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The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter

Patience is a Virtue

by Jean Bethke Elshtain

"Patience is a virtue." We have all heard this, at one time or another, often when parents or teachers, no doubt at the end of their tethers, tried to becalm us unruly, jumpy children.

When a child rushes through homework, making careless errors, a parent is likely to zero in on impatience as the culprit. Child development experts debate whether the trait of patience derives more from a child's genetic make-up and brain chemistry or from habits learned in childhood. But no one doubts the importance of patience or challenges its status as a virtue.

What happens if patience travels from the private to the public realm? Is patience as important a civic virtue as it is a personal trait? And as hard to come by for cultures and polities as it is for individuals? With U.S. soldiers getting killed or wounded in Iraq at a rate of several a day. these questions suddenly seem very relevant. How many casualties do or should we have patience for?

Many of the great observers of democracy fretted that democratic polities were particularly susceptible to the sometimes fatal flaw of impatience. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political scholar and writer who traveled through the fledgling American republic in the Jacksonian era and wrote up his observations in the classic work "Democracy in America," feared that nothing would prove to be more pleasing to the democratic temperament-- or characteristic of it-- than victories quickly won, especially of the military sort.

"You must try to teach patience to an impatient people and the need for sacrifice to a people unused to sacrifice."

Tocqueville believed that the democratic ethos in an age of widespread equality, the epoch that the new American republic was inaugurating, pits people against one another in a mood of striving and competitiveness. Change comes to seem something good in and of itself. Whatever is regarded as old is discarded. The pace and pulse of life quicken. The older aristocratic virtue of stability, a perspective that links past to present in unbroken lines of intergenerational connection, a conviction that the tried and true should never be tossed over lightly-- all this would vanish like the early morning dew under the gaze of the midday sun.

This restlessness as a cultural trait, once enshrined, is hard to break, especially if a society has been as spectacularly successful at generating wealth, power and, yes, remarkable social equality-- the very glue that holds a culture together-- as these United States.

It is also important to remember that American drivenness and impatience, for much of our history, was tempered and moderated by contrary urges sustained by institutions like the family and the beliefs internal to Christianity, in its many denominational forms. A commitment to sustaining a sense of community has blunted the sharp edges of isolated striving and heroic individualism. We also have located civic traditions and the idea of patriotism in a great document, the Constitution, which has been treated with remarkable respect and altered with great reluctance.

The half-century ceremonies marking D-Day, and Pearl Harbor, and V-E day and V-J day, all the veneration offered to "the greatest generation" reminded us of this. The men who fought World War II and the women who sustained the homeland civic stability and virtue that made it possible for them to prevail, exhibited many remarkable qualities, but none so much as the capacity to endure, patience on a grand scale in a time of war and sacrifice that, from our current perch, looks remarkable.

Over four long years of war with 405,399 Americans killed, they never called it quits. And when it was over, it turned out it wasn't over at all. Fast upon the victory parades came the years of occupation. Stable democracies in Germany and France are potent tribute to the virtue of patience-- our patience-- of what it meant to stay the course in order to complete a task of monumental historic transformation.

Do we still have what it takes? Can Americans any longer be called patient in the civic sense? I, for one, am not convinced. In a conversation at the White House on Sept. 20, 2001, but nine days after the terrorist attacks that murdered 3,000 of our fellow citizens, President George W. Bush acknowledged the importance of patience. It happened in the following way. I was part of a group of about 20 religious leaders who met with the president a few hours before his remarkable speech before a joint session of Congress. Thinking it might well be my one and only opportunity to give advice to a sitting president, I said something more or less along these lines: "Mr. President, in the months and weeks ahead, your task as a civic educator will become ever more important. You must try to teach patience to an impatient people and the need for sacrifice to a people unused to sacrifice." He accepted the truth of that. How well this president has done it is, of course, a matter of debate. I believe he has articulated what is at stake in the war against terrorism, and Iraq, too, with great power and conviction.

But the truth is that no president can do it alone. What we on the homefront can and should do is a tougher call, in part because it is so difficult to figure out how to convince millions of Americans who have lived lives of extraordinary stability and upward mobility (and this holds true for all groups in America, for one of the great success stories of recent decades has been the rapid absorption of African-Americans by the tens of thousands into the middle class) that life is not defined exclusively by current measures of success.

To achieve this upward mobility for so many has required patience over many years. But consider how impatient we are already becoming with the situation in Iraq. A brutal dictator, who slaughtered an estimated 300,000 of his own population in the years between 1991, the conclusion of Gulf War I, and the commencing of Gulf War II, has been removed. Our casualties, and those of Iraqi civilians, were stunningly low. But it isn't over, not by a long shot.

"The revolution is over. Now the real work begins."

Will we have the patience to stay the course? It makes little sense to overthrow a dictator but then fail to commit necessary resources, human and economic, to the task of a reconstruction on a scale we haven't seen since the end of World War II, simply because we are impatient over the fact that a three-week war didn't do everything that needs to be done, and because each day brings news of skirmishes, attacks on American soldiers and even deaths of our military personnel.

Think of what is at stake. If a workable representative government emerges in Iraq, the entire Mideast, slowly but surely, will be transformed. Two years ago a candid report issued by the Arab League detailed the many ways in which Muslim-majority countries have fallen behind in indices of economic and social well-being. Now there is an opportunity to alter that pattern and, in the process, with a radically different geo-political configuration, at last find some resolution to the painful travail of Israel and Palestine.

What does this require? Patience, in abundance. President Bush needs to say more about this. Those who seek political advantage by trying to goad us into impatience and even withdrawal from Iraq need to be shown some alternate route to score their points.

The extraordinary efforts of our military will come to naught if we blow the "peace" in Iraq. When the Berlin Wall came down, and in the heady days when new democracies were sprouting all over former Soviet-dominated territory, Vaclav Havel, the extraordinary soon-to-be first president of a Czech Republic that was free for the first time in more than 60 years, told his people: "My friends, we have entered the long tunnel at the end of the light." Havel extolled the virtue of patience. So, too, in Iraq. The revolution is over. Now the real work begins.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. She recently received WFN's 6th Annual Achievement Award in recognition of her influence on public policy and to celebrate the publication of her most recent book. This essay is adapted from a piece written for Newsday

 
 
 
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