“I have an unshakeable conviction that our democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of using them.”

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, letter to Herbert Putnam, March 28, 1939

As every American knows, next year marks the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Many celebrations, events, memorials will be held, films screened, and books published to explain the significance of “the founding” and the meaning of its two and a half centuries of life as a liberal democratic republic, and of its suggestiveness to other liberal democracies as an experiment in self-governance, in a pluralistic society drawn from peoples from across the globe.

Against this sustained tableau of celebrations, our ongoing experiment in liberal democracy—and as a constitutional republic-- is greatly tested. Affective polarization, toxic tribalism, tribal status competition, diverging understandings of the country’s history throughout many storms and stresses, into the ongoing epistemic crisis of the present, are now constant features of our discourse and our public life. Finding a way forward through this welter of cacophonous voices, through the cross-cutting and mutating political, cultural, and generational alliances, creates confusion. That narrow pathway produces far fewer bonds around common purpose and a shared history—indeed, a shared reality—than previous generations of Americans experienced. We are tested in a new fractured reality—and a distorting information ecosystem—to find common ground.

Searching for a new patriotism to celebrate the country and its many accomplishments is one potential path forward. Steven Smith’s Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes illuminates one path: that of giving a true accounting of how patriotism (sharply differentiated from nationalism) can be found as an evolving aspiration, from generation to generation, to live up to Lincoln’s “better angels,” and to understand the uniqueness of the democratic experiment to which all of those generations have contributed. For Smith, aspirational patriotism lives between the extremes of the progressive Left, with its endless critique of the country’s many sins and faults that it considers “systemic”; and the narrow tribalism of the populist Right which wants a very particular view of who gets to be called a “true American.” The populist Right rails against “cosmopolitans” and “globalists,” surely code phrases in themselves; while the woke or Progressive Left demonizes, and condescends to “nativists” and undue flag-waving and bravado. Both extremes diminish what is possible for imagining a renewed patriotism around ideals of equality, fairness, mutual respect, and a common civic creed.

Civic Virtues for a Civic Creed

If Smith’s searching call for an aspirational patriotism traces the best voices from the past who helped create that plane of aspirational striving, Chris Beem’s The Seven Democratic Virtues: What You Can Do to Overcome Tribalism and Save Our Democracy is a self-help guide, of sorts, for American citizens to change the discourse where they live, in their own communities, and change the trajectory of the country. Through understanding common biases and blind spots common to all of us, Beem argues, we are able to marshal a suite of civic virtues to overcome them, and transcend the forces that polarize us and make mutual understanding and better conversations impossible. Beem identifies the civic virtues of intellectual humility, honesty, consistency, courage, and temperance (drawing on classical conceptions of these virtues) as essential to democratic renewal, as the character traits to forge common purposes when a shared reality itself often appears impossible.

For Beem, the average citizen, living in his or her own community, can make a difference, much more than political parties, national leaders, noisy “influencers,” or supremely selfish oligarchs of whatever political stripe and self-interest. Self-governance, obviously, is not quietism, withdrawal, or unwillingness to participate in even small ways to the community where one lives. It isn’t a spectator sport. Civic virtues, as Beem imagines them, have a multiplier effect on a national scale when those virtues are lived out in acts of listening to understand others who believe differently, and deliberating together with them in a spirit of temperance, one of the virtues he identifies as necessary in continuing the American experiment.

For Greg Lukianoff of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), developing civic virtues—similar to those enumerated by Chris Beem—is necessary to counteract the pathology of “too many convictions” in our fractured, distracted, and cacophonous democracy. Lukianoff warns of the hazards of too many convictions—too many totalizing, uninformed, under-evidenced, and loudly proclaimed opinions—even though having “conviction” itself is a worthy goal in the abstract. In an article for Notre Dame’s Virtues and Vocation: Higher Education for Human Flourishing, he observed:

“In its simplest form, humility in a democratic society means you don’t believe everyone else is simply stupid or evil, but instead that they are equal citizens who are likely to have good values. Another form is epistemic humility, which is the recognition that our knowledge is filtered through perception . . .. . In some cases, we disagree with our neighbors because things look differently from where they’re standing. And a really serious thinker should admit that it’s at least possible that, at times, our neighbor’s vantage point is better than ours.

