I recently began reading sociologist Barry Schwartz’s 2008 Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America. It is an argumentative and, to me, frustrating book which waffles deliberately on the question of whether what he refers to as a “weakening faith in human greatness” is a good or bad thing. “The moral and social leveling supporting the most congenial society in history, a society largely free of ethnic and racial hatred, inclusive of all peoples and solicitous of their rights, is precisely the kind of society in which great men and women and their achievements Read more