Moving is one of life’s most stressful, ­time-­consuming, and expensive experiences. It’s also a sacred American rite, our version of the ancestral adventures of immigration and the frontier. Unless prompted by disaster of one sort or another, moving may be the most important form the individual pursuit of utopia can take, a brave and insouciant gamble that the future will be tangibly better than the past. If owning your own home is often described as the American dream, aspiring to a bigger and better one is an expression of the national faith that the best is yet to come. A new house is a new ­life.

To keep searching for the place where we will at last feel truly at home, truly ourselves, is to throw the dice with a recklessness sometimes reminiscent of Pickett’s Charge. Conversely, to stay put for decades at a time is to be unimaginative, a bit stodgy, almost European in one’s avoidance of risk. No wonder adversity in the subprime mortgage market is causing such loud and lingering rumbles. What is at stake is not only the stability of the larger economy but something psy­ch­ologically even more ­important—­a shared ideology of constant and universal mobility, the conviction that anyone who can plunk down five percent has an inalienable right to the pursuit of real ­estate.

According to an ­often-­quoted figure from the U.S. Census Bureau, the statistically average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime. The ­better ­educated and more affluent tend to move longer distances. About 60 percent of ­native-­born Americans live in the state where they were born, which means that 40 percent don’t. Between 2005 and 2006 some 40 million people changed addresses, almost 14 percent of the entire population, which is actually below the historical average for the period since the government started keeping records in 1948. One reason for the small decline may be the aging of the nation (older people move less); another is the rise in homeownership (owners move less often than renters, though, according to ­real ­estate professionals, they still take flight after an average of five to seven years). A third reason may be that most of us now own such a godawful amount of stuff that the mere thought of packing is ­unbearable.

Revealingly, of the many motives people give for moving, the desire for new quarters is overwhelmingly the most common. Moving for practical reasons such as a change of job or of family circumstances is less prevalent than relocating out of an urge to climb the housing ladder. Acquiring a bigger, more comfortable house, or one in a preferable location, seems to be a nearly inevitable corollary of ownership as soon as one can afford ­it—­maybe sooner, judging by the number of ­home ­loan defaults recently. Anything with less than 2,000 finished square feet and two full baths is apt to be described by ­real ­estate agents as a “starter home,” while “McMansion” has been rapidly transformed from a term of derision employed by affluent intellectuals to a more-or-less neutral name for the large, highly visible tract houses that much of the middle class aspires to. If what you really yearn for in life is an 8,000-­square-­foot ­vinyl-­sided simulacrum of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg with twin heat pumps and garaging for six cars, there are a whole lot of people who share your taste and a corresponding number of builders who can make it happen, as a drive through most new exurban developments will ­confirm.

The risk and drama involved in pulling up stakes to head for suburbia are often underappreciated by those whose parents or grandparents made the transition long ago, as well as by cultural commentators who make their living on Manhattan Island. Yet the panic and disorientation that seize you when your whole life is in boxes and there’s no turning back represent some bond with the emotions of immigrant and pioneer ancestors. According to one survey, it takes an average of two years before the trauma of moving wears off and people feel at home again. If change in the abstract is good, as Americans are taught to believe, then uprooting yourself and your family for a new place, however humdrum and perhaps nearby, must be not only a praiseworthy act of faith in the mysterious future, but an expression of confidence that new communities can be created from scratch. After all, immigrants to America and their descendants have been doing it for more than four centuries.

Alan Wolfe, a distinguished sociologist of religion who has studied American values for a long time, places the epic ­20th-­century movement to the suburbs in judicious historical perspective: “No doubt selfish motives were involved in the lure of suburbia: a home of one’s own, a desire to be seen as successful, the two-car garage. But even with all that, the choice of suburbia was a choice in favor of a particular version of morality, one that resonated with utopian versions of the good life.” 

 columnist David Brooks, the poet laureate of the contemporary exurbs, makes the same point even more emphatically: “Why do people uproot their families from California, New York, Ohio, and elsewhere and move into new developments in Arizona or Nevada or North Carolina, imagining their kids at high schools that haven’t even been built yet, picturing themselves with new friends they haven’t yet met, fantasizing about ­touch-­football games on lawns that haven’t been seeded? . . . To grasp that longing, you have to take seriously the central cliché of American life: the American dream.” In what often seem to be the most mundane aspects of their daily lives, ordinary Americans really are searching for ­paradise.

My grandfather's house and garden reflected his self-creation as a fully enfranchised 20-century American.

In this respect, as in so many others, Abraham Lincoln remains the representative American. Born in a hovel in Kentucky, he moved as a child to Indiana, where his improvident father pursued a success that never came. Every reader of American history knows the anecdote in which the ambitious but penniless young lawyer, invited by a storekeeper named Joshua Speed to share his room in the frontier village of Springfield, Illinois, set down the saddlebags that contained all he owned and announced, “Well, Speed, I’m moved.” But in a fairly short time, Lincoln achieved the affluence that had eluded his father. One major result was a house, unprepossessing at first but improved and enlarged by its prospering owner, that has become a national park and a shrine for close to half a million pilgrims a ­year.

More than Monticello or Mount Vernon, which were built on inherited estates, Lincoln’s home represents the aspirations and accomplishments of democratic America, the land where all men are said to be created equal and a home of your own is a national promise. Lincoln’s vision of paradise, hitched to an ambition his junior law partner called “a little engine that knew no rest,” led him from Springfield to the White House. It led the nation to the two most important social enactments of our entire history, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead Act. Both of them drastically enhanced the freedom of ordinary people to move at their own volition; both took effect the same day. Henceforth, geographic and social mobility would be even more closely ­intertwined.

Once upon a time, the proprietor of a James River plantation proudly informed me that his children were the 10th generation of their family to live in the same house, which an ancestor had begun constructing in 1723. Even in Tidewater Virginia so much continuous history in one place is unusual, and although the stability it represents holds a certain attraction (as did the spectacular property to which the plantation owner was heir), stasis seems somehow out of keeping with the main impulses of American life. Why bother leaving the Old World in the first place if you then spend eternity almost at the port of arrival? Just as we admire what we interpret as the durable harmony of ­so-­called indigenous communities but wouldn’t dream of living such a life ourselves, so the most venerable American roots, on the rare occasions when we uncover them, seem like something we might at best pay a qualified tribute, then bury ­again.

To nearly all of us, real life, modern life, means moving on, not standing still. The Homestead Act, which settled much of the West with intrepid newcomers who traded ­back­breaking work for land of their own, is among the most admired pieces of legislation in the checkered history of Congress. By the same token, the most reviled Supreme Court opinion of recent years was the 

 decision of 2005, in which five justices declared it constitutional for local governments (in this case the city of New London, Connecticut) to seize whole neighborhoods of modest houses through the exercise of eminent domain and turn the land over to private developers. 

 was one of those rare cases in which both liberal and conservative voters found the majority decision outrageous. It left nearly everyone with a sour taste reminiscent of 

, John Steinbeck’s novel about Dust Bowl refugees, in which the rich use the law to seize the houses and land of the poor. We all know people who started from scratch and made the desert or its equivalent bloom. Most of us, in fact, are related to ­them.

My paternal grandfather, the first member of his family born in the New World, was prophetically named Adam and began life in a Manhattan tenement at the corner of First Street and First Avenue. As a child, he moved repeatedly up and across town while his father tried in vain to make a decent living as a porter, shoemaker, and tailor. In desperation, the family migrated for a few years to what is now Jersey City, where they truck-farmed in an apparently idyllic interlude between hardships typical of working-class life in the late 19th century. At 12 Adam dropped out of school and went to work for a druggist, then for a succession of ­immigrant-­owned grocery businesses, moving from one run-of-the-mill apartment to another. In 1905, at the age of 25, feeling frustrated with himself and stifled by his close ­German-­American community, he enlisted in the Seventh ­Cavalry.