Humility and its fellow civic virtues—such as honesty, respect, tolerance, and compassion—create an environment that enables us to figure out when our neighbors have developed their convictions from a better understanding of the world. Through discussion, thought experimentation, devil’s advocacy, and counterfactuals, we can test and refine our convictions.” 1

For Lukianoff, too many institutions, including universities, have strayed from their mission as “crucibles of truth” and have become “protectors of faith.” In such environments, civic virtues, free inquiry, and open-ended exploration are not possible.

In this coming year of reflection on the nation’s founding, and its current splintered discourse and manufactured “bespoke realities,” civic virtues loom large as anchors of meaning. Beem, Lukianoff, and thinkers like John Inazu, a scholar of pluralism who calls us to consider how to live together peacefully across large political, political, and epistemic divides, all coalesce in proposing provisional actions as better citizens in imponderably difficult times.

One small action I propose: sustained reading and discussion of a number of authors to advance the cause of civic virtues enacted at scale, with libraries and librarians suggesting these authors, and certainly others, to make possible a deeper reflection upon the country’s past, and a dedication to a common future. Several of them are well-known across decades and their books are widely available in public and academic libraries and in bookstores; others are newer and deserve new audiences beyond their current ones.

The authors I propose vary enormously in age, ethnicity, gender, geographical ties, and ideological turns, but each contributes to a better discourse through their own deepening self-reflection and shared humanity with other Americans, and allegiance to a renewed patriotism. Some are more activist than others, but all are active in believing in liberal democracy and freeing the best thinking in their fellow citizens. All of them strive for balance, wholeness, and sanity in unstable and uncertain times. All of them are, at heart, truth-aspiring, open-minded inquirers— necessary conditions for civic virtue.

Parker Palmer: Restoring Wholeness

Best known for his perennially popular The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer is an intergenerational favorite among teachers of all ranks and institutions. His deepened self-reflections upon the teaching vocation, at an earlier stage of his life, and upon his own incapacities as teacher and a vulnerable human being, are clear examples of intellectual humility from a man who did not understand himself, or his students. His searching honesty in that book grew out of his deep reflection based on the Quaker (Friends) tradition, and his need to create real “connectedness” (a favorite word) with students, rather than the dissecting, competitive, “one-upmanship” attitudes so prevalent in academia. The “culture of critique” which Palmer describes as a malady that afflicted him and others, is not always acknowledged as an enduring feature of the academic life.

Of course, the competitiveness and rivalries within academia are ratcheted up in some disciplines much higher than others, where the stakes are much higher with grants, awards, and other signals of prestige. But Palmer’s sometimes forceful lessons about the wholeness of the human being in a divisive academic culture have resonated across decades—and resonate even more strongly now with academic institutions feeling the pressure to self-examine, to reform, from internal critics; while they also experience assaults from intrusive federal mandates that infringe, potentially, upon the core purposes of open and free inquiry and the core value of academic freedom.

Palmer’s work expands beyond the campus to building and renewing community, and his well-known works celebrate the wholeness and “homecoming”—another favorite word—found in building real connections and relatedness with others. His Healing the Heart of Democracy: the Courage to Create a Politics of the Human Spirit is especially resonant for the moment, as is his A Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Toward the Undivided Life. Palmer’s activism is of a special kind: while a progressive, his credo is about building connections and understanding others with a wide range of beliefs. The sense of connectedness that creates “homecoming” to our best selves as citizens is always his through line in writing, speaking, and working with others. He is founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, a retreat community that gives individuals opportunities to practice self-understanding in “Circles of Trust” based on his Quaker roots in contemplation, in looking inward. At age 86, Palmer is still a voice for wholeness, connectedness, and building trust—that very rare attribute in our fractured country. He is continuing his generative work through his new substack, Living the Questions. He is one of our primary practitioners of civic virtue.

