CLARITY

    Even science (cosmology) sees a unity, a "singularity" (Hawkins), preceding the scattered (by a Big Bang) plural universe. Our monotheistic religious tradition starts the same way through a single God, reaffirmed by Christianity (specifically Jesus, Paul, Dante). Abraham, Jesus, and joint parents in every good family follow suit. Brave soldiers, still, look up in prayer for spiritual guidance and also, dying, to the mother who bore them and smiled down on them first: pietà.
    Our Founders observed this sequence in our primary national document, our Declaration of Independence; the Constitution, later, stands only for the plural, as in "created equal" (biblically "in the image of God", "seed"). In the very text (the "Remonstrance and Memorial to the Virginia General Assembly") defining the equal rights of scattered, differing religions, James Madison re-stipulates the monotheistic principle: "Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the universe...".
    The best of our ancestors here understood this. The motto of the old Harvard Law School is "Under God and under law." Leaders like President Bush, John McCain, Condi Rice still know it and say it. But the pluralistic secular-rational development of the whole West, in s shrinking world where our fate depends more on the scattered billions and their terrible concentrated weapons with new speedy ways to deliver them, obscures the abiding truth. Modernity, like democratic ideology, is increasingly and dangerously pluralistic.
    The biblical fear of "false gods" and "false prophets" is very real again, crucial to survival: the cult of reason and efficiency replacing Judeo-Christian spiritual leadership and transcendent morality (including tolerance for all humans "in the name of God," universal as opposed to the selfish racism and nationalism of a Hitler, or a neo-fascist Saddam Hussein) gave us Auschwitz and the beheadings of Christians and Jews by fanatic Muslims totally intolerant of others, the "infidels."
    Praying for sacred guidance toward a better life for all, Churchill and Roosevelt sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" together when they met off Newfoundland to plan the war. We had to teach Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan a bitter lesson. It is the  same lesson we taught in Afghanistan and Iraq, for other "ears" as well.
    Simply, be decent, stop killing each other and neighbors, eventually us. In this, we must be sure of our own "parental" decency, our righteousness, as was the good, gentle, and noble father, Atticus, in To Kill a Mockingbird, when he had to shoot the mad dog threatening his children.
    Scattering, willful modernity has muddled this immemorial clarity, made it difficult to articulate even for the Bush team: instead of the simple primary goodness, dignity and decency, of persons (to speak like Pope John Paul II), they falsely emphasize the relatively abstract, rational-civil epiphenomenal and contingent scheme "democracy", which is a fine aim but only if it is substantively underpinned by the above-named "virtues," as Montesquieu insisted in The Spirit of the Laws, along with an august tradition including Plato, Aristotle, and latterly, after Hitler's election, Leo Strauss. Now, after elections, we have totally intolerant Iran, Hamas, (the new mass threat to "infidels" like Rahman), the Muslim Brotherhood waiting in the wings.
    No doubt, the ancient one-many paradox bedeviled our own Founders who, despite their own clarity about what comes first, stumbled into allowing an excessive, rationalistic emphasis on pluralistic faith-state separation to stunt the prior units.  So our leaders tend to use pluralistic "democracy" as a code word for what they really believe in most: the simpler good of mankind.
    But now, in the throes of terrible dilemmas—persons and communities versus ruthless globalized economic competition (especially acute in France along with the unbearable tension between rational-multicultural modern ideology versus a faith-based incomparable cultural tradition)—old-fashioned clarity has become supremely necessary again.