Incongruous a ­landing ­place as the cavalry sounds for a young man from the New York slums, the Army, then as now, was one of the most common routes to Americanization and advancement for immigrants and their children. The first thing it did for my grandfather was take him out of New York and into a more mobile, less timid America. The second was to teach him a useful trade—pharmacology. What he learned in the Army would be valuable throughout what proved to be more than a ­half-­century in the pharmaceutical business. The civilian life he returned to a few years later was very different from the one he had left. He was not only more mature but far more familiar with life beyond the Hudson. He had learned to move. In 1910 he married my grandmother, and within a few years they had two sons, Robert and John, whose names bore no connection to the community from which their father had escaped. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, my grandfather forbade his wife ever to speak German again at home. Meanwhile, increasing prosperity led first to a large apartment on the Upper West Side, then, when he was 40, to a house in Passaic, New Jersey, part of a ­post-­World War I suburban development on what had been raw fields a few months ­earlier.

What I remember most about that modest stucco house, from visits early in my childhood, is the garden my grandfather contrived on his eighth of an acre. It was an astonishing array of neat flowerbeds, carefully balanced and bordered with an aesthetic sense that was surprising for a person of his background. Perhaps the interlude in Jersey City had left its mark, or maybe the human affinity for flowers is innate and needs only opportunity to express itself. He even remembered the birds and what a man with his experiences might easily have imagined to be their own pleasure in mobility and freedom, a utopia after their particular fashion. The dozens of brightly painted birdhouses he built over the decades became heirlooms to his children and grandchildren. My grandfather’s house and garden alike reflected his ­self-­creation as a fully enfranchised ­20th-­century ­American.

If you spend your whole life in pursuit of paradise, you must be perpetually dissatisfied with the place where you actually live, with the result that your moves are apt to be frequent and frustrating. That’s the more feverish, less happy side of the American dream. At its most extreme, such restlessness is incapable of fulfillment in this world. After some 45 days working in space, John M. Grunsfeld, a NASA employee who helps maintain the Hubble Space Telescope, declared, “I finally found a place where I feel at home. This is where I belong: in space. It was a disappointment to have to come home, even though I wanted to see my family and friends.” Yet if he could have spent the rest of his life on a space shuttle, one suspects he would soon have found new reasons for ­dissatisfaction.

Whatever there may be of utopia appears to lie in the search itself. Americans always believe the next place will be better.

On a more earth-bound level, I had an uncle, the son of immigrants, who could never stand to live in the same location for more than a few years. His successful career in advertising and public relations allowed him to move as often as he liked—when he wanted to try out a distant city, there was always a job waiting for him. This perpetual need to be on the move drove his wife (and eventually their two children) crazy. They began married life in New York in the early 1950s. During the years when I knew them best, they successively inhabited a turn-of-the-century mansion with a carriage drive in an exurb of Cleveland, another big house in Pittsburgh, a farmhouse in the Berkshires, something similar in Bucks County, ­and—­after my uncle retired from the last of his many ­jobs—­an elegant antebellum house in a sunny Savannah square. But something went wrong again. The taxes were too high or there were too many tourists, or perhaps it was termites. They sold the house and moved first to an apartment, then to a modern townhouse nearer the ­beach.

Surely, we thought, this would be the end of it. But my uncle felt the need for one last, spectacular move. A northeastern liberal, he suddenly discovered that he found Georgia politics offensive. His son lived in San Francisco. What could be more stereotypically American than a move to California just before you turn 80? Never mind the fact that neither he nor his wife had ever lived west of Chicago. My aunt’s reluctance stood no chance at all against the compulsion that had possessed her husband for so long. Off they went once ­more.

For people like him, the destination seems to matter less than simply moving ­on—­the sheer act of assuming a new identity in a new place, adapting to a new community, making friends again, searching out new stores and libraries, banks and doctors, routes and routines. Whatever there may be of utopia appears to lie in the search ­itself.

Nonetheless, immigrants and natives alike, we always believe the next place will be better. Whatever happens to credit, to border enforcement, or to a family over a span of generations, the gamble works out often enough for Americans to remain the world champions of voluntary mobility and the special variety of optimism that underlies it. Even Steinbeck’s migrant Joad family found some of their hopes fulfilled at the end of their epic trek across the ­Southwest.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Think of the most disastrous move in history, the Donner family’s carefully planned relocation from Illinois to California in 1846. After taking a wrong turn in the desert, the Donners and their fellow travelers spent a brutal winter trapped in the Sierras, where the survivors avoided starvation by expedients that turned their misfortunes into one of the ­best-­known legends of the frontier. Experiences like that would have eaten up the resolve of a less driven nation. Yet the widely publicized story of the Donner Party deterred few ­19th-­century Americans from setting off beyond the wide Missouri. And so it continues, whether the projected move is to the suburbs or the desert, across the street or across the country. An insatiable national urge that incompetent navigation, hostile Indians, blizzards, hunger, and even cannibalism couldn’t stop is unlikely to be slowed for long by misdoings in the mortgage ­market.

 Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America, 

among other books. At present he lives in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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Whether in covered wagons or station wagons, Americans have always hit the road, driven by the belief that a better life lies over the hill and around the bend.

Moving: A Great American Tradition

Almost everybody who cares about science or ideas knows by now that 2009 is the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s 

, as well as the 200th anniversary of its author’s birth. 

 is rightly hailed by scientists and non-scientists alike as one of the foundations of modern thought, but it was far from the only important work that came off the presses in 1859. While we might well discount Samuel Smiles’s mega-bestseller 

, the eponym of a genre that flourishes like kudzu, the same momentous year brought forth John Stuart Mill’s 

, the most passionate treatise on human freedom ever written, and a perennially sacred scripture to the world’s civil libertarians.

 bases its argument on a single elegant principle, the sort of all-illuminating idea that makes new readers wonder why they never thought of it themselves. In Darwin’s case, the key is the evolution of living forms through natural selection. With modifications accumulated over a century and a half of scientific progress, especially in the newer field of genetics, evolutionary theory as Darwin conceived it is now taken for granted by virtually everyone who works in science or accepts its most established findings. Those who still argue against it on religious grounds are far outside the educated mainstream.

Mill’s intellectual reputation has followed a somewhat different course. Although he remains a revered figure among feminists and other reformers of many stripes, as well as one of the best known 19th-century philosophers, the argument that propels his most famous work remains as hotly debated today as it was in 1859. Its controversial status owes something to present circumstances—times of economic distress are proverbially unfavorable to individualism and its expression—but also to the uncompromising way Mill (1806–73) framed his position.

“The object of this essay,” he wrote near the beginning, “is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

In his autobiography, Mill correctly predicted that “the 

 is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written.” Why was this little manifesto neither left behind as a relic in the history of political thought nor embraced as received opinion? The argument, if not the style, seems up to date while still attracting criticism from those on both right and left who want to compel people to take or avoid actions because doing so would be better for them. “The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society,” Mill insists, “is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Mill’s absolute statement, intended “to govern absolutely,” still sounds radical in a way that long-ago political assertions rarely do. Like its author, 

 is harder to pin down ideologically than its reputation suggests. Although Mill has often been described as the patron saint of liberalism, his dictum hardly sounds liberal by today’s standards. It would rule out requiring people to save for retirement or do a great many other things that modern democratic governments routinely demand of their citizens. On the other hand, few conservatives feel quite comfortable with the notion that sovereign individuals can do whatever they want so long as they cause no harm (a slippery concept) to anyone else. Moreover, Mill explicitly excludes the operations of business from his principle on the grounds that business affects other people and can properly be regulated.

 could be called a libertarian book, but much of its argument runs contrary to what those who call themselves libertarians typically believe. Despite his ringing credo, Mill does not base his theory of liberty on the concept of innate, self-evident human rights that the Declaration of Independence immortalized and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights later called “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Nor does he make much reference to the enacted laws, royal grants, and judicial opinions from which English liberties were built up piecemeal over many centuries. His starting point is utilitarianism—the doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only rational foundation for morals and legislation. Modern utilitarianism had been largely formulated by the philosophical reformer Jeremy Bentham, of whom Mill’s father, James, was a disciple. The younger Mill was brought up as an adherent and remained one throughout his life, though with growing ambivalence.