Wendell Berry: The Active Steward of the Land

If Parker Palmer is countercultural against the “critique culture” of the academy, Wendell Berry of Kentucky offers another example of a counterculture planted in the midst of our prevailing culture of large-scale industrial farming and land exploitation, of absentee ownership, and of corporate greed. For Berry—and others—that lack of interest in local communities and their cultures of care and husbandry, their wholeness in seeing lifecycles among animals and crops, reveals a profound misunderstanding of integrative work and living, the “unity” of which Berry often writes. His Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture sounds the clearest warning about the ruin visited upon small communities and farms, based on the rapacity of industrial scale farming, agribusiness, and indifferent bureaucracies. His essays of forty years ago in What Are People For? showcase the dehumanizing effects of lack of regard for neglected places in the country, which show up today in some of its political divisions.

His countercultural—and patriotic—voice reminds us of the virtues of seeing wholeness in life, in caring for the land for the long term, and in forging community in caring for the health—economic, intellectual, and spiritual—of local communities where mutuality is possible, where local expertise is valued and respected, and where local arts and literature emerge from the creativity of those living on the land, and deeply understanding its rhythms. Berry himself is best known as novelist and poet whose work sounds the themes of his larger community renewal project tied to farming and localism.

As with Palmer, Berry started that quintessential American venture—a small foundation, a “little platoon” --to promote an animating vision for civic renewal, in this case, with farming communities and their health and well-being. The Berry Center aims to put Berry’s writings on agriculture, industrialism, local economics, and ecological understanding to work in educating new generations who want to live close to the land and contribute to communities in harmony with the land. Berry’s vision is an alternative but vital experimental one that is part of the fabric of our democracy.

Terry Tempest Williams: The Citizen as Environmentalist

The large spaces of the American West, their value as wilderness, as places for contemplation and renewal, are the special concerns of essayist and memoirist Terry Tempest Williams. Her family history in Utah is intertwined with those spaces and some of the ecological harms visited upon them—especially the atomic testing that occurred in southern Utah in the 1950s, which caused cancers in numerous residents there, including several women in Williams’ family. Her nature essays mingled with memoir in Refuge: an Unnatural History of Family and Place, show the searching honesty of dealing with two life-changing events for Williams: her mother’s diagnosis with terminal cancer, and during the same time, the environmental impacts on birdlife of the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. This extended essay shows Williams as deeply reflective citizen pondering the larger issues of human impacts on nature—in public policy that spreads across generations of her own family in the nuclear tests in Utah and Nevada—while elevating nature’s regenerative force in the bird life sanctuary.

Williams’ activism on behalf of environmental conservation in the West, her testimony before Congress on environmental issues, her activism against the Iraq War, and her compelling essays reveal an integrative vision of human life intersecting with natural forces. Her lyrical essays are teaching vehicles in themselves: expressions of a sensibility attuned to place and the natural forces within it; and the possibilities for renewing citizenship itself beyond the narrow procedures of democratic politics and the intensities of partisanship. Her life and writing intertwine to show what citizenship in a large cause looks like: activism on behalf of wilderness as a necessary space for healing from the distempers of contemporary life in an advanced liberal democracy.

After many honors and awards for her writing, Williams was appointed as Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School, for recognition of her contributions about the spiritual dimensions of nature and wilderness. While in this position, she completed her most recent book, The Hour of Land: a Personal Topography of America’s National Parks. The book offers numerous riveting quotes that distill her wisdom:

“Wilderness is the source of what we can imagine and what we cannot - the taproot of consciousness. It will survive us.”

“Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves.”

