The Legacy of the Civil War by Robert Penn Warren

“Is it possible for the individual, in the great modern industrial state, to retain some sense of responsibility? Is it possible for him to remain an individual? Is it possible, in the midst of all the forces making for standardization and anonymity, for society to avoid cultural starvation—to retain, and even develop, cultural pluralism and individual variety, and foster both social and individual integrity? Can we avoid, in its deep and more destructive manifestations, the tyranny of the majority, and at the same time keep a fruitful respect for the common will? We sense that one way, however modest, to undertake this mandatory task of our time is to contemplate the Civil War itself, that mystic cloud from which emerged our modernity.”
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“The Great Alibi and the Treasury of Virtue both serve deep needs of poor human nature; and if, without historical realism and self-criticism, we look back on the War, we are merely compounding the old inherited delusions which our weakness craves. We fear, in other words, to lose the comforting automatism of the Great Alibi or the Treasury of Virtue, for if we lose them we may, at last, find ourselves nakedly alone with the problems of our time and with ourselves. Where would we find our next alibi and our next assurance of virtue?”
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“In any case, the historians, as human beings, are bound to pick the scab of our fate. They are bound to turn to the question underlying the assessment of all experience: To what extent is man always—or sometimes—trapped in the great texture of causality, of nature and history?”

-Robert Penn Warren