With the New Year, come the New Year’s resolutions. Although the unlikelihood of persevering in such resolutions is so widely acknowledged that the whole idea has become a parody for some, the essential concept remains sound and beneficial. It is one expression of the impulse to reform.
The custom of the New Year’s resolution reflects the fact that we are in continuous need of reassessment and improvement. Striving to become a better, more mature, more charitable person involves a constant process of ascertaining weaknesses and failings, the creation of a plan to address them, and action to put that plan into effect. In various Christian traditions, the seasons of Advent and Lent, the church revival, or the spiritual retreat also serves this purpose.
What is true at the personal level is also true at the societal level. Like individuals, cultures need reform. The cycle of corruption and reform is inherent in the human experience. In the history of Western religion, the “Reformation” and the “Counter-Reformation” were watershed events. But even before the dissolution of Catholic Europe, there were the Cluniac reforms, the Hildebrandine reforms, and many others. Contemporary American social and political life is still stamped by reform movements that arose in the late nineteenth century, such as populism and progressivism. The civil rights movement in the postwar era is properly seen as yet another reform movement in American history.
There are many different ways to approach and effect reform, as these examples indicate. There is also an extreme version of reform, which doesn’t really reform at all: revolution. Proponents of revolution declare that incremental reform is inadequate and that what is necessary for the given context is a complete overturning of the status quo. The existing system must be razed and a new one built from the ground up.
Revolution can be justified in rare cases, but in almost every instance—as history bears out—it is a rash, dangerous, and destructive path to take in an attempt to improve society. Revolution assumes that there is nothing salvageable in a given cultural or political or economic structure. It is intrinsically arrogant, believing that all that came before is corrupt, tainted, without merit, and that what is built anew will be superior.
Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the French Revolution’s descent into terror, exemplifies the ideology of revolution. When the aim is pure, any means are justified. “In order to arrive at the peaceful reign of constitutional laws,” he declared in 1794, “we must finish the war of liberty against tyranny and safely cross through the storms of the revolution: that is the goal of the revolutionary system which you have put in order.” A regime of the rule of law, respecting individual rights, is, of course, the goal, the revolutionary insists; but transforming society so corrupt into such an ideal regime will in the meantime necessitate extraordinary measures. Suppression of liberty is permissible, even necessary, so long as the destination is greater liberty. “Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is, therefore, an emanation of virtue,” Robespierre concluded. “It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.” Thus the tyrant has always justified trampling the rights of others. In the name of the people, some people must be sacrificed.
Revolution is not the way of the reformer, who does the hard work of discerning what is good, bad, and indifferent amid the current circumstances, recognizes that solutions cannot be accomplished in a day, and sets about trying to improve whatever discrete and manageable bit of the world’s problems appears to be most tractable or urgent.
We all want a better world. It’s more likely to come about through building up than tearing down, and it’s more likely to come about by focusing on what each of us has the most control over—ourselves.
Resolutions, yes. Revolutions, no.
