I awoke in my hospital room from a long sleep Wednesday morning, having been here for seven days after cancer surgery. When I awoke, I wasn’t sure whether I had passed to heaven or remained in a dream.
Around me were various people smiling down at me, young and old, of various religions, races, and nations of origin. They seemed to be part of a team, and they seemed not to care about their differences or mine.
Apparently, they had worked hard in their schools and in their careers to be in this place and to be part of this team, to deserve such work, and to be rewarded for their excellence.
In their service and around me, during my awakening, was an array of high technology and people with great scientific knowledge, the products of free institutions and enterprise that focused on educating and helping humankind. Indeed, around me, too, were people of every description whose sufferings were receiving that help.
Where was I? Was this the place of the Enlightenment that America’s democratic founders expected me to find? A place where people of different backgrounds worked together with equal opportunity and mutual appreciation to achieve important things for the common weal? Was this a place of the Enlightenment to which personal initiative, scientific inquiry, educational excellence, technological innovation, and a diverse community were to bring my country and be rewarded for so doing?
Wherever I was, I seemed to be in, at least, a microculture of the Enlightenment that could serve as an example for the larger culture, a larger culture that seems to have lost sight of the non-partisan Enlightenment values which gave birth to America and of the places and ways to which those values were to bring us to achieve the common weal.
I am sure there are many Enlightenment microcultures in American society that could teach the larger culture about the future to which this nation should be bound. Wednesday morning, I awakened to the diverse and wonderful faces of American nurses, doctors, and staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where respect for education, for science, for excellence, for diversity, and for relieving human suffering should be an example for what, in the view of the Enlightenment, America should be all about.
Gloucester resident Richard N. Rosenfeld is an historian and essayist, author of American-Aurora, A Democratic-Republican Returns (St. Martin’s Press), whose recent Fellows Talk at Yale on the Enlightenment was widely published throughout the University. See https://youtu.be/ULgUbdke6Jw?feature=shared