Anna Lembke: Counselor Against Overindulgence

If Palmer, Berry, and Williams illuminate paths toward wholeness and civic health, another voice in the current moment sounds a warning about the perils of overconsumption and lack of balance in our society that impede a renewal of civic virtue on a large scale. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and medical director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, explores through her personal experience, and that of her clients, the seductions of plenty and the overexposure to, and overuse of, many dopamine-inducing substances and experiences. Her Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, shows how the pain-pleasure balance in our brains is often upset, with constant cravings, causing addictive behaviors that shut down the opportunities for reflective thinking and considered interactions with others.

Her book, rooted in neuroscience, illustrates how the reward “pathways” work in the brain and how out-of-balance addictions take hold and are exceedingly difficult to overcome: whether from drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, shopping, overwork, online gaming, pornography, texting, sexting, social media “doomscrolling”, and a host of other temptations and addictions. Her years of experience in working with clients suffering from many of these addictions have convinced her that recovery is possible with self-discipline, even in a dopamine-saturated world. Abstinence, radical honesty, temperance, self-binding and removal of stimuli causing the addiction, and the importance of prosocial shame in helping us reconnect with others—these are all lessons from her research and clinical experience.

The great “plenty paradox” from Lembke’s work centers on how a broadly prosperous population, in an advanced liberal democracy, in the midst of overstimulation resulting from “too much”, can become disordered because of addictive behaviors, and lose self-discipline through overconsumption and overindulgence. That addictive disorders on a large scale now exist suggests, for Lembke, that prosperity and plenty create unfilled time for many citizens and a surfeit of opportunities for overindulgence.

In a recent interview,2 she informed the reporter that abundance and convenience are ever-present for most Americans and that indulging in “digital drugs” is an almost irresistible temptation—including those social media apps that make such indulgence possible. She insisted that the smartphone is a gateway device that makes much overindulgence incredibly easy, and that this large-scale, societal-level overindulgence has become a collective problem for which solutions must be found, both by individuals and groups. It is at least a plausible hypothesis that large-scale addictive behaviors, shortened attention spans, compulsions toward any activity or experience made possible through digital devices, will impede citizens’ participation in deliberative democracy or participating as more informed citizens, instead of only as “consumers” of digital experiences. Lembke’s research sounds a warning, but also offers a way into self-discipline that makes it possible for individuals caught up in their digital isolation and seductive compulsions to rejoin communities with others, and practice civic virtues.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: The Virtue of Temperance

Best known as author of The Harper’s Letter in 2020 against various forms of censorship and cancel culture, and a broad defense of intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity in public discourse, Williams is now a staff writer at The Atlantic and a visiting faculty member at the Arendt Center at Bard College. Author of the memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White, he addresses the complexities of his own mixed racial heritage and the importance of resisting facile generalizations about groups, racial or otherwise—and calls for the primacy of individual identity. His writing in numerous publications consistently shows what generous, careful, thoughtful, and well-argued writing looks like. He responds in a deeply considered way to current politics, cultural and social trends, and demonstrates what a public intellectual voice of the first order sounds like in the 21^st century—reasoning across multiple perspectives, bodies of evidence, geographies, cultures, and historical experiences to explain for a broader public the many complexities of identity, institutional cultures, urban settings and national customs, and even recent history.

Notably, Williams’ second major book is eagerly awaited. The summer of 2020, still feverishly present in many of our memories, remains a bonfire burned down to embers but still glowing with fierceness even in our rapidly forgetful culture. Williams’ forthcoming book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, promises to place the fraught events of that summer, the George Floyd murder and the COVID-19 lockdowns and other measures, against the larger backdrop of accelerating change surrounding a totalizing “social justice” monoculture, with further breakdowns in shared facts and the spread of multiple conspiracy theories, that preceded and followed those events.

Williams’ new book is sure to provoke discussion and debate, and may help citizens engage in more sense-making rather than clinging to certitudes and blind spots of their tribes. His ability to understand larger trends and through lines in cultural change is becoming a model for democratic discussion and debate, and his voice is a temperate one using facts and evidence, and also, the “better angels” of shared citizenship.

