Liberty and Virtue – December 4th, 2019
Does liberty exist without virtue?
Reading the histories of Greece and Rome, I find that the ancient histories of the Greeks and Romans bore great gifts of lessons learned through the mistakes and successes of the same, passed on to the founding fathers of our Republic. They learned from those great states and peoples who stood before them, and whose memories and lessons still echo through the annals of history: life, liberty, and a particular propriety of government. From the likes of Athens and the Roman Empire, they discovered those roads to be avoided. Through the heroic Spartans and the stalwart Roman Republic, they learned the importance of individual liberties, and the virtue that upholds it. Virtue, a morality that is simultaneously social and individual in nature, ensures a most effective defense against tyranny; for, “vice leads to tyranny, and tyranny leads to even greater vice.” So, it us such lessons that the founders were armed with the principles of revolution, a rebellion made right by its foundation of ideals, making the American Revolution paradoxical in nature: “a revolution fueled by tradition.” They took the best principles of those who came before us, using them to build the best Republic possible, a foundation for the continuity of liberty underpinned by virtue: One nation under God. Indeed, it is the moral fabric that ensures the continuity of a republic. A fabric so frayed and fettered with individual ideologies, so torn apart with divergent desires and subjectivity, so overpowered by feelings over objective truth, is the surety of a doomed republic. History shows us this, in Sparta, Athens, The Roman Republic turned Empire, and every great state and nation that has followed since.
We have not learned from history, so we shall be doomed to repeat it. So, we look forward to the horizon unseen, for insanity is partaking of the same thing repetitiously, and expecting a different result. The world wields nothing different from what it has already wrought, for there is nothing new under the sun. We look forward to the new day, the eighth day that dawns, under the light of which all shall be revealed, and all things shall be made new. So say we all.
