The Soul of America

I’m currently reading Jon Meacham’s new book, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, which a friend loaned me.  John Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and author of the New York Times best-sellers Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power, American Lion:  Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, and Destiny and Power:  The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.  The only book on this list that I’ve read is Thomas Jefferson, which was a good read.  I am adding the others to my summer reading list.

Does a country have a soul?  Does America have a soul?  Gunnar Myrdal and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote about “The American Creed.” Others have written or spoken of  “The American Dream.” Meacham is not the first to write of an American Soul.  This soul, Meacham writes, is “the vital center, the core, the heart, the essence of life.” The soul according to the Hebrew Bible is life itself:  “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed  into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living soul.” Meacham refers to the Greek New Testament when Jesus says “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” where the word for “life” could also be translated as “soul.” America, Meacham says, has such a soul, (with impulses of good and of evil).  Abraham Lincoln seemed to believe in such a soul in “we, the people” when he spoke of  “the better angels of our nature.”

Does America have a soul?  Western philosophical thought has generally accepted the idea of a soul.  Meacham says the “soul” is what makes us us, whether we are speaking of a person or of a people.  What makes America America?  Meacham attempts to tell and urges the “Soul” of America (as did Lincoln) to follow “the better angels of our nature.”

“To know what has come before,” in terms of our national soul, Meacham writes, “ is to be armed against despair.  If the men and women of the past, with all their flaws and limitations and ambitions and appetites, could press on through ignorance and superstition, racism and sexism, selfishness and greed, to create a freer, stronger nation, then perhaps we, too, can right wrongs and take another step toward the most enchanting and elusive of destinations:  a more perfect Union.”  

Meacham’s hope is that our better angels will survive the current assault as our better angels have rallied against such assaults in times past.  I join him in this hope for The Soul of America. 

"The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor,” 

wrote Ayn Rand, “that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach.”  

But, I say,  what good is a monument if there is no soul within it?