National service would uplift us
Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from an essay by National Review founder William F. Buckley that comes from the first chapter of his 1990 book, “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country.”
I have always thought Anatole France’s story of the juggler to be one of enduring moral resonance. This is the arresting and affecting tale of the young monk who aspires to express his devotion to the Virgin Mary, having dejectedly reviewed, during his first week as a postulant at the monastery alongside Our Lady of Sorrows, the prodigies and gifts of his fellow monks. Oh, some sang like nightingales, others played their musical instruments as virtuosi, still others rhapsodized with the tongues of poets. But all that this young novice had learned in the way of special skills before entering the monastery was to entertain modestly as a juggler. And so, in the dead of night, driven by the mandate to serve, he makes his ardent way to the altar with his sackful of wooden mallets and balls, and does his act for Our Lady.
This account of the struggle to express gratitude is unsurpassed in devotional literature. The apparent grotesquerie — honoring the mother of the Saviour of the universe, the vessel of salvation, with muscular gyrations designed to capture the momentary interest of six-year-olds — is inexpressibly beautiful in the mind’s eye. The act of propitiation; gratitude reified.
How to acknowledge one’s devotion, one’s patrimony, one’s heritage? Why, one juggles before the altar of God, if that is what one knows how to do. That Americans growing into citizenhood should be induced to acknowledge this patrimony and to demonstrate their gratitude, for it is the thesis of this exercise. By asking them to make sacrifices we are reminding them that they owe a debt, even as the juggler felt a debt to Our Lady. And reminding them that requital of a debt is the purest form of acknowledging that debt.
It is entirely possible to live out an entire life without experiencing the civic protections which can become so contingently vital to us at vital moments. Even if we never need the help of the courts, or of the policeman, or of the Bill of Rights, that they are there for us in the event of need distinguishes our society from others.
This enjoyment, this answering of needs, can make us proud of our country — and put us in its debt. In this essay on the theme of Gratitude, I postulate that we do owe something. To whom? The dead being beyond our reach, our debt can only be expressed to one another; but our gratitude is also a form of obeisance — yes, to the dead.
Coming very slowly to a boil in Congress is the question of national service. It is a very old idea, by the way. George Washington spoke in favor of national service, which was commonly supposed at the time to be service in the military, it being military preparedness that was in those days most commonly needed to defend against the agents of His Majesty King George, or the red-skinned agents of Chief Charging Bull. The proposition that American citizens owe something to the community that formulated and fought to establish their progenitive rights was proffered in 1910 by William James, in an essay still widely referred to as a kind of charter instrument of national service. The durability of the idea of national service at the very least betokens an inherent appeal.
It was all so very much easier to speak about, and even to fancy, back when the tradition of public service meant the military. The Ferocity of the Warrior was readily transmuted to the Pride of the Father. In an age in which military contention absorbs less and less social energy, the eye roams, under the prompting of a parched heart, for service of another kind; for the satisfaction, say, of juggling for Our Lady.
Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn introduced as the very first bill in January 1989, a Citizenship and National Service Bill. What it says, to use only a few words to describe it, is that young people should be induced to give service to the nation. By no means does the bill propose that national service be limited to the military. The efforts of many national-service volunteers would be directed to extra-military pursuits, of which there are a dismaying number — say, in helping old people; in assisting teachers both in instructing children and in protecting them; in advancing environmental goals; in protecting deteriorating books in libraries. The Nunn bill addresses the younger generation and says: Look, if you will agree to give us a year of your time in national service, we will pay you $10,000 beyond the pocket money you will get during your national service. This $10,000 you can use toward your college tuition payments, if you go on to college; or as a down payment on your mortgage when you get around to buying a house.
It is very much worth remarking that the subject of national service, although the debate about it has not yet reached the voter’s hearth, is very much there, a subject waiting to be deliberated. It is going to run into any number of hostile presumptions, among them the aversion to an idea of federally sponsored philanthropy (though the Federal Government has long since encouraged philanthropy by granting tax deductions); an egalitarian resistance to special favors for special classes of citizens (though the government has long since favored veterans with the GI Bill, which pays much of college costs); and, not least, the inertial resistance to the blight of any Grand New National Idea.
Meanwhile, it is fair to note that those politicians who have entered into the argument, and they are both Democrats and Republicans, are saying that participation in the community should take more active form than merely paying taxes, buying and selling in the marketplace, and voting. And of course the question is necessarily raised in the context of the one question we can never get away from: How to pay for it? The question of cost cannot be dismissed. I reveal at this early moment that I deem it entirely manageable. But just as the question is bound to arise, so an advocate of the idea is required to consider that cost and to explore its ramifications. In the last analysis a society has to accumulate a surplus before it gets around to thinking in terms of expenditures beyond those absolutely necessary to produce food and shelter. Without an economic surplus we are left with not even enough to afford a set of the juggler’s mallets and balls.
Of course. Practical attention needs to be paid to the question of national service, but if the idea takes over the public imagination, as it has done my own, the cost will prove bearable, and its fruits beyond the reach of slide rules. And then, properly conceived, the status of the citizen in a republic, uniting privilege with responsibility, evolves into a kind of nobility no less aristocratic for being widespread and universally accessible.
Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight. National service, like gravity, is something we could accustom ourselves to, and grow to love.