The Principled Man: Ancient Sacrifice, Modern Privilege, and the Lost Art of Choosing Between Opposites
I. The Privilege of Principle in America
America stands nearly alone in history, offering its citizens material wealth and the rare opportunity to live by principle. Allan Bloom observes that the American teenager enjoys “the liberties hard won over the centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind.” Throughout this essay, I’m drawing on the work of Allan Bloom, a University of Chicago philosophy professor, whose famous book The Closing of the American Mind (1987) takes a hard look at how America’s tradition of principle, duty, and moral language is fading in today’s culture.
Taking our freedoms for granted is easy, especially when life feels safe and comfortable. Allan Bloom warns that this kind of security can make us indifferent, turning real values into just another set of options we can pick up or put down. That’s why it stands out when someone holds onto things like truth, duty, and honor—and why it matters.
II. Ancient Sacrifice: When Principle Wasn’t an Option
If we want to grasp what it means to stick to our principles, it helps to look back at the ancient world, when doing the right thing wasn’t just a nice idea, but sometimes a life-or-death decision. Back then, values like honor, duty, and truth weren’t just words people tossed around; they were serious business, and living by them could cost you everything.
Take Socrates, for example. He wasn’t just some philosopher spouting theories in the marketplace. When push came to shove, he had to choose between staying true to his beliefs or saving his skin. Instead of backing down, Socrates stood his ground—even though it meant drinking poison and paying the ultimate price. For him, living honestly and with honor and duty mattered more than living comfortably.
His death was not a tragic accident but a conscious affirmation that some things—honor, truth, duty, the soul’s integrity—are more precious than life itself.
Cato the Younger offers another luminous example. Instead of bowing down to Julius Caesar and accepting a government he thought was wrong, Cato decided he’d rather die than give in. By taking his own life, he made one final stand, showing he wouldn’t back down from what he believed in, no matter how bad things looked.
These were not men of convenience; they were men for whom principle, duty, and honor were a sacred responsibility, for whom the opposites of justice and injustice, honor and dishonor, were not negotiable. Their sacrifices remind us that the highest things—truth, justice, duty, honor—are only real when one is willing to pay the highest price.
III. Bloom’s Polar Opposites: The Forgotten Art of Serious Choice
To bridge the ancient world and our own, Bloom’s philosophy helps us see why these sacrifices matter today. Bloom, writing in the late twentieth century, later diagnosed a deeper problem at the heart of American life: we have forgotten how to recognize and choose between real, consequential opposites. He insists that a serious life only happens when we face and choose between the fundamental polarities that define existence—good and evil, democracy and aristocracy, reason and revelation, freedom and necessity, body and soul, self and other, city and man, eternity and time, being and nothing.
Opposites exist in the world. Bloom lists reason-revelation, freedom-necessity, democracy-aristocracy, good-evil, body-soul, self-other, city-man, eternity-time, being-nothing. Serious thought requires recognizing the existence of these opposites and choosing one over the other. ‘A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.’
Modern America, cushioned by comfort and freedom, drifts into relativism. We start to see all values as equally valid “lifestyles.” The concepts of duty, honor, and love, rooted in sacrifice and heroism, are replaced by commitment, relationship, and lifestyle, which feel provisional and transactional. Where the ancients saw principle as a sacred duty and honor, we often see it as another preference. The ancients gave us some of the clearest examples of what it means to live—and die—by principle, duty, and honor. Socrates chose death over betraying his search for truth; Cato chose death rather than submit to tyranny. Their sacrifices remind us that choosing between opposites is not an abstract exercise but the heart of moral life.
IV. Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: Law as Political Religion
Long before Bloom’s critique, Abraham Lincoln saw this crisis of principle coming. In his 1838 Lyceum Address, he responded to a nation threatened by mob violence. He warned that the greatest danger to American democracy comes not from abroad but from within, when we lose reverence for law and principle. Lincoln didn’t mince words:
“Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the country’s laws; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to support the Declaration of Independence, so too, to support the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, property, and sacred honor… Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe… let it become the political religion of the nation.”
Lincoln treated law as a sacred bond, not a tool for convenience. He called on Americans to anchor democracy in principle, not passion. His “political religion” anticipates the relativism and moral drift that Bloom would later diagnose.
V. The Gettysburg Address: Rewriting America’s Covenant
Twenty-five years after the Lyceum Speech, Lincoln faced another test of principle at Gettysburg. The Civil War had reached its bloody climax, and the nation stood fractured not just by bullets but by competing visions of freedom. In 272 words, Lincoln performed what historian Garry Wills calls “one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed.”
