Exploring the Canon

David C. Hendrickson

These days, it’s pretty much impossible to inhabit American culture without thinking about the Apocalypse. It’s everywhere, on TV, radio, and the movies. These daily reminders, I am sure, will have gotten many of you to thinking about a Desert Island Book, that is, what you take along when you repair to a distant locale after the coming Apocalypse to rebuild (hopefully with a guy or gal) the elements of a new civilization. You can only take one book; you’re in a hurry and don’t have much room in your suitcase.

This mental exercise—that is all it is, as you wouldn’t in reality stand a chance in hell of getting out of Dodge alive—leads me to the following conclusion: I would want the record of what human beings thought about human beings from way back when till just recently, concisely summarizing all the good stuff that was said before they were plowed under.

A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles, From Ancient and Modern Sources, selected and edited by H.L. Mencken, will tell you that. Mencken was the most original journalist ever in a nation that has always produced original journalists. He held the intellectual classes in thrall in the 1920s. He was also a scholar of indefatigable habits. His studies of the American Language are legendary. His Dictionary of Quotations is a classic, but something of a forgotten classic. You can find used copies on Amazon, but it’s no longer in print.

What follows from this fact should be obvious. Some philanthropist needs to get with the program and distribute zillions of copies of this book to the world’s masses, before everything falls apart. Better, some rich guy should launch it in a great-big-electronic-cloud into the interstellar void, to the delight and edification of aliens everywhere. This to be preceded by Mozart, Beethoven, and Verdi, to put them in the mood.

As to why this should be so, I offer the following summaries of four big concepts: Truth, Justice, Liberty, and Peace. Most of the quotations appear in Mencken's fat book.

Truth

I am something of a skeptic about the idea that human beings will ever discover the ultimate Truth about themselves. In the long run of time, before that ultimate discovery, I think it likely that human things will end through some silly miscalculation—"oops, wrong button”—which aliens of a sour disposition will laugh about when they reconstruct things and find out what it was that doomed the species. “It was an accident,” as my son used to say when he flailed his arms at the dinner table and spilt his milk. This cosmic though wayward event, this little accident with big consequences, occurs, in my estimation, before men and women achieve true Enlightenment regarding the meaning of the universe. Right before their scheduled meeting with the Supreme Being, something will go wrong.

But for those self-same human beings, at least for some of them some of the time, seeking the truth must remain what it’s all about. Why is truth “the highest thing that man may keep?”¹ Why has nature “given our minds an insatiable appetite for the truth?”²

In the first place, it’s because “all truth is safe, and nothing else is safe.”³ That pretty much says it all.

Possession of the truth is very helpful in most circumstances, but you gotta bring a lot of affection to bear for it to be meaningful. “Those who know the truth,” Confucius say, “are not equal to those who love it.”⁴

True, the truth sometimes has had a hard time of it. “Truth is given the eternal years of God because she needs them every one.”⁵ It usually doesn’t take that long, but undoubtedly “truth always lags behind, limping along on the arm of time.”⁶ We have to admit, awkwardly, that “there are not many certain truths in this world.”⁷ More painfully, “truth, like all other good things, may be loved unwisely—may be pursued too keenly—may cost too much.”⁸ It is unfortunately all too true that “Truths and roses have thorns about them.”⁹

But dammit, people, we require the truth to get on with our business; it’s the thing we often don’t have but really need the most. “Nothing from man’s hands, nor law, nor constitution, can be final. Truth alone is final.”¹⁰ “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”¹¹ We want men and women who never “sold the truth to serve the hour.”¹² We want it to be valued for its sacredness, not for its convenience, as politicians do.¹³ As Francis Bacon said, “The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.”¹⁴ 

Bacon’s comparison of truth-seeking to love-making is divine. But even success in that enterprise sometimes produces disappointment. To woo is to desire possession, but even after success the person wooed remains just as mysterious as before. You thought you would capture the prize, but you didn’t. In general, the wise agree, the chase is better than the snare.

