Libros / Outstanding Books

Viking, 2016
Barnes & Noble: 
Hardcover $17.94 

Metaxas’ golden triangle of freedom

by Sam Webb

In If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty, author and public intellectual Eric Metaxas is concerned that the American people have forgotten the essence of our “more perfect union.” Metaxas is concerned that America today might not be worthy of future Memorial Day celebrations. He recalls in his Introduction the story of Benjamin Franklin — the story that serves as the inspiration of the name of this book — emerging from the Constitutional Convention one day when a woman asks him whether the young country is a republic or a monarchy. Franklin replied, “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.” This is the point of the book: the American experiment is exceptional and must be kept for future generations. He writes, “each of us who call ourselves Americans has a great duty to keep that promise [of America] – and if we don’t do our duty toward keeping that promise, our nation will soon cease to exist in any real sense.”

That main argument runs as a thread through the seven chapters of Metaxas’s book, which offer insight into the promise of America, a call to hold fast to the promise, while also casting a vision for a promising American future. Metaxas reminds the reader in Chapter One of the fundamental “idea of American liberty, which might also be called self-government.” This is the promise of America. In order to best keep the American promise, Metaxas prescribes that Americans “behold ourselves afresh” and perceive the strangeness of American liberty in political history.

Metaxas offers instructive insight in Chapter One when he contrasts the liberal and conservative misunderstandings of freedom. For the liberal, he writes, “American freedom is when freedom – or liberty – is confused with [moral] license.” For the conservative, however, the false hope is that an American understanding of liberty and self-government is the natural condition of mankind. Both of these are misunderstandings, Metaxas argues, because the liberal does not reckon with moral reality and the conservative understates the need for supporting structures of self-government.

Further, the inherited experiment of American liberty has “nothing to do with jingoism and nationalistic chest beating” — contra current political zeitgeist — but rather all to do with the goodness of the people called Americans. Metaxas persuasively argues that self-government – American liberty – is not only a civil government concept, but is primarily a matter of personal ethic. “True freedom must be an ‘ordered freedom’” and this ordered freedom grows from the bottom-up, a culture to a government, rather than from the top-down.

Metaxas offers a paradigm for thinking about the cultural milieu needed to sustain American liberty in Chapter Two. He borrows a concept from the Christian public intellectual Os Guiness: The Golden Triangle of Freedom, or freedom, virtue, and faith. This triad of cultural goods is mutually reinforcing. “Freedom requires virtue; virtue requires faith; faith requires freedom.”

In a secular age, the idea that freedom requires virtue and that virtue requires faith is not well-received. But, the liberal misunderstanding of freedom–freedom to moral license–disintegrates the virtuous anchor of the Golden Triangle. A lack of virtue leads to a greater need for masters. Metaxas fills the pages of this book with quotes from America’s founders making this point, a point lost on the majority of Americans today.

To poke the bear even more, Metaxas argues that virtue requires faith, or more explicitly, religion. The root of virtue in a man’s life is his religion. Metaxas writes, “[Today], everyone seems to know that helping the poor is important … or that slavery is wrong, or that being good stewards of the environment is important, but what we have completely forgotten is that these ideals all stemmed from the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. We seem to think that whatever virtues we do possess arose by themselves. History shows this to be false.” False, indeed. Humanity is incurably religious and the religious context that spawned American liberty was specifically a Judeo-Christian context filled with its moral imperatives.

So, then, we come full triangle to freedom. Virtue and faith result in a self-governed people, a civil government constrained in its power because the people are governed by higher ideals and authority. Metaxas reminds us that faith and freedom are not bitter enemies, as thought in the 18th century France and 21st century America. Central to American freedom is religious liberty.

Religious liberty, imperiled in various ways today, was the genius of the American founding. The founders recognized the federal government should not dictate dogma, but rather facilitate freedom of faith and practice. The civil government judges behavior, not beliefs. Religious liberty has facilitated a flurry of faith communities committed to their God which serve to reinforce the virtue and freedom necessary for our thriving republic all these years. Religious liberty is the American first freedom. “We the people” must resolve to protect this freedom for the good of our collective American soul. 

Hardcover, 352 pages. Basic Books, 395 pages
ISBN 0465050913 (ISBN13: 9780465050918)

As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine’s past in order to understand its present and future. The Gates of Europe is the definitive history of Ukraine that helps us understand the country's past and the current crisis.