As a theory of ethics and government, utilitarianism retains considerable influence, which becomes understandable when one tries to think of a better basis for moral action than increasing happiness or reducing misery. As a foundation for individual liberty, however, it shows some major cracks. Suppose, for example, that a majority in Congress were to decide that mandatory health insurance would, on balance, increase Americans’ happiness. Such a decision would seem to meet the utilitarian standard, but what happens then to the freedom of the individual not to be coerced for his own sake?

More damagingly, what if in 1859, also the year of John Brown’s raid, an apologist for slavery had argued that the peculiar institution contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest number so long as slaves were a relatively small minority? What could Mill, who (like Bentham) strongly opposed slavery, have said to the contrary without temporarily abandoning utilitarianism in favor of an inherent human right to be free? Although Mill later published an essay called “Utilitarianism” in which he tried to reconcile its contradictions and his own, he never effectively answered such questions.

Mill defines liberty, or freedom (he uses the terms interchangeably), as the absence of coercion by law or public opinion, or even more simply as “doing what one desires.” In mid-19th-century England, he felt, while legal limitations on speech and action were less onerous than they had been, public opinion had taken their place in many areas of life where individuals should be left to their own choices. One of Mill’s lifelong concerns was “the tyranny of the majority”—the phrase was borrowed from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 

(1835–40)—which both men feared was a nearly inevitable consequence of democracy. It led, at best, to conformity, at worst, to a stifling of the originality and vigor a society needed to develop further—development of both the individual and his society being foremost among the advantages of freedom as Mill saw them.

The possibility that some individuals might choose not to develop, not to live up to what an idealistic intellectual regarded as their highest potential, was one that Mill acknowledged only intermittently and reluctantly. The general principle he lays out corresponds to “negative freedom,” a concept later popularized by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, but the utilitarian Mill somewhat paradoxically argues that individual liberty is justified mainly by its social results. (“Positive freedom,” in Berlin’s words, means the specious liberty “to lead one prescribed form of life”—precisely what Mill opposed.)

Although his deeply Romantic feelings about freedom sometimes overpowered his utilitarian reasoning, he could never quite have endorsed the dictum of another Victorian liberal, Lord Acton, that liberty is not a means to a higher political end but is itself the highest political end. On the contrary, Mill asserts that “liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.”

This utilitarian sense that freedom, far from being an entitlement, needs to be vindicated by its fruits, sometimes leads Mill to tie himself in knots. In the book’s second chapter, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” he announces that three kinds of opinions exist: those that are true, those that are false, and those that are a mixture of the two. If a widely held belief is false, then an individual or minority that challenges it, however unpopular their views may be, is doing a public service. Galileo’s assertion that the earth orbits the sun, which he was forced to recant, is an obvious example, though one that Mill surprisingly fails to mention. He does point out that in the long history of superstition, persecution has often succeeded in quelling unpopular beliefs, and that complete freedom of speech is essential for truth to prevail over the almost gravitational pull of what we now call groupthink.

Hardly anybody would quarrel with this part of the argument. Similarly, where a prevailing belief is partly true and partly not, few would dispute that free debate offers the best possibility of improvement. But of course, the question of which category a particular opinion falls into—true, partly true, or demonstrably false—is the very point at issue. Should those scientists who believe that the evidence for man-made global warming is too uncertain to justify predictions of impending catastrophe be given a respectful hearing? By and large, schools and the news media have decided otherwise. Are the main precepts of contemporary feminism open to dispute? Not in most universities.

How to resolve cases in which the parties disagree irrevocably on the criteria to be applied, as in the claim that Darwin was wrong and God created all existing species either in six days or over a long span of millennia, is even more controversial. Scientists are nearly unanimous that such ideas should not be taught in public schools even if evolution is given equal time, and the federal courts have consistently upheld them, though polls suggest that most Americans support teaching both points of view. (This sort of disagreement is the chief reason Mill believed that governments should not run the schools.)

Mill tied himself in knots with his belief that liberty is not a birthright but something to be justified by its fruits.

What Mill would have thought about the substance of this particular dispute is impossible to say, but his impassioned claim that even the most far-fetched views must be freely stated in order that the truth may be better understood sounds like a desperate argument for free speech. In many European countries, including Britain, making derogatory assertions about other races or ethnic groups is now a criminal offense. Statements whose legality (if not social acceptability) Americans take for granted can lead to jail sentences, not only in Europe but in Canada, where the question of what may lawfully be said about Muslims has become a point of heated contention. The British writer David Irving was actually tried and imprisoned in Austria in 2006 on a charge of denying the Holocaust.

If free speech has to be justified in hard cases by its social benefits, you have a situation very different from that in the United States, where even obnoxious expressions of opinion such as Irving’s are protected because the First Amendment was based on an Enlightenment notion of inalienable individual rights. It would be difficult to argue persuasively that advocating incendiary racial views advances the interests of society as a whole, and therefore, by Mill’s utilitarian criterion, easy to urge censorship. Yet one suspects he would have pleaded that such advocacy be tolerated, so long as it carried no incitement to violence. Likewise, Mill probably would have parted company with those who condemn scientific inquiry into the explosive topic of the connections between race and intelligence, even though their arguments often rest on the utilitarian premise that such research can be socially harmful.

Mill runs into the same problems when he discusses “individuality as one of the elements of well-being.” Living in a time when, he believed, conformity was increasing, he valued diversity to the point of eccentricity and thought men and women should be free to live their lives as they chose so long as—returning to his original caveat—they caused no harm to others. An extensive literature has arisen on whether human actions can really be divided between what Mill calls “self-regarding” and “other-regarding” categories. A more basic difficulty is that, once again, he grounds individual freedom precariously on its social consequences.

It seems not to be enough that if individuals are free to pursue happiness in whatever way they wish, happiness will be maximized one person at a time. Instead, Mill feels a need to show that society—the ghostly abstraction that in other parts of his argument presents the greatest obstacle to liberty—profits collectively from the myriad choices of its members because it thereby avoids stagnation. In this tortured line of reasoning, liberty itself becomes a form of utilitarian social engineering. If it could be proved that rigidly stable societies were happier than innovative ones, as many social theorists have argued, then Mill’s rationale for the freedom of individuals would collapse.

Mill would have been on firmer ground had he based his “simple principle” on an inherent human entitlement to live as one chooses, but even in the land of Thomas Jefferson he would have found the same conflict between liberty and other values. As Berlin wrote in revisiting the same issues a hundred years after Mill, “The extent of a man’s, or a people’s, liberty to choose to live as they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values, of which equality, or justice, or happiness, or security, or public order are perhaps the most obvious examples. For this reason, it cannot be unlimited.”

Since 2001 the war on terror has highlighted, as previous wars did, the multiple difficulties of balancing security and freedom. Reviling the Bush administration for shredding the Constitution and abolishing American liberties quickly became an academic and journalistic ritual, conducted many thousands of times with complete impunity. 

 won praise and prizes for revealing classified intelligence programs; no reporter or editor was ever prosecuted. More than one Hollywood director fearlessly portrayed the United States as a fascist dictatorship bent on enslaving the world for oil, and nobody ever got a knock on the door from the FBI. If Mill were still around, he would surely have something to say about the interrogation or detention of persons accused of being enemy combatants, the authority required to eavesdrop on suspected terrorist conversations, and other issues that remain conundrums for the new administration; but he would also observe that freedom of expression seems strikingly unimpaired.