In conclusion, we ask: what do we get after all this lustful searching after the Truth? We discover the following: “The ‘truths’ that come down the ages are like a long string of grasshoppers standing in single file who jump over one another's backs. They continue without pause, always ‘moving ahead,’ until they arrive over and over again at the point where they began. And where was that?”¹⁵

That was in Greece, of course.

Justice

We don’t hear much about Justice in the US foreign policy debate. But the common sense of the matter among most philosophers is that respect for justice is inseparable from wise policy. Edmund Burke said it well: “Justice is the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.”¹⁶ Villainy can succeed for a time, but in the long run “payback” is the most likely possibility. Mother Nature, of course, punishes insensate stupidity and will sweep you away in a flood unless you make proper preparations. So it is with injustice. One observer, Dickson Watts, helps us understand the reason: “The wound that injustice makes goes deeper and lasts longer than any other.”¹⁷ When thinking about the affairs of nations, this is very important to remember. Nations tend to have very long memories about the injustices committed against them and very short memories regarding the injustices they commit against others.

The question of justice gets raised in the Woody Allen film classic, Crimes and Misdemeanors, where the hapless good guy suffers all manner of misfortunes, and the murdering, lying (though somewhat likeable) cheat of a man—played by Martin Landau, who has his mistress killed—goes unpunished and is as happy as can be at the end of the movie. Crime pays, right? In this instance, perhaps; life does sometimes work out that way. But you never know. Perhaps twenty years later DNA tests might improve so as to allow the identification of the murderer, so that the creep gets nabbed after all. Stranger things have happened. The point is, injustice often carries with it serious consequences; the victims and their sympathizers want justice to be done. Justice moves slowly, wrote the Latin poet Horace, but “it seldom fails to overtake the wicked.”¹⁸ “Justice may wink a while,” wrote English playwright Thomas Middleton, “but see at last.”¹⁹

From whatever conjunction of reasons, the classic wisdom was well expressed by Cicero: “Justice is the crowning glory of the virtues.”²⁰ Its aim is to give human beings “their due.”²¹ “The precepts of the law are these,” held the Institutes of Justinian: “to live honorably, to injure no other man, to render to every man his due.”²² The alternative to justice is the rule of the strong. To withdraw ourselves from that grim prospect, wrote a Frenchman in 1746, “we have found ourselves obliged to submit to justice. Justice or might, we must choose between these two masters: so little are we made to be free.”²³ Francis Bacon made the same point, with flourish: “It is because of justice that man is a god to man and not a wolf.”²⁴

In most circumstances, it’s not especially hard to avoid committing an injustice. You can improve yourself and your fortune without stealing from others. Adam Smith has some wry comments on this aspect of the situation. Lay around the house and congratulate yourself for staying strictly within the confines of justice, he seems to say. “Good for you. Way to go. You have committed no unjust act in the last 24 hours, as you’ve been mostly sitting in your chair watching TV.” The law, which ensures justice, has no problem with that. Besides, it’s perfectly fine to congratulate yourself on not being a criminal. “I didn’t kill anyone today; good for me.”²⁵

“Justice is the end of government,” wrote James Madison in The Federalist. “It is the end of civil society.”²⁶ Madison knew the words of David Hume, who had written in his Essays that the “vast apparatus of our government [has] ultimately no other object or purpose but the distribution of justice. Kings and parliaments, fleets and armies, officers of the court and revenue, ambassadors, ministers and privy councilors, are all subordinate in the end to this part of administration.”²⁷ Justice, for Madison and for Hume, was evidently an obligation of governments as well as ordinary people. It was also evidently a matter for foreign as well as domestic policy.

