The Better Angels
Of our Nature, shine brightly
that blind may see them
Where to look for hope?
A thought inspired perhaps by Mr. Lincoln.
How do we undo the damage Trump has done? Instead of writing off the 40% which still seems to be mesmerized by his racist theater, Wise has a better idea. He believes that when most people are confronted with their subconscious biases, if they are “encouraged to respond to the better angels of their nature, they will do it.
“It’s when you don’t let them believe that they have better angels; if you make it seem like, ‘You’re just a horrible, irredeemable human being,’ they will show you just how horrible and irredeemable they are. The research tells us … that most white folks don’t want to think of themselves as racist, and don’t want to be racist.” From a review by Charles Kaiser of The Man Who Sold America by Joy-Ann Reid
The phrase, Better Angels, maybe comes to us from Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, “It is curious to imagine these people of the world, busy in thought, turning their eyes towards the countless spheres that shine above us, and making them reflect the only images their minds contain…So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed” though Abraham Lincoln’s 1st Inaugural Address, I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. “
In 1861, before his inauguration, Lincoln showed a draft of what he intended to say to William Seward, his Secretary of State. Seward recommended that Lincoln conclude with conciliatory words, and sketched out a few sentences for Lincoln to consider.
Seward’s rough draft, which has been preserved, contains the expression “better angel.” Twenty years earlier, in 1841, Charles Dickens had used “our better angels” in his novel “Barnaby Rudge.” There is no evidence that Lincoln read Dickens, but Seward did.
Lincoln read Seward’s rough draft in which Seward had scratched out the words”better angel” and substituted in their place “guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln then turned Seward’s discarded two words into the memorable expression “better angels of our nature.” (from A Lincoln Quotation You Can Use In Writing: Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln by Gene Griessman, Ph.D)