Other anomalies in present-day America would look quite familiar to him. In Connecticut and Massachusetts (and briefly in California, until a 2008 referendum), court decisions have made it possible for two people of the same sex to marry—something new in history. If they want to visit a bar that caters to smoke-consenting adults and exercise their age-old freedom to light up, however, they have to find another state, one of the shrinking number where smoking in enclosed public places is still allowed. As Mill shrewdly pointed out, whenever an old prejudice dies, a new one takes its place, as though the amount of tolerance in human nature were fixed and constant.

The Mormons, whose troubled history was widely publicized in 19th-century Europe, succumbed to government pressure more than a century ago and abandoned plural marriage, but male members of dissident sects in the Southwest who continue to practice it are still tried and imprisoned periodically. As a leading supporter of women’s rights, Mill thoroughly disapproved of polygamy, and like most Englishmen he regarded Mormon revelations as fraudulent. Even so, he wrote, as long as women participated in plural marriages voluntarily, and “other countries are not asked to recognize such unions” or allow their own citizens to enter them, Mormons should be left free to practice their way of life in what was then the remote territory of Utah.

His conclusion sounds very much like one of the fragile compromises in effect nowadays to deal with same-sex marriage outside those states that recognize it. Opponents of same-sex marriage have often pointed out the inconsistency of arguing in its favor while continuing to criminalize another form of marriage that has been common in many cultures. Today Mill would probably urge that on both issues the law should follow where his principles led him in 1859, though he might well share the mixed feelings of most Americans contemplating legal alterations to traditional monogamy.

I once had a teacher who was outspoken in her devotion to the American ideal of liberty, though whenever it threatened to become operational among her unruly charges, she would hastily point out that liberty is not license. She might just as well have added, as the British union leader Hugh Scanlon did in a 1977 interview, “Liberty in my view is conforming to majority opinion.” Lord Scanlon (as he became) was on the far left politically, but his point of view is equally common on the right, as well as among people who are unconscious of having any strong political views at all. It coexists in complete harmony with the contemporary American style of mass individualism, in which vast numbers of people defiantly express their uniqueness by dressing alike, aggressively voicing the same opinions derived from television or the Internet, and buying the same products as everyone else in their peer group.

Whenever an old prejudice dies, Mill observed, a new one takes its place.

Mill would undoubtedly have felt that something essential had gotten lost, that the security of conformity was now masquerading as liberty. He might also have noticed with some chagrin that all these individualists firmly believe that a tyrannical force called society was oppressing them, and that their resistance, however hard an observer might be pressed to find it, was courageous and even heroic.

Nevertheless, he would probably have found these historical ups and downs unsurprising. Although an optimist about human possibilities, he rarely expected too much from human nature. America was the land of hope, immune to some European contagions, but in 1859 it was also the one advanced Western society that still practiced slavery. Of less importance but still worthy of criticism, he thought, was the moralistic intolerance of many Americans toward (among other things) alcohol and displays of affluence that would have seemed quite normal in Europe.

As would Lord Scanlon, a century later, too many Americans in 1859 believed in individual freedom only when it did not violate what a British prohibitionist group called “social rights.” The prohibition of alcoholic beverages, which had so far made little headway in Britain but was now law in some American states, would be only one consequence of social rights. Other groups could use the same principle, Mill warned, against tobacco and other substances that were considered dangerous to their users. (In 1859, opiates and similar drugs were still legal in both Britain and America.) The theory of social rights, in effect an insistence that no one must ever behave in a way that offended others’ sensibilities, “acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them.” By uniting political power with the intimidating force of majority opinion, the growth of democracy encouraged just such threats to liberty.

Mill, like Tocqueville, was convinced that whatever its defects, America represented the future of Europe. Both freedom and the growing homogenization of modern societies were more advanced there than in Britain. Walt Whitman put the paradox squarely: “One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.” Since Mill and Whitman’s time, not only democratic ideals, but most of the technology that simultaneously advances and retards individuality, from the automobile to the Internet, have spread from west to east. For most Americans, the car ranks with the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of personal autonomy. At first glance, nothing could be more liberating than the ability to drive wherever you choose, whenever you want. Yet few inventions have so increased government control over everyday life.

Governments build and own the roads, tax and regulate every machine that drives on them, bail the manufacturers out in hard times, license the drivers, install lights that peremptorily command us to stop or go, police the highways, and set mandatory standards for everything from speed to emissions to the age at which one can begin driving. As in other areas of life, some of the rules would strike Mill as incomprehensible. For example, in most jurisdictions drivers and passengers are required to protect themselves with seatbelts, but in most states it remains perfectly legal to use a cell phone while driving, a practice that causes numerous fatal accidents every year. In spite of everything, most drivers feel free on an interstate highway so long as the traffic keeps moving.

 refuses to fade away partly because its contradictions and confusions are much like our own. Is freedom really an end in itself, or a means to something else? What obligations does each individual have to all the other individuals who together make up a society? Governments in Britain, America, and other democratic countries are far more powerful and intrusive than they were in Mill’s day, sometimes interfering with liberty and at other times protecting it against other forces. The long-term trend toward bigger government shows few signs of reversing, to put it mildly. Yet on the whole, speech is freer than it was—although its equally important counterpart, the freedom to keep one’s secrets, has been greatly diminished by changing attitudes and technology—and so are many choices about how to live. Far more people possess the resources to exercise their liberties.

How would Mill balance his “very simple principle” with his earnest belief in cooperation and civic duty if he had to consider the prospect of mandatory national service for the young? How would he set about evaluating the tradeoffs between individual liberty and collective action as governments undertook to control something as comprehensive as the climate? Predicting which sides he would take in particular controversies is often impossible, but his searching ambivalence about freedom and the other good things that sometimes conflict with it may be the strongest reason that 

Only the future, Mill felt, would show whether the democratic societies that he and many of his contemporaries saw as both desirable and unavoidable could overcome their tyrannical side effects. “It is then,” he predicted, “that the teachings of the 

 will have their greatest value. And it is to be feared that they will retain that value a long time.”

 and other publications. His most recent book is

 Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of PostCultural America (2000).

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Wherever there's a debate over gay marriage, free speech, or even smoking in public places, the arguments John Stuart Mill made in “On Liberty” are still in the thick of the action.

John Stuart Mill's “Very Simple Principle”

As the Civil War Sesquicentennial approaches cruising speed, North and South look a great deal more alike than they did on the eve of the war’s last great anniversary just 50 years ago. That much-heralded celebration coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement with a precision that was almost too good to be true. A century after Gettysburg, President John F. Kennedy had just proposed the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When the centennial of Appomattox rolled around, Congress was about to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and few people were paying much attention to ceremonies on old battlefields.

The fact that the White House is now occupied by a man born during the Civil War Centennial to a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya represents a historical development hardly imaginable at the time, yet all but the most regressive now accept it as perfectly natural. The major civil rights laws of the 1960s are so well established that whatever disagreements may arise in their application, few Americans understand—or can even imagine—what life was like without them. Sometimes progress takes the form of historical amnesia.

Yet the question of what the Civil War was about, and therefore what was actually won and lost, is less settled than you might expect after 150 years. Both sides fought with determination, but their motives were shifting and sometimes ambiguous. To add to the confusion, as soon as conflict ended, the losing party readjusted its position sufficiently to win back in peacetime not only a more positive historical reputation, but some very tangible benefits.

The major civil rights laws of the 1960s are so well established that whatever disagreements may arise in their application, few Americans understand—or can even imagine—what life was like without them. Sometimes progress takes the form of historical amnesia.

When Jefferson Davis of Mississippi resigned from the U.S. Senate after his state left the Union—the second to do so, after South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860—he made a much-praised speech explaining his reasons. The essence of it was simple: “We but tread in the paths of our fathers when we proclaim our independence . . . not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children.” Defenders of the South since the war have taken much the same position. The 11 states that briefly constituted the Confederacy left the Union, they have said, for much the same reason the original 13 colonies left the British Empire. They fought to protect what they considered inalienable rights.

