Walter Lipmann, the nation's most esteemed columnist at the time, wrote: “Those in high places are more than the administrators of government bureaus. They are more than the writers of laws. They are the custodians of the nation’s ideals, of its permanent hopes, of the faith that makes a nation out of the mere aggregation of individuals.”
It is this pointed perspective that has made the Trump presidency so invidious. It is what makes me so grateful and hopeful for the Biden administration which lies ahead.
In a separate passage, Lipmann wrote:: “Our civilization can be maintained and restored only by remembering and rediscovering the truths, and by reestablishing the virtuous habits on which it was founded. There is no use looking into the blank future for some new and fancy revelation of what man needs in order to live.”
“The revelation has been made. By it man conquered the jungle about him and the barbarian within him. The elemental principles of work and sacrifice and duty—and the transcendent criteria of truth, justice, and righteousness—and the grace of love and charity are the things which have made men free…only in this profound, this stern, in this tested wisdom shall we find once more the light and the courage we need.”
That is as well as it could be said.
I believe this timeless quotation from Joseph Conrad captures the essence of our ambitions: “What one lives for may be uncertain; how one lives is not. Man should live nobly, though he does not see any practical reason for it, simply because in the mysterious, inexplicable mixture of beauty and ugliness…in which he finds himself, he must be on the side of the virtuous and the beautiful.”
