bounty of the West: a legal system based on the letter of the law.

Being “non-judgmental” is often recommended as essential for a pluralistic society to become cohesive. “Taking offense” is regarded as understandable, if not inescapable, and even as a worthy response to offensive behavior. Yet, to take offense is to judge that another’s behavior is unjust, discriminatory, rude, immoral or even criminal. The truth is that it is impossible to refrain from making judgments. Even the recommendation to be non-judgmental is itself a judgmental statement. However, while making judgments cannot be avoided, the quality of the judgments we do make can be assessed. That quality is not to be found merely in our words, but in the quality of our hearts—in the quality of how we see ourselves and others.