Not only did most secessionists believe in the constitutionality of their actions, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James M. McPherson has argued; they did indeed represent “traditional rights and views” about the relationship between the states and central government, views about which the North had largely changed its mind since the adoption of the Constitution. That is not to say that slavery was not the fundamental issue, in McPherson’s view; it was indeed slavery, he asserts, that made the North-South division deep and irreconcilable. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, along with a Republican Congress hostile to the interests of the South, led those who favored secession—an overwhelming majority of white Southerners, McPherson concludes—to feel that the North had violated the compact embodied by the Union. Secession amounted to a preemptive counterrevolution against the Republicans’ revolution.

Whether or not they owned slaves, Southerners almost universally professed the doctrine known then and now as states’ rights, grounded in the federal system as originally understood, at least by the followers of Thomas Jefferson. When the South lost, states’ rights lost with it, and the unquestionable supremacy of the central government has been with us ever since. That abstract phrase “states’ rights” as used before the Civil War immediately prompts the question, states’ rights to what? “The right to own slaves,” McPherson explains, “the right to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government.”

Not only did most secessionists believe in the constitutionality of their actions, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James M. McPherson has argued; they did indeed represent “traditional rights and views” about the relationship between the states and central government, views about which the North had largely changed its mind since the adoption of the Constitution.

There is, of course, no logical connection between local autonomy and racial oppression. Insofar as they coincided in this instance, it was an accident of history, as some perceptive contemporaries recognized. Bound up with the defense of an odious institution to which the South had committed itself in word and deed were some positive values—the federal system, limited government, the defense of one’s homeland against long odds—that many Americans in both the North and the South would continue to profess. Lord Acton, the English apostle of liberty, strongly supported the Confederacy while loathing slavery. “History,” he explained, “does not work with bottled essences, but with active combinations.” Acton defended his position by arguing that a federal structure like the American one, whose balance of central and local powers he felt the North was destroying, would be the best means for a future united Europe to avoid the dangers of nationalism. He was a man in some ways clearly ahead of his time.

For the seven states that seceded first, however, distinguishing between slavery and states’ rights was a waste of breath. These were the Cotton States, and four of them—South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas—issued mini-declarations of independence explaining what possessed them to end a union that had begun in revolution 85 years earlier. Fortunately for the Confederacy, whose success depended in large part on achieving recognition and assistance from antislavery Europe, these declarations, with their tedious legalisms and tendentious histories of the slavery controversy in American politics, went largely unread. South Carolina complained that Northerners had systematically shirked their constitutional obligation to return escaped slaves and were now inciting “servile insurrection.” Texas made similar claims in pseudo-Jeffersonian language, adding for good measure that the federal government had failed to protect white Texans from raids by hostile Indians and Mexican “banditti.” In a rare lapidary sentence, Jefferson Davis’s Mississippi candidly proclaimed: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”

Because slavery is one feature of the American past that long ago lost all its defenders, explaining the war solely in these terms almost requires portraying it as a conflict of good against evil. Many academic historians who fervently support diplomatic compromise and peace processes in today’s world largely endorse the Lincoln administration’s refusal of those means in the 1860s and its determination to prevail unconditionally, no matter what the scale of death and devastation. This shift in the interpretations of historians became dominant after the civil rights movement and can be seen even in the titles of major works, as the Mississippi novelist Shelby Foote’s evenhanded

 (1958–1974) was soon challenged by McPherson’s more militant

 (1988). The Lincoln administration’s gradual transition from reluctant prosecutor of a war undertaken merely to save the Union to the Emancipation Proclamation and, by 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment, is one of the familiar legends of American history.

Less familiar is the postbellum change of emphasis by Southern writers in their depiction of the motives behind the Confederate cause, from the defense of slavery to the more abstract and sympathetic protection of limited government, states’ rights, and the freedom of a local majority to decide its own political destiny. Identifying their new nation inextricably with slavery made foreign support more difficult to attract, especially once the North decided it was explicitly fighting for emancipation. By the same token, once defeat came, Southerners who wished to save something from the ruins needed to redefine their reasons for resisting so valiantly. This necessity applied not only to the historical record, but also to their immediate political needs in grappling with Reconstruction.

Edward A. Pollard, a Richmond newspaper editor, began writing a history of the war almost as soon as it began and published several installments while it was still going on. In explaining secession to Southern readers in 1862, he recounted at length the controversy over slavery from its beginnings through the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, and Bleeding Kansas down to what he saw as the North’s treachery in embracing Hinton Rowan Helper’s antislavery tract 

 (1857) and John Brown’s effort to start a slave rebellion with his raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Treachery was, Pollard maintained, the basis of nearly all Northern politics, and was demonstrated even by those Northerners who seemed to share Southern convictions about the scope of federal power: “While acting with the South on empty or accidental issues,” he complained, “the ‘State Rights’ men of the North were, for all practical purposes, the faithful allies of the open and avowed consolidationists on the question that most seriously divided the country—that of negro slavery.” Sneering at the successive compromises that had averted war for so long, Pollard praised the militancy of South Carolina and ended his account of the war’s background with a portentous description of the state of affairs on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration: “Abolitionism and Fanaticism had not yet lapped blood. But reflecting men saw that the peace was deceitful and temporizing; that the temper of the North was impatient and dark; and that, if all history was not a lie, the first incident of bloodshed would be the prelude to a war of monstrous proportions.”

When Pollard published a complete version of his history for a national audience in 1866 under the title The Lost Cause, his account of the war’s background underwent considerable alteration. Although “a political North and a political South” were already recognized when the Constitution was adopted, slavery was not really the issue. “The slavery question is not to be taken as an independent controversy in American politics. It was not a moral dispute. It was the mere incident of a sectional animosity”—that is, a pretext for the North’s jealousy of the South’s greater power in the early Republic.

While protesting that Southern slavery “was really the mildest in the world,” Pollard declared tactfully that “we shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery.” As an institution, it was gone forever; defending it now would simply prejudice Northern readers further against the South. Instead, he repeated, “the slavery question was not a moral one in the North, unless, perhaps, with a few thousand persons of disordered conscience. It was significant only of a contest for political power, and afforded nothing more than a convenient ground of dispute between two parties, who represented not two moral theories, but hostile sections and opposite civilizations.” Needless to say, Southern civilization in Pollard’s eyes was more elevated and honorable than that of the “coarse and materialistic” North.

Pollard’s immensely popular book quickly became the standard Southern history of the war, a status it retained for decades in part because it made slavery a side issue in a war that was really fought by the South for states’ legitimate rights and by the North for sheer power. This position, still popular among Southern commemorative organizations and Confederate reenactors, made possible the abiding romantic image of the Lost Cause. It was not made up entirely out of whole cloth. As a Virginian, Pollard had pointed out even in 1862 that the states of the upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee) chose not to secede over Lincoln’s election and left the Union only when the North began a war of coercion against their departed sisters. Since Virginia was the most important Southern state, site of more battles than any other, and home of the preeminent Confederate hero, Robert E. Lee (a man who had reluctantly followed his reluctant state out of the Union), its motives and sufferings were crucial to rehabilitating the failed Confederacy itself.

Another newspaper editor, Henry Grady of Atlanta, proved even more successful at restoring the South’s honor by retouching the historical record. “The New South,” a much-reprinted 1886 speech Grady delivered to an audience of New Englanders, stands as a completed monument to a civilization that had fought gallantly for eminently moral reasons, lost through no fault of its own, and was now starting anew better than ever—a region of honorable gentlemen and pure ladies whom any nation would be proud to embrace as fellow citizens. After paying graphic tribute to the poor “hero in gray with a heart of gold” returning from Appomattox to a devastated homeland, he turned to the demise of slavery: “The South found her jewel in the toad’s head of defeat. The shackles that had held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the Negro slave were broken. Under the old regime, the Negroes were slaves to the South, the South was a slave to the system.” Without slavery, the South was far better off than it had been before the war. “The New South,” Grady announced, “presents a perfect democracy,” in which former masters and former slaves alike would experience “the light of a grander day.” It was an age of florid oratory.