“He altered the document [the Constitution] from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its indictment.” —Garry Wills, *Lincoln at Gettysburg*
Where the Founders’ Constitution tolerated slavery, Lincoln returned to the Declaration of Independence, reframing America as a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This wasn’t just memorializing the dead; it was a moral revolution. As Wills argues, Lincoln “remade America” by grafting the Declaration’s radical equality onto the Constitution’s flawed framework. The war became not just a fight to preserve the Union, but to fulfill its founding promise.
The genius of Lincoln’s brevity lies in its timelessness. He didn’t negotiate with the past—he redeemed it. “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here,” he admitted, yet his words became scripture. By tying the soldiers’ sacrifice to the “unfinished work” of equality, he made principle inseparable from survival. In a nation still wrestling with its contradictions, Lincoln’s Address remains a masterclass in using words to describe reality and reshape it.
VI. Tocqueville’s Paradox and the Modern Illiberal Turn
Tocqueville, writing just before Lincoln’s speech, admired America’s democratic experiment but warned of a “soft despotism”—a tyranny of comfort and conformity where the majority’s will could stifle real dissent and flatten moral courage. This echoes Bloom’s later fear that prosperity breeds complacency without real principle, and the language of sacrifice, duty, and honor disappears.
To bring this discussion into the present, we turn to the historian Steven Hahn. In his widely discussed book Illiberal America: A History (published in 2024), Hahn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, explores how the tension between America’s founding ideals and its long record of exclusion and conformity has shaped our national story. Hahn argues that illiberal currents—where principle, duty, and pluralism are sacrificed for conformity or power—have always been part of the American fabric, not just recent developments. He shows how both right and left have weaponized law and culture to enforce conformity and silence dissent. From election denialism to cancel culture, the refusal to recognize and choose between true opposites—truth and falsehood, justice and oppression—leaves democracy vulnerable to new illiberalism.
When we combine these perspectives, we follow the example of the Founding Fathers. The framers of the Constitution were not just politicians, but a rare blend of philosophers, lawyers, and statesmen—men who debated Locke and Montesquieu, drafted legal frameworks, and put those ideas into practice. Their achievement was to create a structure, like an immovable object, to withstand the moment’s passions and the shifting winds of history. Lincoln, a lawyer and self-taught philosopher-president, understood this. He insisted that reverence for the law should become our “political religion,” echoing the Founders’ belief that the Constitution, like the Bible in religion, must stand above the fray of daily politics—an ultimate duty, not a matter of personal choice. In this story, we see how the historian, the philosopher, the lawyer, and the politician each play a role in defending the fragile inheritance of principle, duty, and honor.
VII. The Burden and Hope of the Principled Man
To be a principled man in America today means standing in a unique historical position. We have the privilege to choose—and the responsibility to choose well. Bloom reminds us that the deepest opposites—good and evil, democracy and aristocracy, reason and revelation, freedom and necessity, body and soul, self and other, city and man, eternity and time, being and nothing—are not just abstractions. They form the very substance of a meaningful life. Most people can’t afford the privilege of principle, but those of us who can must act not just for ourselves, but for everyone who still hopes that truth, honor, and justice are more than words—they are the foundation of civilization itself.
When we see the law and the Constitution as the Founders and Lincoln did—not as tools for convenience or tribal gain but as a sacred inheritance—we reclaim the classical language of duty and honor—reverence for law, like reverence for scripture, anchors the nation. The ultimate test of our character is whether we treat that responsibility as optional or binding, whether we settle for comfort or choose to bear the burden of principle.
We don’t keep democracy alive with comfort or convenience. We do it with reverence for law, for truth, and the “awful responsibility” of living by principle. If we let that go, we risk exactly what Tocqueville warned about: a democracy that survives in form but dies in spirit, surrendering its soul to the tyranny of the moment.
As Bloom might say, the principled man is the last hope for a civilization that remembers what it means to believe, choose, and bear the burden of principle when it is a privilege. The example of Socrates, Cato, and the ancients stands as a challenge and an inspiration: to live—and if necessary, to die—for what is truly just, honorable, and true.
The principled man’s task is to bear this burden, to remember Socrates and Cato, to choose between opposites—good and evil, democracy and aristocracy (substitute oligarchy for aristocracy), reason and revelation, freedom and necessity, body and soul, self and other, city and man, eternity and time, being and nothing—and to keep alive the fragile inheritance of truth, justice, duty, and honor.
