The denial of the Fall–the hopeful insisted–was supposed to make life more cheerful; Bushnell was sure it succeeded only in making it duller. It was a denial of that human potential for evil which had made life adventurous precisely by making genuine moral crisis possible. It was a failure to understand tragedy. The sustained American aversion for tragedy, then as now, was based upon an obscure connection between tragedy and low spirits. Bushnell, pointing to the most enduring tragic dramas and tragic heroes, suggested that tragedy, by posing a real opposition and a real choice in human experience, was an affirmation of human dignity, and fundamentally optimistic. Adamism, Bushnell argued, by dissolving the opposition or absorbing it into a purely natural scheme, rendered life flat, colorless, undramatic, and boring.
–RWB Lewis, American Adam, via Rattus