Virtues and Morals in Public Life

I’m reading The 5,000 Year Leap, a book dedicated to explaining the principles that guided our nation’s founders and led them to design the governmental structure of our Republic. It is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wonders why current events in our country don’t make sense anymore.

The author quotes generously from the official documents, speeches and correspondence of the founders, and then restates the ideas in language a modern and comparatively illiterate person like myself can understand. If you read Polybius, Cicero, Hooker, Coke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Locke or Adam Smith, you might not need the translation. The closest I ever got to reading Alexis De Tocqueville’s tome, Democracy in America, was ordering it for my precocious firstborn son, so I’ll take all the help I can get. By synthesizing all of these ideas into a set of 28 “Founder’s Basic Principles”, the text clearly explains each concept.

The forward thinking of the men who spent that long hot summer in 1787 Philadelphia serving in our first federal convention can’t be overstated. I was surprised to learn that John Adams predicted our nation would someday be composed of 200 to 300 million citizens. It was with that future in mind that they crafted a Constitution that could stand the test of time, IF we stayed faithful to its guiding principles.

Our government was designed very carefully to keep all power in the people’s hands to prevent rule by tyrants, while at the same time avoiding anarchy. Foundational to the success of this grand experiment was the character of its citizens. Without what they called “public virtue”, or a willingness to put one’s personal desires below the needs of the community, the government will fail. A personal morality based on subjection to our Creator’s code of “right conduct” (The Ten Commandments, for starters) is equally essential.

When tempted to blame politicians or any other group for our deteriorating condition and increasing government control over our lives, remember that the success of this nation starts with each one of us as individuals. If our nation is suffering, it is because we as a people have lost our bearings and shirked our responsibilities. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”