According to the learned writers on the law of nature and nations (“the publicists”), “the obligation to do justice to other nations at all times, and under all circumstances, is an absolute duty which no state can evade.”²⁸

Justice is connected with other good things. An inscription on the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., reads as follows: “Justice is founded in the rights bestowed by nature upon man. Liberty is maintained in the security of justice.”²⁹

Of course, “riches and honors”³⁰ are loved by most people more than justice. Most folks only get worked up about it when it concerns their own affairs. “Love of justice in the generality of men,” wrote La Rochefoucauld,” “is only the fear of suffering from injustice.”³¹ Pursuing it zealously, warned another observer, is not without hazard: “The extremity of justice is extreme injustice.”³²

Snipe at it as you will, marvel at the immortal deeds built upon great injustice in the past as way of justifying great injustice in the future³³ (we’ve robbed one bank successfully, why not rob another?)—what can we say to those who take this view? What Daniel Webster said: “Justice is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.”³⁴

Liberty

Liberty is on everybody’s lips, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing when they use the word. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” said Abraham Lincoln.³⁵

“Thou inquires what liberty is,” Mr. Lincoln? “To be slave to nothing, to no necessity, to no accident, to keep fortune at arm's length.”³⁶ “Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.”³⁷ Well, those two definitions aren’t exactly the same, so you’ve made a good point, Father Abraham, as usual. But if we look into it further and from different vantage points, we can better understand what it is and why we love it.

Liberty implies equality. “Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.”³⁸ Liberty is also meek and reasonable. “She admits that she belongs to all—to the high and the low; the rich and the poor; the black and the white—and that she belongs to them all equally.”³⁹

Liberty requires government. To enjoy it means “to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another.”⁴⁰

Though liberty requires government, it really needs a particular kind of government—that is, a free government: “Only in states in which the power of the people is supreme has liberty any abode.”⁴¹ It is ruined by despotism: “Liberties and masters are not easily combined.”⁴²

The traditional view among republicans is that liberty can be threatened by inequality. “Our liberty depends on our education, our laws, and habits to which even prejudices yield; on the dispersion of our people on farms and on the almost equal diffusion of property,” said Fisher Ames of Massachusetts in 1800.⁴³

Liberty seems an essential companion of life and the pursuit of happiness. “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”⁴⁴ “Natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and . . . civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.”⁴⁵ If liberty is a “sweet name”⁴⁶ for just about everybody, no wonder that “a love of liberty is planted by nature in the breasts of all men.”⁴⁷

“Liberty is a great pleasure.”⁴⁸ We enjoy liberty when we possess it, and it gladdens us to see others possess it, too. “Where liberty dwells, there is my country.”⁴⁹ Its fortunes on earth may be tied to a particular nation but it is more important than any nation. “Dear is country, but liberty is dearer still.”⁵⁰

Liberty is usually in some kind of danger. “In those very few places where men enjoy what they call liberty, it is continually in a tottering situation, and makes greater and greater strides to that fault of despotism which at last swallows up every species of government.”⁵¹ There are many witnesses to the mysterious and injurious trend, so there must be something to it: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”⁵²

Given its ample charms, why should this be so? Here’s one plausible answer: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”⁵³

The raucous results of freedom are sometimes a tad worrisome. “If liberty produces ill-manners and want of taste, she is a very excellent parent with two very disagreeable daughters.”⁵⁴ Some people are not impressed with its manifestations. “Liberty here,” wrote an Englishman about America in 1823, “means to do each as he pleases; to care for nothing and nobody, and cheat everybody.”⁵⁵ Without wisdom or virtue, sad to say, liberty “is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”⁵⁶

Transitions to liberty are not without cost. “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”⁵⁷

Wealth is nothing as compared with liberty. “Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.”⁵⁸

Give me again my hollow tree,A crust of bread, and liberty.⁵⁹

It is worth fighting for. ‘Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.”⁶⁰ Patrick Henry wasn’t just making things up. He knew that

A day, an hour of virtuous liberty.Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.⁶¹