When he spoke of the war itself, Grady, whose father had died for the Confederacy, was less conciliatory. “The South has nothing for which to apologize. She believes that the late struggle between the States was war and not rebellion, revolution and not conspiracy, and that her convictions were as honest as yours. I should be unjust to the dauntless spirit of the South and to my own convictions if I did not make this plain in this presence. The South has nothing to take back.” For Grady and his enthusiastic audiences, the outcome of the war spoke for itself, and his assurance that the New South fully accepted reunion and emancipation left no fundamental issues unresolved. As Shelby Foote described the beginnings of postwar harmony, “the victors acknowledged that the Confederates had fought bravely for a cause they believed was just and the losers agreed it was probably best for all concerned that the Union had been preserved.”

After 1865, then, Southern apologists hardly ever claimed that the country or the region would have been better off had slavery survived. States’ rights, of course, was another matter. A decade before Grady put the final rhetorical seal on it, the subtle alteration in the Southern position had encouraged Northerners to revert to what might be called “default federalism,” a more traditional understanding of the constitutional system modified only by the conclusion that slavery and secession had been settled for all time. Fifteen years after Fort Sumter, ordinary citizens in the North and their political leaders were looking for an exit strategy from a devastated, occupied, but still defiant South in the throes of the bitterly hated Reconstruction. The outcome of the 1876 presidential election was disputed amid massive fraud, and a commission ultimately had to settle it. The eventual result was a bargain that historians today, following C. Vann Woodward’s classic 

 (1951), uniformly denounce as the shameful beginning of an era of segregation and white supremacy that lasted until the middle of the 20th century.

The South agreed, in effect, to allow the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, to take office. The new president and congressional leadership agreed in turn to withdraw the last occupation troops from the South and let the vanquished run their ruined states according to their own prejudices. Broadly speaking, state governments were free to pass any laws that did not overtly challenge the authority of the federal government or outrage the elastic conscience of a national majority. So long as they made no attempt to secede or reinstitute slavery, white Southerners were free to build monuments to the Confederate soldier in every county seat, romanticize the Lost Cause to their hearts’ content, and deny the rights of citizenship to anyone with a visible fraction of African DNA.

This agreement, sometimes referred to as the Compromise of 1877, finally ended the Civil War, though at a heavy cost. That it sold out the recently freed slaves is beyond question. So, unfortunately, is the fact that a deal of this sort was unavoidable. If you force the inhabitants of 11 states to remain part of your country after defeating them in a conflict that took 600,000 lives, but shrink from ruling them indefinitely by martial law, you have to compromise sooner or later in ways that may distress future generations. As Woodward expressed it in a 1958 speech at Gettysburg College, the North had fought the war and imposed Reconstruction for three reasons: to save the Union, to abolish slavery, and, more equivocally, to bring about racial equality. The first two aims were achieved and soon accepted, however grudgingly, by the South. The third, seemingly assured by constitutional amendments and supporting legislation, was bargained away for most of another century.

“It would be an ironic, not to say tragic, coincidence,” Woodward wrote on the eve of the Centennial, “if the celebration of the anniversary took place in the midst of a crisis reminiscent of the one celebrated.” Now that that second crisis too is a matter of history, its timing a hundred years after secession seems nearly inevitable. By that time Southerners and Northerners had fought on the same side in two world wars, and the solidity of the Union was beyond question. The rusty, clanking apparatus of institutionalized inequality had finally become such a widely recognized contradiction to official American values, highlighted both by our Cold War adversary’s propaganda and our own television news broadcasts, that the days of the post–Civil War compromise were clearly numbered. Without ever fully agreeing on the rights and wrongs of the war itself, the nation at last attended to its most ignominious legacy—the hard bargain through which reunification had been accomplished.

(2000) and other books, writes frequently about the Civil War and historical memory. 

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A century and a half after the first state seceded from the Union, a lively debate over what caused the Civil War continues. 

America's Changeable Civil War

 online op-ed pages were surprised late last year when the two newspapers began blogging a series of events that had taken place a century and a half earlier, starting with the secession of South Carolina in December 1860 and leading within a few months to the Civil War’s first shots at Fort Sumter. Although mostly written by professional historians, these blogs resembled their political counterparts in the sense that they tended to be militantly one-sided. Their authors seemed to feel the need to stand with the North against disunion and, above all, against slavery.

It may seem a quaint moral affectation for historians to line up indignantly against a long-vanished and thoroughly discredited institution at this late date, but academic historiography of the Civil War has been moving in that direction since the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, which coincided with the war’s centennial. Many older historians believed that eventual reconciliation between North and South had led to the United States’ success as a society and world power in the 20th century, and therefore tried to give both sides their due while recognizing their historical distance from us. The newer tendency is to see the war solely in terms of slavery and evaluate the combatants in the light of today’s racial attitudes.

’ regular bloggers is Adam Goodheart, director of the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, at Washington College on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the most “Southern” region of that border state. In his new book about the war’s first months, Goodheart goes so far as to declare, “Americans today find it fairly easy to fathom the idea that there was a right side and a wrong side in World War II, a side that stood for freedom and a side that stood against it. . . . We find it harder, though—much harder than most people did in the 1860s—to accept that there was a right side and a wrong side in our own Civil War. It is difficult to fathom that millions of Americans could have fought as enemies of America.”

It’s hardly surprising that “most people” in the 1860s saw the war in terms of right and wrong; people engaged in warfare generally do. The problem for anyone who aspires to historical perspective is that Southerners saw the rights and wrongs, including the all-important issue of freedom, in the opposite way from Northerners. For us to approach the Civil War with the same reflexes we bring to contemporary politics (with the exception that we think radical Republicans back then were the good guys instead of the bad) obscures the pastness of the past, and allows us to adopt a smug pose toward one side. By the standards of today, after all, both North and South had huge moral blind spots.

Correctly emphasizing that without slavery there would have been no secession and no war does not mean that no other important issues were at stake. Yet the Civil War, Goodheart insists, “is a story of how some people clung to the past, while others sought the future; how a new generation of Americans arose to throw aside the cautious ways of its parents and embrace the revolutionary ideals of its grandparents.” It may be one sign of his distaste for ambiguity that he fails to notice how the second part of this statement applies at least as well to the seceding South as to the Unionist North.

Like other tillers of overworked historical fields, Goodheart tries to make a familiar story new by writing about (and, as much as possible, quoting from) individuals whose varied experiences add new perspectives. While these novelistic passages are well sourced and sometimes absorbing, Goodheart’s relentless stress on his moralistic thesis narrows the range of unfamiliar voices. All the characters he dwells on at length are antislavery Northerners, from future president James Garfield to Elmer Ellsworth, a young friend of President Abraham Lincoln, to Thomas Starr King, an abolitionist clergyman who helped save California for the Union.

Though the story is filled with foreshadowing, Goodheart’s main account ends portentously on July 4, 1861, a few weeks before the war’s first major battle at Manassas. The transformation of the Northern cause from merely restoring the prewar Union into launching a frontal assault on slavery still lay in the future, which gives the book a curiously prefatory feel.

and other books, writes frequently about the Civil War and historical memory. His most recent contribution to the

was “America’s Changeable Civil War,” in the Spring 2010 issue.

 by Adam Goodheart, Knopf, 481 pp.

Photo courtesy of the 

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It’s hardly surprising that “most people” in the 1860s saw the war in terms of right and wrong; people engaged in warfare generally do. 

