How the Scots Invented the Modern World (34 page)

Preventing this kind of “mental mutilation,” Smith says in the
Wealth of
Nations,
deserves “the most serious attention of government.” It is in fact the one place where Smith actually commends a genuinely active role for civic institutions: creating a system of education that will counteract this “deformity” of the human character by the division of labor.

Through capitalism we gain, but we also lose. The loss, Smith felt, was felt most among the lowest classes—his particular example was employees in a pin factory—whose cramped place in the chain of production leaves no room for the enlargement of the mind and spirit, which the freedom of commercial society should open up. Smith in fact defined the problem of the “assembly line” mentality of factory workers almost two decades before the Industrial Revolution got fully under way—the problem that Karl Marx and his followers would call alienation. It was especially worrisome to Smith, because “in free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favourable judgement which the people may form of its conduct,” a mass of ignorant, culturally degraded citizens easily becomes an immense drag on the system. They become easy prey to demagogues and applaud every attempt to undermine the foundations of that “natural liberty” which they have enjoyed in the first place.

So, while Smith had given one set of issues its final, definitive shape—the link between commercial society, refinement, and liberty—he had opened up a whole new territory for discussion and debate, the cultural costs of capitalism. In fact, he and his Edinburgh friends had been arguing about this for almost a decade, even before Dr. Johnson had wondered during his Scottish tour whether any society benefitted from becoming entirely “commercial” in its mentality and attitudes. The Scots, including Adam Smith himself, had firmly answered No.

The person who put the matter in the strongest terms was another member of the Select Society, and founder of the Poker Club, Adam Ferguson. Born in Perthshire, along the border between the Highlands and Lowlands, he had gone to Edinburgh to study for the ministry. There he became friends with the other future Moderate literati. But he missed the traumatic events of 1745–46 when he accepted a post as chaplain to the Black Watch regiment in Flanders.

It was an experience that profoundly altered his perspective from that of his contemporaries. They, as we saw, considered Prince Charles’s Highland followers uncouth barbarians, and looked forward with undisguised relish to the demise of their society and culture. As chaplain, Ferguson had come to know the Highlanders firsthand and understood that for all their crude habits and harsh aggressiveness, they were men of honor, with an undeniable sense of courage, loyalty, and generosity toward friend and foe alike. In fact, they reminded Ferguson of no one so much as the warriors of the Homeric poems, and the ancient Spartans and Roman legions. The very qualities that his Moderate friends admired in their beloved Greeks and Romans, Ferguson found alive and well in the Scottish Highlands. The destruction of that way of life meant the destruction of something precious, Ferguson decided, and Scotland and the Scots would be the poorer for it.

Ferguson expanded his argument far beyond Scotland and into the very nature and history of civil society itself. In fact, that became the title of his book
Essay on the History of Civil Society,
published in 1768. In it, Ferguson helped himself to generous portions of Kames and Hume, as well as Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—and another, largely forgotten figure, Andrew Fletcher. The result was a volatile mixture of typical, cold-eyed Scottish political and social analysis, and flights of almost romantic poetry in praise of primitive peoples everywhere, but particularly in the ancient world and among Native Americans. Ferguson found in them what he had found in his Highland regiment: honor, integrity, and courage, which commercial society, with its over-specialization and mental mutilation, destroyed.

This was one of Ferguson’s most striking points. Far from being “civilized” and advanced in their attitudes, the ancient Greeks and Romans were in fact, by modern standards, true primitives. A world of differences separated them from us, a world created and defined by the rise of capitalism. As Ferguson showed, modern civilization had erected an enormous barrier, cutting off “polite” nations not only from their “barbarous” neighbors, but from their own past as well. He quotes with approval a Native American chief telling a British official in Canada, “I am a warrior, not a merchant.” It is a sentiment that would have been shared by an Achilles or a Hector, or even a Cato or a Pericles—not to mention a Highland chieftain such as Lochiel. “Their ardent attachment to their country,” Ferguson wrote of the ancients, “their contempt of suffering, and of death, in its cause; their manly apprehensions of personal independence, which rendered every individual, even under tottering establishments, and imperfect laws, the guardian of freedom to his fellow citizens . . . have gained them the first rank among nations.”

All these qualities were being steadily eaten away in the new, self-centered, modern society taking shape around them. Today “the individual considers his community only so far as it can be rendered subservient to his personal advancement and profit.” Human beings become weak and soft, and lose their sense of honor and courage. They must have their creature comforts, no matter what. Freedom itself becomes a commodity, to be sold to the highest bidder—or seized by the strongest power.

Ferguson saw history moving along the same lines as his fellow Edinburgh literati, but the ultimate destination would be very different from what the prophets of progress had forecast.

The boasted refinements, then, of the polished age, are not divested of danger. They open a door, perhaps, to disaster, as wide and accessible as any they have shut. If they build walls and ramparts, they enervate the minds of those who are placed to defend them; if they form disciplined armies, they reduce the military spirit of entire nations; and by placing the sword where they have given a distaste to civil establishments, they prepare for mankind the government of force.

The last stage of modern history would be not liberty but tyranny, unless something was done to prevent it. Left to itself, commercial society would become humanity’s tomb.

Ferguson’s book had an enormous impact when it came out. It contained one of the first uses of the word
civilization
in English, and coined the term
civil society
as synonymous with modernity itself. It made Ferguson almost as famous as Adam Smith, and on the Continent almost as influential. The German Enlightenment particularly admired it, including the father of modern nationalism, Johann Gottfried Herder, and the founder of German Romanticism, the poet Friedrich Schiller. But Ferguson’s closest reader would be Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who incorporated many of Ferguson’s ideas and even phrases into his own philosophy of history, which Karl Marx would take up and develop. In fact, Marxism owes its greatest debt to Ferguson, not Rousseau, as the most trenchant critic of capitalism—and as the great alternative to Adam Smith as the prophet of modernity.