Can there be too much of a good thing? Some do say so. “Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.”⁶² The rule regarding this is not especially complicated: “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.”⁶³ That doesn’t seem too difficult a concept, but perhaps does not reach all cases. “The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not.”⁶⁴

War may be necessary on occasion to preserve liberty, but war invariably threatens liberty. “The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for the defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.”⁶⁵

Liberty is sometimes reckoned to be limited in appeal by longtitude and latitude: “Liberty is not a fruit that grows in all climates, and so it is not within the reach of all people.”⁶⁶ Others disagree: “The ball of liberty is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe.”⁶⁷

However, there is no right to go to war in order to extend the blessings of liberty to others. Forcing it on other peoples and governments would be repugnant “to the general rights of Nations, to the true principles of liberty, [and] to the freedom of opinion of mankind.”⁶⁸

In international relations, liberty meant usually “the liberty of states,” the idea that each state or nation, like individuals in a free country, should enjoy it unmolested from other princes and republics. This was “international freedom.”

Benjamin Constant distinguished between ancient and modern liberty. In antiquity, with the partial exception of Athens, modern liberty was not prized. All actions of the individual were subject to surveillance by the city. There was hardly anything that the laws did not regulate. It consisted mainly of the right to exercise collectively several parts of the sovereignty given to each particular city. “The individual, a sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations; the individual was lost in the nation, the citizen in the city.”⁶⁹ Modern liberty, by contrast, gives a right to everyone to express their opinions, to entertain any and all opinions about religion, to come and go without a by-your-leave from anyone. The very excellence of this condition, however, might lead the people who enjoy it to forget about the conditions under which they hold it. “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.”⁷⁰

Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a deeper meaning and a broader definition to the American idea of liberty. It wasn’t just for the men of wealth, but had to be for everybody. His vision was of “a greater freedom, a greater security for the average man than he has ever known in the history of America.”⁷¹ As pointed out by David Hackett Fischer in his outstanding book Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, Roosevelt believed in the old ideas of liberty, “but he expanded the idea of rights to include the right to be treated with decency and respect, the right to work, the right to life itself, the right to the means of subsistence, the right to food and shelter, and the right to be safe and secure from the depredations by other human beings.”⁷² Mencken didn’t like Roosevelt at all; his dazzling but cynical dissection of things proved unpopular in the 1930s. He lost his audience as Roosevelt gained his. We have nothing to fear but fear itself, spoke Roosevelt in his First Inaugural.⁷³ FDR provided the nation with desperately needed hope.

My father was of that generation. He would have heard FDR giving his Inaugural Address on the radio when he was about twelve years of age. The lesson he taught me when I was twelve, which would have been about 1965, and which he thought was the most important lesson he could teach me, was “the dignity of the common man.”

Peace

Truth, Justice, and Liberty are vital things to seek for, though it seems we can never enjoy their full abundance on this earth. But one thing seems clear. Without Peace to nurture them, they can be placed in peril.

Thucydides explains why in his account of the revolutions and civil wars that befell Greece at the time of the Great War between Athens and Sparta. “The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man.”⁷⁴ In the beastly conflict that Thucydides chronicled, every trait necessary to civilized life was swallowed up and devoured.

From contemplation of Thucydides or just plain common sense, there arose the following injunction: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”⁷⁵

War was sometimes a dire necessity, but peace was the command of the law of nature as discerned not only by Christianity but by the reputed atheist Thomas Hobbes. “Seek peace and follow it” was, according to Hobbes, “the first and fundamental law of nature.”⁷⁶

For some people, the historian Martin van Creveld has said, war is a step up, offering all sorts of great thrills and opportunities for heroic accomplishment. These people are deluded. “When will the world know that peace and propagation are the two most delightful things in it?”⁷⁷

Alexander Hamilton observed in the eighteenth century that it was “astonishing, after the experience of its having deluged the world with calamities for so many ages, with how much precipitance and levity nations still rush to arms against each other.” That was the record then; it is the record now. And yet war still has its champions. "What can I do but weep over them?" asks Erasmus. "And I weep over them the more bitterly, because they weep not for themselves. No part of their misfortune is more deplorable than their insensibility to it."⁷⁸