A Moral Question

When Barack Obama promised in his 2009 inaugural address that “we will restore science to its rightful place,” he invoked not so much a debate as a set of widely shared assumptions. According to conventional wisdom, liberals and Democrats are the party of reason and science; conservatives and Republicans are the party of religion and patriotic symbols. As Drew Westen, a psychotherapist, recently expressed it in a 

 op-ed, “Whereas Democrats have carried forward the belief in the role of science and knowledge in improving our lives, Republicans have moved in increasingly anti-intellectual directions.” This way of stating the division, needless to say, is itself liberal and Democratic. While many conservatives (with notable exceptions) agree that religion is an important source of beliefs and public policies, probably few consider themselves anti-intellectual. Yet the impression that the physical and social sciences are to liberalism what religion is to conservatism goes mostly unquestioned on either side. Conservatives complain about a liberal war on Christian values and faith in general, Democrats about a Republican war on science.

Whether or not science inherently conduces toward liberalism, there is little question that American scientists tend to be liberals. In 2009 the Pew Research Center, in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), released an exhaustive survey of attitudes toward science among scientists and the general public. About half the scientists were in biology or medicine; the rest were divided among other “hard” sciences. Fifty-five percent of the scientists identified themselves as Democrats, a level 20 points above that of the nonscientists. (When “leaners” are included, 81 percent of the scientists fall into the Democratic camp.) More than half of the scientists described themselves as liberals, while only a fifth of the general public did. Only nine percent of the scientists said they were conservatives, while 37 percent of the public did. Do scientific habits of evaluating evidence and looking at the world lead their practitioners to become liberals, or are scientists simply following the dominant influences in environments such as universities? After all, professors of English are also leftward in their political sympathies, though hardly anyone would claim that the study of language and literature is responsible.

If God is not a Republican, however, as a familiar bumper sticker proclaims, neither is nature a Democrat. Consider evolution. One of the anomalies of contemporary thought is that acceptance of Darwin’s theory, which posits a brutally competitive, amoral, and goalless process of natural selection, has come to be identified with liberal political beliefs, while traditional Christianity, with its New Testament teachings about brotherhood, serving the poor, and turning the other cheek, is equated with conservatism. The emphasis on cooperative elements in social development by many evolutionary biologists today is partly an attempt to make the theory more compatible with aspirations to a more harmonious world. When William Jennings Bryan helped prosecute John Scopes in the famous 1925 Tennessee case that defined the battle lines between fundamentalists and evolutionists, part of his motivation was a concern about the brutalizing effects of Darwinian thinking on social theory. Bryan, who was the Democratic candidate for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, had been perhaps the farthest-left presidential nominee in U.S. history at a time when social Darwinism—the application of an exaggerated version of natural selection to economic and social relations—was an influential force in American life and right-wing thought. If the South had not been simultaneously more religious and more conservative (for unrelated reasons) than the rest of the country when these controversies came to a head, Christian belief might easily have been more often identified with liberal politics and evolution with the Right.

Social Darwinism was not the only politically charged outgrowth of evolutionary theory. There was also eugenics, the movement to breed a healthier, more genetically fit population, which Bryan found particularly odious. Because of its later identification with Nazi racial theories, the eugenics movement has come to be thought of as right-wing, but early in the 20th century it was championed by progressive thinkers and political figures. The Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw made it the theme of 

 (1903), one of his most popular plays. In the United States, Margaret Sanger, the leading early advocate of birth control and founder of what later became Planned Parenthood, was a close ally of the eugenics movement on some issues (though not all).

By the mid-1930s, 35 states had enacted laws “to compel the sexual segregation and sterilization of certain persons viewed as eugenically unfit, particularly the mentally ill and retarded, habitual criminals, and epileptics,” Edward J. Larson writes in 

 (1998), a history of the Scopes trial. “Typically,” he says, they justified their actions “on the basis of evolutionary biology and genetics.” In the celebrated 1927 case 

, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such laws, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing a majority opinion that culminated in the lapidary announcement: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The only justice who dissented, Pierce Butler, was a politically conservative Roman Catholic whom Holmes criticized for letting religious dogma get in the way of scientific and legal judgment.

Though long since established as the bedrock of modern biology, evolution remains controversial in American popular opinion, especially in public education. Many efforts to reconcile Christianity and Darwin have been made since the 19th century, but the results are inevitably decaffeinated versions of both that many Christians and most scientists find unsatisfactory, whatever Spencer Tracy may have thought in 

. In the Pew survey, only 33 percent of the more than 2,500 AAAS members polled stated that they believed in God, as against 83 percent of the general public in the same survey. (Oddly enough, the younger the scientist, the more likely he or she was to acknowledge a belief in God. This result could herald a change in attitudes or might simply indicate that, in common with recent popular usage, young scientists attach a vaguer meaning to the word than their elders do.)

Since the founding of the American Association of University Professors in 1915, the doctrine of academic freedom as generally understood has held that properly certified teachers should be free to speak and write according to their convictions. The Scopes trial began as a contest not just over the rights or wrongs of Darwinism but whether majority rule should determine what a public school teacher might or might not teach on a sensitive subject. According to Scopes’s liberal defenders, by banning evolution from the classroom the state of Tennessee had put itself in the position of the Catholic Church with Galileo. More than that, it was practicing thought control by overriding individual conscience, the very organ that both Protestantism and the First Amendment to the Constitution supposedly held sacred. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had recruited Scopes to test the Tennessee law, lost the battle, but in time won the war absolutely. In 

 (1968), the Supreme Court threw out the last state laws banning the teaching of human evolution, on the grounds that such requirements, however framed, expressed an unconstitutional religious purpose.

Debates over ethical questions will not disappear simply because one side denounces the other as backward, ignorant, or motivated by religion.

Today the shoe is on the other foot. Following Epperson, some states enacted laws mandating equal time for creationism whenever evolution was taught. The Supreme Court struck these laws down as well in 

 (1987). Public school teachers are now forbidden to discuss “creation science,” “intelligent design,” or related doctrines as alternatives to Darwin’s theory. How many of Scopes’s supporters in 1925 would be happy with this outcome is impossible to say. The justification usually given by scientists and others who defend what looks like a double standard is that creationism in whatever guise is religion, not science. No question, but the corollary that all mention of such a widely shared view should therefore be excluded is less obvious. It can hardly be considered either socially marginal or irrelevant to the subject of human origins. According to the findings of a 2010 Gallup poll, about 40 percent of Americans believe in “strict creationism”—that God created humans in their present form—with another 38 percent accepting evolution with divine guidance. Only 16 percent accept evolution with no divine participation. These numbers have changed only slightly since Gallup began asking about the subject in 1982.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, as modified by later discoveries in genetics, is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all time. None of its competitors has anything like its sophistication or credibility. Why go to so much trouble to forbid any mention of them? Doing so has apparently not made them less popular. The principle that everyone is entitled to his or her say on disputed subjects is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that advocates of banning religious points of view wherever possible are at a crippling disadvantage with public opinion—perhaps one more reason scientists often feel beleaguered despite their prestige and perquisites.

Today, political controversies involving science are aggravated by the discipline’s tendency, as it became an important element in popular culture, to accrete moralistic elements that are not really scientific at all. A venerable example that predates Darwin is the common belief that evolution means progress from “lower” to “higher” forms of life, probably with supernatural guidance, rather than simply an unending process of adaptation to changing environments that could lead in many different directions. Another moral concept that crept into supposedly scientific discussions of ecology is the notion of a correct balance of nature that human action is capable of disrupting. Although it has been critiqued by ecologist Daniel Botkin and other scientists, this imaginary construct has become one of the fundamental, if not always conscious, premises of environmentalism, a movement with elements of both science and religion. On the antiabortion right, activists in a number of states have introduced contentious legislation to recognize that human life or personhood begins at conception, and therefore that even early-term abortion is murder. (A referendum on this issue failed in Mississippi last November.) While the assertion is often stated in quasi-scientific terms, neither it nor the counterclaim that life begins at birth has anything to do with science. Nobody disputes that both sperm and ovum are as alive and human as their hosts. The moral question of the stage at which a fetus becomes entitled to the legal protections accorded human beings has no possible scientific answer.

