More Perfect
The deepest truth of all
We have free will. We can choose. And the potential for tragedy is a necessary consequence of that freedom. It is a burden we must carry to be free, that we may fall.
This is the oldest claim in the Western tradition and one of the hardest to keep in view. The hardness is not intellectual. The argument is not complicated. The hardness is that the claim asks something of us that we would rather not give, which is the steady acknowledgment that the conditions of every good we love are also the conditions of every loss we fear, and that we cannot have the first without the second. The wish that we could is the deepest and most common wish a human being can have. It is also the wish that, when granted, destroys us.
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The Greeks knew this. They built their tragedies around it. Sophocles wrote a play about a man named Oedipus who was free, who chose, whose choices were the choices of a man of integrity, and whose integrity destroyed his house. Oedipus is not a fool. Oedipus is not a villain. Oedipus is a king who, presented with a plague, tries to discover its cause. He is told the cause. He follows the evidence. He refuses to look away. He does, at every step, what a serious person would do. And the doing, performed by a man free to do otherwise, brings down upon him and upon his family a catastrophe so complete that the play’s last lines warn the audience to call no man happy until he has crossed the boundary of his life free of pain.
The Greeks did not write this play because they thought freedom was a mistake. They wrote it because they thought freedom was the truth about what kind of creature a human being is, and they wanted the city to look at the truth without flinching. To be the kind of creature that can choose is to be the kind of creature that can be destroyed by its own choices. The two are not separable. A creature that could not be destroyed by its choices would not be making choices. It would be following a script. And the dignity of being human is precisely that we are not following a script — that the choices are ours, that the integrity is ours, that the catastrophe, when it comes, is ours also.
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The mistake that runs through the modern centuries, in every form they have taken, is the wish to grant the first without the second. The wish to have freedom without the possibility of falling. The wish to have love without the possibility of loss. The wish to construct a world in which the goods we cherish are guaranteed, and the costs of cherishing them are eliminated, and the human creature is finally safe from the consequences of being the kind of creature it is.
This wish has names. It has been called perfection, and progress, and the end of history, and salvation by other means. It has powered revolutions and built empires and animated the manifestos of thinkers who believed that the right arrangement of human affairs would, at last, abolish the conditions that had produced human suffering. None of these projects has succeeded. All of them have failed in the same way. They have failed because the conditions they sought to abolish were not separable from the conditions they sought to preserve. The freedom and the falling, the love and the loss, the choice and the consequence — these are not pairs of independent variables that can be optimized one at a time. They are the same condition under different descriptions, and any project that abolishes one abolishes the other.
A world without the possibility of loss is a world without the possibility of love. A world without the possibility of falling is a world without the possibility of standing. A world without the possibility of tragedy is a world without the possibility of meaning. And the project of constructing such a world, however nobly it begins, ends in the same place every time, because the only way to abolish the possibility of human failure is to abolish the conditions of human freedom, and the only way to abolish the conditions of human freedom is to take from human beings the capacities by which they are themselves. The perfect utopia and the perfect tyranny are not distant cousins. They are the same arrangement under two names. The utopian promises that no one will ever suffer again, and the tyrant promises that no one will ever choose again, and the two promises describe the same world.
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This is why romance does not work without tragedy. Every love story that has lasted in the Western canon — the great ones, the ones that readers still return to centuries after their writing — has the possibility of loss built into its structure. Sometimes the loss is consummated in death. Sometimes in separation. Sometimes in the slower tragedies of incompatibility, or duty, or the simple passage of time across two lives that cannot finally be lived in the same place. The reason these stories endure is that they tell the truth about what love is. Love is the orientation of one finite being toward another finite being in the knowledge that the other is mortal, fragile, capable of leaving, capable of being lost. Without that knowledge, the thing is not love. It is something else — a contract, a convenience, a transaction in which neither party stands to be undone by the absence of the other. Love is the willingness to be undone. The willingness is the substance.
The same is true of every other good a free creature can pursue. Friendship is the willingness to be betrayed and to remain. Vocation is the willingness to fail at the thing one has staked one’s life on. Citizenship is the willingness to bind oneself to a polity whose decisions one may not be able to control. Parenthood is the willingness to love a being one cannot protect from every harm. In every case, the structure is the same. The good is constituted by the possibility of its loss. Remove the possibility and you do not get a safer version of the good. You get a different thing entirely, which is not worth the name.
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The American republic was founded on this insight, and the founders chose their words with care. The Preamble does not say In Order to form a perfect Union. It says In Order to form a more perfect Union. The comparative is doing the philosophy. More is the word of a creature in time, who can move, who can build, who can fail, who can recover. Perfect is the word of a state that has been removed from time, that admits no motion, that admits no failure, and that therefore admits no recovery either. The founders did not pretend they had achieved perfection. They pretended nothing of the sort. What they offered was the structural promise that the Union they were constituting would be capable of becoming more than it currently was, by the exercise of the freedoms it would protect, under the conditions of contingency it would not pretend to abolish.
This is what makes the American project, when it works, an answer to the older question. More perfect, not perfect. The phrase contains its own warning against utopianism. It contains its own acknowledgment of imperfection. It contains its own commitment to motion. A republic capable of becoming more than it is is a republic in which freedom is real, in which choice has consequences, in which the citizens can fail and recover, in which the institutions are imperfect and can be improved without ever being completed. The completion is not the goal. The completion would be the end of the thing the founders were trying to constitute. The motion is the goal. The capacity for the motion is the freedom. The freedom is the dignity. The dignity is what we are.
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More perfect. Not perfect.
More is constructed of freedom and love. That is what meaning is. That is who we are.
We are not creatures who happen to have these capacities. We are these capacities, in action, in time, under risk. To be human is to be the kind of being for which more-perfect-not-perfect is the available form of motion — not a settling for less than the perfect, but a recognition that the perfect, if it were achieved, would not be a higher form of our existence but the abolition of our existence as the kind of creature we are. The Greeks knew this. The founders knew this. Every poet who has ever written a love story in which the lovers were parted has known this. Every citizen who has ever stood inside an imperfect republic and refused either to leave or to demand its perfection has known this.
The burden we carry to be free is real. The falling is real. The losses are real, and they are ours, and they cannot be talked out of being the losses they are. But the carrying is also real, and the carrying is what we are doing when we choose, and the choosing is what we are doing when we love, and the loving is what we are doing when we live.
That is the deepest truth of the nature of our existence. That is what meaning is. That is who we are.
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In reading this and then Jim Palmer's The Religion of the Future, here is what stood out for me. These are companion pieces in many ways. Jim quotes Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger, who said: "The most important thing about us is that we are not fully determined by the worlds we inhabit.” This sounds very much like your focus on the founder's statement of "a more perfect union." Jim goes on: "Human beings are not simply products of the worlds they inherit. They remain capable of transcending, revising, and remaking the structures that shape them." Both you and Jim orient us to the truth of human possibility, both for creation and destruction.