THE Bicentennial of the American Revolution ought to be a time for restoring the dialogue between the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future in our national life. We commemorate our origins because our origins are intertwined with our destiny; memory is the reciprocal of hope, and conservation and change are essential to each other. "There is nothing real without both ...," as Alfred North Whitehead once said. "Mere conservation without change cannot conserve ..., mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing,"

The dominant tense in America has been the future. The nation began in revolt not only against the British Empire but against the empire of the past. It began with a fundamental commitment to redeem man from history, with all its accumulated guilts and terrors, and to place him in possession of himself. Nature eclipsed history as the director of human affairs. A curious national tradition arose, one whose libertarian principles contravened the force of tradition itself. In "the American Creed," as Gunnar Myrdal once reminded us, "the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical." So, paradoxically, successive generations of Americans freely legitimated change at the cutting-edge of the future without changing much of anything in the venerable core of national values and goals. They were radical in 1776, and so they may still be; but in celebrating them we are all conservatives.

From the beginning, of course, there have been different