These examples betray a common instinct to use science as an assault weapon in political combat even when it really has little or nothing to say. In the fever swamps of the academic Left, some postmodernists attack science as just one more expression of power, but the Pew survey confirms that most Americans of all political ideologies respect and admire its accomplishments. Science in the abstract has become so powerful that conservatives as well as liberals claim its authority when it seems to support their positions, as in the case of social science research showing the benefits to children of living with two married parents. Conservatives also tend to be more comfortable than liberals with modern genetic science when its findings bear upon such matters as social behavior, abilities, and differences between the sexes.

More often, though, liberals are the ones who cite “the science” about a particular subject as indisputable support for policy decisions, treating Big Science (the interlocking apparatus of national academies, commissions, foundations, universities, and professional societies) as the ultimate referee rather than as a team of specialized players. When the Obama administration followed the U.S. Institute of Medicine’s recommendation that all health insurance plans be required to cover birth control without charge, defenders hailed the decision as a victory for science over politics. “They asked for the guidance on what the evidence and science say,” declared an institute spokeswoman, “so that’s what we’ve given.” A few months later, a recommendation by the California Medical Association that marijuana be legalized was greeted by longtime supporters of pot as a scientific refutation of the status quo.

What is the actual role of science in policy disagreements such as these? In the birth control case, the recommendations were intended to reduce unwanted pregnancies and, by mandating screening as well, certain forms of disease. Few people would doubt the new policy’s potential effectiveness in achieving at least some of these goals. But the controversy over birth control in health insurance has little to do with scientific questions. It involves differing convictions about religious freedom, sexual behavior, and government control over personal or medical decisions. Similarly, when Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled a Food and Drug Administration recommendation last December that the “morning-after” pill be made available without prescription to girls younger than 17, both she and the FDA couched their disagreement in scientific terms, though the issues were really moral and political. Scientists are no more qualified to pronounce on these matters than anyone else, and to believe otherwise is to confuse different realms of thought.

The marijuana issue is likewise much more about values than about facts that science can determine. In a 2010 referendum, California voters defeated a proposal to legalize marijuana in the state. (If it had gone the other way, its validity would have been at best debatable, since drug policy falls under federal jurisdiction.) Less than a year later, the California Medical Association urged that the drug be legalized and regulated in unspecified ways. Once again, defenders claimed to be representing science against superstition. “This was a carefully considered, deliberative decision made exclusively on medical and scientific grounds,” Dr. James T. Hay, president-elect of the group, announced. “Drug use is a health issue, and for too long we have let law enforcement and federal bureaucrats decide policy,” added Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy organization. “CMA is saying let’s treat medical marijuana as a health issue.” Legalizing marijuana, however, would affect far more users than the patients who constitute a sympathetic but minute proportion of those who consume the drug.

The point is not that science is irrelevant to questions of public policy. Where a consensus exists about ends such as eradicating polio or putting a man on the moon, scientific findings are indispensable for reaching them. Properly designed studies can produce valuable information about the physical and mental effects of marijuana on users, or the likelihood that free screening for cervical cancer would significantly reduce its prevalence. But not everyone thinks this kind of information should settle these issues, any more than the scientific fact that men commit many more crimes of violence than women should automatically lead to a policy of preventive detention for aggressive young males. Debates over ethical questions will not disappear simply because one side denounces the other as backward, ignorant, or motivated by religion.

, a biologist at Stanford University, published a scary book titled 

. Backed by the imprimatur of the Sierra Club and armed to the teeth with what seemed to be up-to-date science, the book, which went on to become a bestseller, built on contemporary fears of a global population explosion (a term that first appeared in the 1940s) and carried them a big step further. It opened with these ominous words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” While it was already too late to prevent mass deaths, population control could help minimize the slaughter, provided governments acted decisively: “Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

Not surprisingly, Ehrlich relentlessly attacked the Catholic Church and complained indignantly that in what were then called underdeveloped countries “people want large families” and would continue “multiplying like rabbits” unless their governments imposed draconian controls. He was far from optimistic that catastrophe could be avoided—“the chances of success are small,” he conceded. Still, it was possible to look on the bright side. “Suppose we do not prevent massive famines. Suppose there are widespread plagues. Suppose a billion people perish. At least if we have called enough attention to the problem, we may be able to keep the whole mess from recycling.” The book concluded with a series of steps readers could take to demand action on the part of the federal government.

Almost half a century later Ehrlich remains a hero to some environmentalists, but none of his apocalyptic predictions have come true. Although overpopulation is still a threat in some parts of the world, birthrates have declined dramatically and resources have proved to be far less fixed than alarmists feared. The hysterical tone of 

 now seems as dated as its authoritarian solutions. The book and its reception came to represent a much-cited demonstration that while science as an ideal is detached and self-correcting, actual scientists can be as fallible and ideological as anyone else.

Today, most of the passions and anxieties the population explosion once aroused are centered on global warming, more elegantly known as anthropogenic climate change. Again, one side claims to be motivated purely by science, while the other argues that the science is questionable. In contrast with the debates over abortion and embryonic stem cells, there is no overt moral or religious disagreement. The dispute in this case, at least on the surface, is solely about facts: Is the atmosphere as a whole getting steadily warmer, and if so, are human-produced greenhouse gases the main reason?

Beyond the immensely complicated evidence and computer models that predict the future climate of the entire world, however, lie familiar political factors, such as a vast increase in government power over the economy and everyday life that advocates say is immediately necessary to avert calamity. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why activists resort to such overheated language in dismissing skeptics, sometimes going so far as to claim (in the words of economist and 

 columnist Paul Krugman) that anyone who denies global warming is guilty of “treason against the planet”—while most conservatives remain skeptical.

When those who question the validity of a relatively new scientific theory are accused of mythical crimes by its supporters, and conversely skeptics attack believers for trying to impose a dictatorship, something other than science is at stake. According to the Pew survey, “The strongest correlate of opinion on climate change is partisan affiliation.” Even more striking, a 2007 Pew poll found that among Democrats, having a college education correlated with an increased likelihood that one believed in global warming, while among Republicans and independents the opposite was true. Probably only nature has the power to resolve this impasse by unambiguously confirming the views of one side or the other. Because such strong claims of a scientific consensus have been accompanied by so much invective against skeptics, the potential damage to the reputation and future credibility of institutional science if catastrophic warming fails to occur is enormous. In the meantime, most Americans rank global warming near the bottom of the list of pressing national issues.

Since the Progressive movement a century ago, the dream of settling contested questions of governance by empowering scientific experts—of making policy follow pronouncement with no struggle—has appealed to many intellectuals disillusioned with raucous, often ill-informed political processes. To most members of the public who heard President Obama’s inaugural address or took part in the Pew survey, “science” should be a supremely nonpolitical activity, impartial and guided by evidence rather than interest, the opposite of partisan bickering. Partisan bickering, however, is one of the many names for democracy. An extreme but logical consequence of the desire that science and evidence (invariably equated with one’s own convictions) should prevail without political struggle is the belief in an updated version of the benevolent despot of 18th-century fantasy who can build bullet trains or establish a green economy at a stroke.

The United States is not the only country where claims made in the name of science sometimes clash with the popular will. In Europe, genetically modified crops, which create hardly a ripple here, are an object of heated opposition, while militant hostility to nuclear power coexists uneasily with strident demands for an end to fossil fuels. We may, however, be the only country in which the relation of science to power is itself such a powerful issue. A few enthusiasts, such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, have wished in print that the United States could have, at least temporarily, a system of government more like china’s that could ignore opposition and do whatever it wanted, or, rather, what the enthusiast wanted. Why not, when those desires are equated with the dictates of science and what any dispassionate expert would recommend? The only thing that stands in their way in a society like ours is politics. Such wishes actually prove the opposite of what their proponents intend: that when it becomes embroiled in controversies over government policy, science is anything but above the battle.

Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America

 (2000) and other books, writes frequently on American culture and society. His last article for the 

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Liberals and conservatives alike wrap groupthink in the cloak 
of science whenever convenient. The results are seldom good.

Christopher Clausen