Robert Talisse: Advocate for Democratic Distance

This complement of “voices of sanity” concludes, fittingly, with Robert Talisse. A political philosopher who studies democratic governance, Talisse has focused over time on the perils of too much democracy—an overindulgence in itself when politics becomes an all-consuming, possibly even addictive, pursuit. Drawing on decades of scholarship and thinking about the dynamics of democracies, Talisse writes in his most recent book, Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance, of the extremism that arises from too much “in the streets” democratic activity, of large crowds feeding each other’s ingroup convictions, in a spiral of what is well known in political science as belief polarization—which creates frenzied monocultures of unreasoning activity.

Against this dynamic, Talisse makes a strong case for solitary reflection on the part of citizens, to engage in better thinking, to understand members of outgroups and other worldviews, in order to engage in better political participation through a cycle of self-renewal. It is the better habits of mind, and time and spaces provided for solitary reflection, that Talisse holds are vital to overcome the intense tribalism and polarization of the present in American society.

Talisse identifies three public places for this crucial solitary reflection: public libraries; museums; and public parks. These are inherently democratic spaces, open to all citizens, regardless of politics, faith traditions, race, gender, age, viewpoints, worldviews, or other identity characteristics. In this sense, libraries are not passive repositories of inert “content”—as important as well-chosen and -organized collections are-- but are potential laboratories for civic renewal in a virtuous cycle of regenerative discourse in their communities, and beyond.

Coda

The epigraph of this essay quotes a former President sharing with a friend his own private views of the possibilities of the nation’s libraries: that sufficient “library resources” as well as “the national intelligence to use them” were part of his ongoing faith in democratic self-government. In a time of great threats within and abroad, Franklin Roosevelt placed his faith in institutions such as libraries as ongoing experimental spaces for popular self-education and enlightenment. Across decades, his faith has largely been fulfilled.

Now we face trials of focus, attention, reading and distractibility; social media addictions; digital toxicity; questioning of the purpose and meaning of democratic norms themselves; and assaults on knowledge-generating institutions that have sustained the country and made it a more prosperous and civilized nation. The “six voices of sanity” discussed here are all dissenters in some fashion, but affirm the best traditions of the country, finding activism in civic renewal, rather than torching institutions and civic norms. They have lived out more productive paths. In this climate, they offer deeper springs of thinking and reflection about public knowledge and virtuous participation. Their “bonds of affection” for a nation ever-changing and renewing itself, suggest pathways into agency for librarians and libraries in democratic renewal as well.

In 1862, in his written Annual Address to Congress announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln wrote, “Fellow Citizens, we cannot escape history.” He placed the great moral challenge of his time in front of the country—at that time, the northern states—and raised the stakes, and elevated the call, for renewing a fractured nation. In this time, libraries and librarians, as part of their own local communities, but also as contributors to the larger network of epistemic institutions, will need to accept the responsibility of renewing civic virtues and honoring the best voices who believe in the American experiment in self-governance. That is a professional responsibility beyond particular partisan positions and one that speaks to truth-seeking pluralism, and “living the questions” of which Parker Palmer writes.

Franklin Roosevelt’s faith in libraries as necessary to liberal democracy requires the collective “national intelligence” to use them for the public good, to ensure the continuity of public knowledge across generations. That “national intelligence” depends upon the virtues lived out by the voices of sanity discussed here, and by many others, even in dissent, to overcome the epistemic crisis of which Richard Reeves writes—one that he asserts is met only by “truthfulness,” in provisional form, not a final uncontested “truth.”

Patriotism of the future will mean bringing to the fore the additional virtues of which Reeves writes: accuracy and sincerity—necessary in order to rebuild trust in institutions, experts, researchers, and our political and cultural leaders, and also to become reciprocal trust-builders as citizens. In forging stronger ties with other epistemic institutions to create a shared reality again, libraries of all types can become generative instruments in our ongoing democratic experiment. Former Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish caught this spirit well:

“Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.”