Why the struggle for Ukraine is the key to Europe’s future? This book attempts to give us an answer from a historic perspective. At the heart of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is the contested legacy of a long-forgotten superpower: Kievan Rus. Both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and post-Soviet Ukraine lay claim to the mantle of Vladimir the Great, a prince who just over 1,000 years ago accepted Christian baptism for his unruly tribes of Slavs and Vikings. To patriotic Russians, that was the founding action of their statehood. For Ukrainians, the story is the other way round: their country, so often wiped off the map by its neighbours, is the true descendant.

Ukraine’s identity and its enemies over the past ten centuries are the central threads of Serhii Plokhy’s admirable new history. He eschews polemic—almost to a fault, given the horrors he describes. The subject material could seem dauntingly dense: few readers will be familiar with the twists and turns of the history, and unfamiliar names and places abound. But Mr Plokhy—a Harvard historian whose previous book, “The Last Empire”, was a notable account of the Soviet Union’s downfall—treads a careful path.

The story is not just of high politics, gruesome and enthralling though that is. Even when Ukraine did not exist as a state, he writes, “language, folklore, literature and, last but not least, history became building blocks of a modern national identity”. He pays particular attention to the linguistic complexities. Ukrainians may speak Russian yet also identify profoundly with the Ukrainian state. The real linguistic divide is with Polish: western Ukraine was for many decades under Polish rule. Memories of massacres and oppression are recent and vivid, making the reconciliation between those two countries all the more remarkable.

The epilogue to “The Gates of Europe” rightly describes the Ukraine crisis as central to Russia and Europe as a whole. It is widely known that the Ukrainian national anthem begins: “Ukraine has not yet perished”. Belief in Ukraine’s history of tolerance and legality, rooted in European Christian civilisation, keeps hope alive. In his elegant and careful exposition of Ukraine’s past, Mr Plokhy has also provided some signposts to the future.

Andrew Wilson, Professor of Ukrainian Studies at University College London:

“Serhii Plokhy has produced a perfect new history of Ukraine for these troubled times—authoritative and innovative, but always clear and accessible, and a delight to read.”

Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University:

“For a comprehensive, engaging, and up-to-date history of Ukraine one could do no better than Serhii Plokhy’s aptly titled The Gates of Europe. Plokhy’s authoritative study will be of great value to scholars, students, policy-makers, and the informed public alike in making sense of the contemporary Ukrainian imbroglio.”

John Herbst, former US Ambassador to Ukraine:

“Serhii Plokhy offers a short yet comprehensive history of Ukraine that contextualizes Mr. Putin’s current policies as aggression against the wishes of the Ukrainian people, as well as the order established at the end of the Cold War. A pleasure to read, The Gates of Europe will take those familiar with the Moscow narrative on a mind expanding tour of Ukraine’s past.”

Review:

Rows over inheritances are bitter—within families and between countries. At the heart of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is the contested legacy of a long-forgotten superpower: Kievan Rus. Both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and post-Soviet Ukraine lay claim to the mantle of Vladimir the Great, a prince who just over 1,000 years ago accepted Christian baptism for his unruly tribes of Slavs and Vikings. To patriotic Russians, that was the founding action of their statehood. For Ukrainians, the story is the other way round: their country, so often wiped off the map by its neighbours, is the true descendant.

That dispute underlies today’s smouldering war. Many Russians find it hard to accept that Ukraine is really a state; moreover, Ukrainians (especially if they speak Russian as a first language) are essentially Russians. The territory they inhabit is therefore part of Moscow’s patrimony.

Ukraine’s identity and its enemies over the past ten centuries are the central threads of Serhii Plokhy’s admirable new history. He eschews polemic—almost to a fault, given the horrors he describes. The subject material could seem dauntingly dense: few readers will be familiar with the twists and turns of the history, and unfamiliar names and places abound. But Mr Plokhy—a Harvard historian whose previous book, “The Last Empire”, was a notable account of the Soviet Union’s downfall—treads a careful path.

The story is not just of high politics, gruesome and enthralling though that is. Even when Ukraine did not exist as a state, he writes, “language, folklore, literature and, last but not least, history became building blocks of a modern national identity”. He pays particular attention to the linguistic complexities. Ukrainians may speak Russian yet also identify profoundly with the Ukrainian state. The real linguistic divide is with Polish: western Ukraine was for many decades under Polish rule. Memories of massacres and oppression are recent and vivid, making the reconciliation between those two countries all the more remarkable ...

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