In so much today, we heed in politics the sense of criticism as finding fault with. Hence, the cliche that we (as citizens of the United States) must be willing to criticize our nation, that this criticism is a sign of our democratic strength. This cliche becomes a faulty myopia when "to criticize” means to dwell only upon failings. Just as we should know about a healthy body if we are to cure the sick (rather than merely obsessing over the qualities of the sickness), our “criticism” of this nation should entail an inquiry into the strengths as well as the weaknesses of this nation. In making judgements, should we always cast negating stones or sometimes turn toward an affirmative recognition? Can even our partial imprecations function without some sense of a whole right?*
Consider Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglass assaults the woeful falling-short of American ideals in the existence of the slave system. With cold scathing words, he strips away the prim hypocrisy of a nation dedicated to liberty even as it consigns men to bondage on its own soil. The height of American ambition and ideals renders the abyss of slavery all the more depraved. In this speech, Douglass thus cuts doubly against the grain of our present time: he presents a rhetoric of hope rather than regret and shines a beacon for the future rather than a footlight from the past.
He praises the “saving principles” of our national Declaration and terms our Founders “statesmen, patriots and heroes” but turns the knife in this point of praise: amidst the “banners and pennants” of celebration, above our “national tumultuous joy,” he hears “the mournful wail of millions! whose chains” are rendered all the “more intolerable by the jubilee shouts” of our republic’s birthday. Douglass knows the pitch of that mournful wail, had heard it from his first moments as a child. He had suffered the weight of chains and knew in his flesh their cruelty.
Unlike others (particularly radicals, then and now), Douglass does not surrender the dignity of the federal Constitution to the slave-holding oligarches; he puts it forward as a “glorious liberty document” with “principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.” He hopes for the progress of liberty, of the “genius of American Institutions,” of the glorious light to break these black chains. Douglass waits for the fabulous, Pacific rolling hour of a brighter, better day.
Rather than settling for a pat disgust with the present and despair for the future, Douglass finds in the present the seeds for a future growth. Instead of degrading our national compact as a tool to oppression, Douglass instead sees it as offering an opportunity for future liberty. He balances present bad with present good and finds, in the potential of this present good, a springboard for righteous advocacy. In speaking out against evil, Douglass did not shy away from the good. And this testimony was not delivered out of sentimental ignorance; Douglass had suffered at the slaver’s hand, but his heart bore a hope stronger than the oppressor’s whip. He had borne that yoke of wrong and used that weight of suffering as a way of refining and trying his testimony for the good.
Our current rhetoric of dissent is easy; it provides sundry escapes from a serious engagement with the facts. Pointing out flaws in our government is like finding a star in the clear night sky. But to keep to a guiding star, to find a conviction and struggle for rightness, those are great tasks for those who would help keep the republic on an even keel. You dissent–but to what do you assent? Should we content ourselves with a politics and rhetoric of one grand negation?
“Dissent is patriotic” is too often a shield to obscure what the quality of this dissent is. A is a Nazi, B is an animal-rights advocate, C is a Libertarian, D is an evangelical preacher: the slogan “dissent is patriotic” envelops them all like a blanket. It is a patriotism of cloud and fog. We must not suspend our inquiries nor sign over our minds to soft-headed vagaries. Should we fear to inquire in these matters? Should we fall silent–the public market rendered a ghost town? Oh, for a bit less of this strangling “dissent” and for a whit more of Douglass!
“Freedom of speech” should not be a deterrent from debate and serious inquiry but an invitation–and, perhaps, an obligation. Perhaps because our speech is free, because of the liberties of debate secured, in part, by the federal and state constitutions, we must be civically vigilant in our use of words. Freedom of speech is not an excuse to avoid the responsibility of words–to shuffle along any rhetorical opponent as “infringing” upon one’s freedom–but an impetus to engagement. We should take our freedom as a call to courage and a call to allow our words to remain not dead and inert but alive to the fullest obligations of language. If we are to maintain our freedom–if this republic is to endure–we should hope for a criticism informed by the good. If we forget what is good, we may soon fall into ill. We may fall anyways, but, with good light in our eye, we are more likely to find a safer way through the morass of depravity. We may–it seems–continually confront error, but, with a try for the good, we might gain some view of our better powers.
*Though it might also be observed that those who criticize are often asserting, albeit in a backwards way, some criteria (or criterion) of the good. E.g. if slavery is wrong, abolition is good. However, this back-door allusion to the good does not always explicitly state the goodness of this alternative to the bad (or even make clear what the alternative is). I do not aim to be a sycophant of the explicit, but I do wonder if this lack of clear engagement might not sometimes become an excuse for sloppy or inert thinking, if it does not sometimes content itself with vague swings at the bad or a shallow vituperation of vice. Rather than supposing that the opposite of the present is itself virtue (if we wish to go north and see that we are heading east, it the solution to go west?), let us not forget to attend to virtue directly, to awaken it to our minds, and secure our civic vision with an eye toward the right. Back-handed slaps perhaps have little hope of grasping the good.