Admiration among his fellow Scots was more measured. Hume disliked the
Essay;
he saw it as a surrender to a kind of romantic primitivism, which the controversy over the Ossian poems had recently set off.
²¹
Adam Smith was miffed by the fact that Ferguson had stolen many of his insights from Smith’s own lectures, including the part about the decline of the martial spirit in capitalist society. The real disagreement was not over content, however, but the tone. Smith and Hume clearly saw the shortcomings of a society organized completely around the gratification of self-interest and the calculation of profit and loss. They saw the virtues of premodern “rude” societies disappearing, along with their vices, and understood that we pay a heavy price for the division of labor and specialization in a modern complex economy.

But they believed firmly that the benefits were worth the price. A society that could finally feed everyone, not just a chosen few; that could relieve the poverty and misery of even the weakest and least productive of its members; that recognized the sovereignty of the individual and his rights, and agreed to leave him alone to pursue his own ends; that put a premium on treating others with kindness and deference rather than disdain and exploitation; and, finally, that a society that recognized that it was better to do business with other nations than to try to conquer them, was not one on the verge of tyranny, but just the opposite. These were the conditions of modern liberty. If the ancients had constructed a version of freedom that lacked these essential ingredients, then they, not we, were the poorer for it.

And if commercial society offered new problems, it also offered solutions. Steps could be taken to correct course, and counteract the “bad effects of commerce” Smith and Ferguson had defined, even the cultural ones. One such solution was education, and Smith, in the late sections of
Wealth of Nations,
strongly urged public support for a system of schools that would make sure the benefits of a civilized culture reached as large a public as possible. Not surprisingly, his model was Scotland’s own system of parish schools, which “has taught almost the whole common people to read, and a very great proportion of them to write and account.” Smith knew that a modern capitalist society without a decent system of education was committing suicide, politically as well as culturally.

Another solution was one that many of Smith’s Edinburgh friends had embraced, including Adam Ferguson: the creation of a citizen militia. This was a sore subject for Scotsmen. Ever since the Forty-five, they had been denied the use and ownership of weapons, and Parliament’s passage of Militia Acts in 1757, and then during the American war, deliberately left the Scots out. Ferguson had become a virtual firebrand on the issue. He organized the Poker Club specifically to “stir up” public support for creating a Scottish militia. He also wrote pamphlets on the subject, as did John Home and other Moderates, arguing that a citizen militia was a way to keep alive the traditions of physical courage and martial spirit in a commercial society.

Why did the Scottish Enlightenment embrace the militia cause so strongly? Lurking in the background, perhaps, were uncomfortable memories of the volunteer companies of 1745 and that ill-fated march through Edinburgh. When liberty is threatened, can anyone expect young men raised in a cushy commercial environment to risk their lives on the battlefield against tough and hardened warriors? Obviously not, unless they have help. Not material help in this case, but cultural help, something that taught them self-sacrifice, discipline, and loyalty, and gave them confidence in their own physical powers and those of their weapons. This, Ferguson and the rest believed, militia training could do. And Adam Smith came to agree with them. Although he warned in
Wealth of Nations
that a citizen militia could never equal the discipline of a professional army in peacetime, he did believe a few campaigns in the field could harden them into an effective fighting force. The record of citizen soldiers in modern times, from Saratoga and Gettysburg to El-Alamein and Omaha Beach, tends to bear him out.

The agitation for a Scottish militia failed to move legislators in London. But it did set a new standard for later debates about the future of free societies, and the place of military virtues and military arms in them. The idea that a free people needed to keep and bear arms in order to defend their liberty was an ancient one, reaching back to the Greeks and forward to Andrew Fletcher. But now Ferguson and his friends had added something new, a social-psychological dimension. By owning weapons and learning to use them, a commercial people can keep alive a collective sense of honor, valor, and physical courage, traditions that no society, no matter how sophisticated and advanced, can afford to do without.

Here again, we see how the force of the debate had shifted. The issue was no longer how to make Scotland “civilized” and modern. That had been done. The question now was, having crossed that irrevocable line, what could be preserved of what came before? A watershed had been passed, and everyone knew it.

The
Wealth of Nations
was published on March 6, 1776. In February of that year, another masterpiece had appeared, the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Although English, Gibbon modeled his work closely on the Scottish and Edinburgh historical school: for all intents and purposes, he was intellectually a Scot. One of his closest friends was Adam Ferguson, but his other heroes were Hume and Smith, whose new book Gibbon called “the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or century.” When Hume wrote to Gibbon praising his new history, Gibbon said the letter “repaid the labour of ten years.”

On August 25, 1776, David Hume died after a long illness. His funeral drew a huge crowd, as his body was carried in a pouring rain from his house in the New Town to the Old Calton Burying Ground. Although Hume dismissed the idea of an afterlife to the very end, his last hours were calm and serene. Joseph Black described them in a letter to Adam Smith: “When he spoke to the people about him [he] always did it with affection and tenderness.”

Earlier, on July 4, a different world-shattering event took place across the Atlantic. The American Revolution lurks in the background of every chapter of
Wealth of Nations,
just as it occupied the attention of so many of Smith’s colleagues and friends.
²²
Yet in certain ways, the reverse was also true. Scottish ideas, and Scots, were having a large impact on the events unfolding in the American colonies.