Given the hostile bearing of nations, it may be safely conceded that “’Tis safest making peace with sword in hand.”⁷⁹ On the other hand, and more importantly, “peace is seldom denied to the peaceful.”⁸⁰ Besides, “peace becomes mankind; fury is for beasts.”⁸¹

Maintaining the peace is often held to be extremely complicated. Is it really so? “Upon the whole it must be said,” wrote Erasmus, “that the first and most important step towards peace, is sincerely to desire it.”⁸²

War has been endemic to human history, but even peoples inured to its hardships often longed for peace.

Buried was the bloody hatchet;Buried was the dreadful war-club;Buried were all warlike weapons,And the war-cry was forgotten,Then was peace among the nations.⁸³

The most disappointed dream in human history, right up there with failed romantic entanglements, is the dream of peace. “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”⁸⁴ Fat chance of that happening.

But still the dream persists, as it is a beautiful and necessary dream. Whenever it is forgotten, when peace is held cheaply by the rulers, governments risk the alienation of their people. “A government that spoke of military glory as an aim would betray ignorance of, or contempt for, the spirit of nations and the age. It would be an error by a thousand years. Even if it should initially succeed, it would be interesting to see who in the end would win this odd wager, our own century or the offending government.”⁸⁵

That odd wager has once again been made by the Trump administration. The US government just cannot help itself. It advances thoughtlessly extravagant ambitions, and it does not know how to retreat, the prospect of which is seen as a standing threat to its entire world position. So it blindly pushes forward, blathering about “Peace Through Strength” as it launches another war.

This is a big shame, made even bigger by the fact that it seems to be incorrigible.

There were many contributing factors behind this deformation of US policy, but the causa causarum, the cause of causes, was the new fact of unipolarity that arose after the end of the Cold War, the United States as Heavyweight Champion of the World. Under those circumstances, it was to be expected that they would follow

...the good old Rule
...the simple Plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.⁸⁸

The inability of our leaders and of the commentariat to register the sheer craziness of world military domination never ceases to amaze. As Rousseau wrote, “if the princes who are accused of aspiring to universal monarchy really so aspired, they displayed much more ambition than judgment; for how to envision such a project without instantly perceiving its absurdity?”⁸⁹ Now that US military power has weakened—its arsenals depleted, its vulnerabilities exposed, its legacy weapons suddenly nearing obsolescence—those ambitions seem especially absurd.

The abuse of power, following like tumbling dominos from its oversized acquisition, is one of the oldest stories in international politics. Only an exceptional nation might have resisted it. America is exceptional in many ways, but it proved to be very ordinary in not having the fortitude to resist the temptations of hypertrophic power.

I do wonder about US policymakers. Did anyone ever tell them that “the purpose of war is peace”?⁸⁶ Is there a White House Memo which endorses the divine law that “Peace is our final good?”⁸⁷ Perhaps there is, because the command may easily be misused or perverted to justify war in the present.

Oddly, ideas of American exceptionalism today call not for the observance of justice but seek to justify its violation. This logical proof proceeds on the highest of grounds: “Because we’re America, we can do anything we like.” This is a perverse overturning of the traditional teaching, but far more powerful in media and culture than “exceptionalist” views counseling restraint.

The worst part of it is that those who will plunge us into war know that, once having done so, there is no turning back. When the doves prevail, it’s just for a day; when the hawks prevail, it’s for eternity, or what seems like eternity. A new reality is created, the reality in which the nation is “at war.” In that condition, force and fraud are awarded first place in the nation’s arsenal.

A sad spectacle, indeed. But every war must end; surely a growing number will see and say that peace has its victories, no less renowned than war.⁹⁰

October 21, 2026

← Back to Maxims