Reflect on this oddity or paradox.
Only humans are endowed with brains equipped to pursue and attain justice, wisdom, and a sense of moral duty. Brains are what earmark humanity.
But super-athletes whose talents are replicated in the animal kingdom occupy the summits of our admiration or ambition.
Cheetah’s can run fast. Kangaroos can jump far. The common dolphin can swim fast. Elephants can lift heavy weights. Walruses fight each other.
To the extent you devote your life to doing what animals can do, to that extent you have abandoned your humanity. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “What is a man if his chief good and market of his time is but to feed, sleep, and exult in sports. A beast no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability to fust in us unused.”
No super-athletes participated in writing the American Declaration of Independence. None attended the constitutional convention of 1787. None assisted in authoring the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. These landmarks gave birth to the United States and enabled the nation to grow and prosper. Then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams could truly say in his July 4, 1821 address, “[America’s] glory is not dominion but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.”
The march of America today is no longer the march of the mind. It is the march of athletic prowess—amateur or professional. Think of the countless Americans preoccupied with NFL football, FIFA World Cup soccer, the Olympics, NBA basketball, Major League Baseball, the Wimbledon Tennis championships, or the heavyweight boxing titleholder. Think of the hundred million American children waylaid from seeking intellectual and moral excellence by dreams of becoming a super-rich professional athlete like Tom Brady, Pele, or Aaron Judge.
The collective literacy and wisdom of America has plunged stupendously over the past two centuries. Our first six Presidents were George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. Read their voluminous writings that glitter with lucidity, profundity, and wisdom. Compare them with the last six Presidents: George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. The collective thinking and writings of the latter cannot hold a candle to our first six Presidents.
Abraham Lincoln’s entire schooling amounted to a year or less of intermittent attendance below college or university level. He learned largely by borrowing books and newspapers and endless hours of thinking. Yet his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address are unsurpassed masterpieces of the English language that continue to inspire and engage humanity. Leo Tolstoy observed, “He was what Beethoven was in music, Dante in poetry, Raphael in painting, and Christ in philosophy of life. He aspired to be divine—and he was.”
It is thus altogether fitting that we resort to Lincoln for America’s path back to the march of the mind. I have substituted that phrase for “the laws” in Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address:
“Let reverence for the march of the mind, be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and Almanacs—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
America is headed for the Dark Ages if it neglects to restore the march of the mind as the nation’s lodestar. The fault will lie not in the stars but in ourselves. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.