Am really enjoying Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals which details the lives of Abraham Lincoln and his rivals for the Republican nomination for president. She writes well, keeps it moving, but includes great stories about the shaping of each of the characters’ lives. I’m left with two thoughts: (a) I know not the suffering of that era. So much death and loss by many at young ages; (b) The drive of these men to learn, read and memorize the bible and the classics under such difficult circumstances. Our electronic age makes us lazy.
But check out this quote that Goodwin gives us at the start of chapter 3:
“Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the year Lincoln was serving his first term in the state legislature, “when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult; a confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ear at the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you everything moves; here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or school.”
“Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the course of government….To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure that an American knows….An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an assembly.”
Sounds just about right today as well. We talk, we “hold forth” but not so much for dialogue but to state our opinions. What do you think?
Musings on Faith and Psychology 