I’ve written on this general topic before: as one example, one revealing an important development in my thoughts, see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding as one example. In that essay, about the necessity of abstractions, but proper abstractions, I stated:
My interest lies in an important stream of thoughts and attitudes of New England European colonists which showed itself during the period of King Phillip’s War, a stream which I think to represent a failed intellectual maturing process on the part of highly educated and intelligent men in confrontation with alien cultures. Instead of moving towards a proper abstraction that would have allowed a defense of their own culture but also an understanding of the human good in a different way of life, the European settlers raised their particular way of life to a self-righteous ideal. A conflict of cultures was seen as a war between God’s servants, the White settlers, and Satan’s slaves, the Indians. This stream, which may have been nascent in Puritan thought from the time they first stepped into that wilderness region of the New World, developed fully during the lead-up to the war as the Puritan leaders dealt with the growing resistance of the Indians to the expansion of settled ways of life.
Americans seem to love sloppy idealizations drawn from shallow and literalistic understandings of reality. We love witch-hunts of all sorts; we love to justify ourselves in the way of Emerson and Thoreau and Parker and other New England Transcendentalists and Unitarians who seem to have had a respect for common sense and reality only because they truly and deeply believed that common sense and reality were those wraiths which flickered across the stages in their own minds. Most of all, we love that strangely profound and profoundly strange thinker named Abraham Lincoln, though we like the folksy man of the people as he’s depicted in movies and in public school textbooks—among other errors in our `knowledge’ about Lincoln: he started as a poor lawyer but quickly became a wealthy lawyer skilled in defending railroads and other corporations fighting against efforts of local communities to rein them in. The reality is more interesting but the American dreamworld is so comforting, I guess, though I’m not particularly comforted.
It’s hardly surprising that a people convinced that every shadow passing across their minds would soon enough decay to a point where we can no longer produce heretics with stuff in their chests. At least Lincoln had stuff, but even Emerson, most of all Emerson, was always questionable so far as stuff goes—Melville had to dress up his character with a rebellious courage before Captain Ahab was born. I guess Emerson was an English country parson trying to present himself as a self-made frontiersman. If Melville had known, he could have waited until Lincoln came along as a model for Captain Ahab. But maybe Captain Ahab was truer to Lincoln than to Emerson.
Garry Wills, in his honestly admiring book about what Lincoln actually did—Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, told us that Lincoln had little respect for the Founding Fathers or their Constitution, though he found The Declaration of Independence to be at least useful to his arguments. I don’t know from what I’ve read, including the book by Wills, if Lincoln was aware that decontextualization is a form of abstraction more conducive to distortions than to truths. I suspect he simply wouldn’t have conceded that such was an issue because he would have thought his dreamworld to be a greater and better reality. Then again, I’m simply not sure how Lincoln would have justified his all-too American style of abstracting from concrete reality in an effort to derive…
Not ultimate truths. Lincoln was too insightful in his glacial way not to see that his ways were incompatible with any recognition of truly objective or absolute truth. Yet, Lincoln was willing to engage in actions he knew to be enforcing his particular dreamworld, not nearly as trite as the current American dreamworld, upon the dreamworlds of other Americans as if convinced his Gospel to be the true Gospel.
My criticisms of American transcendental ways of thought aren’t consistent, at least not fully so, but I think this to be a result of trying to describe a rapidly mutating mind-infection of sorts. It’s easier to produce coherent critiques of the American tendencies toward a strange sort of well-meaning antinomianism, closely associated with our Transcendentalism to be sure; I provided a very sketchy critique of those tendencies, the desire to sin without being guilty of sin, in Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American. It’s all part of one disordered American Mind.
In any case, I’d recommend a reading of Gettysburg Gospel: How Lincoln forged a civil religion of American nationalism, an essay by Richard Gamble who seems to be a thinker conservative in the true way of trying to preserve what was and might still be good in our heritage. He recognizes the true insights in Garry Wills’ book but presents an analysis not only critical of the acidic effect of Lincoln’s way of thought but also open to something which might be called “moral order.” In fact, it be dangerous to present a firm view of moral order in an age such as ours; openness to objective truth is needed and parts of truth are revealed in the Bible and in our traditions and in empirical knowledge.
I’d also recommend some time contemplating this question: is it knowledge of some external reality that is of interest or rather a knowledge which is participation in a being which is us as well as those rocks and rattlesnakes out there. I’ve dealt with this general issue in many and sundry essays and a few books including some novels; the freely available book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, is particularly important in this context.
My somewhat voluminous writings, most available for free downloading, are described in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.