Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

by Alan Jacobs

“Becoming aware that even the likes of Kant and Hume were products of their times is a humbling reminder that the greatest minds can still be blind to mistakes and evils, if they are widespread enough.”

everything; our cognitive limitations are such that there will always be a great many topics that we will take no real thought over, but will simply believe what the people around us, for the most part, believe. These views can scarcely be dignified by the term “belief”: they’re more like the intellectual equivalent of ambient noise, always there in the background but never noticed, never brought to consciousness for reflection.

As John Dewey wrote a century ago, “It seems almost incredible to us, for example, that things which we know very well, could have escaped recognition in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds riveted to other things.”

Again: we should judge characters from the past in precisely the same way we judge characters of our own time, according to whether we think their behavior is good or bad, virtuous or vicious.

“The highest ideals put forth in this generation of conflict were noble; the men who fought or worked for them were less noble than the ideals, for the best of men do not consistently live on the highest plane of virtue, and most men live far below it.”

ways, this is the human predicament: We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas. Why should Washington and Jefferson and Milton have been any different? We should not be surprised that they failed to live up to their ideals; we should, I think, be surprised that in their time and place they upheld such ideals at all. They pushed the world a little closer to freedom and justice. Of how many of us can that be said?

Our culture has made certain decisions on our behalf, decisions we individuals have participated in with varying degrees of willingness, and even when we fully endorse those decisions we should not, we must not, be afraid to count the costs—to notice the ways in which the rum we make lacks the savor of that made in the old, abandoned ways, even when we affirm that abandonment. For, again, only when we do so may we seek the proper compensations and consolations for what we have left behind.

savor. Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.

as he wrote The Prince, the manual of political action he offered to Lorenzo de’ Medici in hopes of being restored to influence in Florence, he saw princes and kings and warriors of the past as offering examples for modern rulers to learn from—but, and this has always been the most controversial element of The Prince, they are merely examples of success and failure, not virtue and vice.

speech Churchill gave in 1909, when he was still known primarily as a journalist, he said: Someone—I forget who—has said: “Words are the only things which last forever.” That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought. The most durable structures raised in stone by the strength of man, the mightiest monuments of his power, crumble into dust, while the words spoken with fleeting breath, the passing expression of the unstable fancies of his mind, endure not as echoes of the past, not as mere archaeological curiosities or venerable relics, but with a force and life as new and strong, and sometimes far stronger than when they were first spoken, and leaping across the gulf of three thousand years, they light the world for us to-day.

G. K. Chesterton, who in an essay titled “On Man: Heir of All the Ages” argued that we have the whole of history available to us as our rightful inheritance, and that “the mind of man is at its largest, and especially at its broadest, when it feels the brotherhood of humanity linking it up with remote and primitive and even barbaric things.” Alas, says Chesterton, “If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs.”

that Chesterton believes that the archaic, the primitive, is still an element of our psychological and moral constitution,

enormous power of reading. But the experiences of Abrahams and Douglass also show us that that power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.

“There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.” And those unarticulated ideas are the truly key ones in any culture or age—including our own.

We live thinly in our instant, and don’t know what we don’t know.

“What force shall represent the future in the present?” What laws and what norms will embody our care for those who come after us, including those already here and those yet to be born?

The decisions of our ancestors, however strange those people may be to us, touch us and our world; and our decisions will touch the lives of those who come after us.

“You keep the past connected to the present, and to the future, by keeping your promises.”* In making those promises, we take a step toward giving those who come after us clean earth to till.