Thursday Thinking - Gettysburg

Tuesday of this week marked the 150th anniversary of the second day of Battle at Gettysburg. David Brooks wrote an opinion column on Monday's New York Times describing the psychological perspective of the soldiers who fought, as described in Allen Guelzo's new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. Brooks goes on to contrast the politics and sacrifice of that day with the special interest politics and cynicism of today.

I'm not sure Brooks is right. Does he make a valid point, or is he just romanticizing a naive nationalism of a bygone era? What do you think? Click Here to read Brooks' piece, "Why They Fought."

Excerpts from Brooks' column:

In our current era, as the saying goes, we take that which is lower to be more real. We generally believe that soldiers under the gritty harshness of war are not thinking about high ideals like gallantry. They are just trying to get through the day or protect their buddies. Since World War I, as Hemingway famously put it, abstract words like “honor” and “glory” and “courage” often seem obscene and pretentious. Studies of letters sent home by soldiers in World War II suggest that grand ideas were remote from their daily concerns.

But Civil War soldiers were different. In his 1997 book “For Cause and Comrades,” James M. McPherson looked at the private letters Civil War soldiers sent to their loved ones. As McPherson noted, they ring with “patriotism, ideology, concepts of duty, honor, manhood and community.”

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These letter writers, and many of the men at Gettysburg, were not just different than most of us today because their language was more high flown and earnest. There was probably also a greater covenantal consciousness, a belief that they were born in a state of indebtedness to an ongoing project, and they would inevitably be called upon to pay these debts, to come square with the country, even at the cost of their lives. Makes today’s special interest politics look kind of pathetic.