Passionate Sage (23 page)

Merchants, bankers, and other members of “the moneyed aristocracy” were actually driven by emotional forces that wealth itself, no matter how huge the supply, could never satisfy: “Why do men affront heaven and earth to accumulate wealth, which will forever be useless to them?” The answer was psychological, not material or economic. It was “
because riches attract the attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind
.” Avaricious businessmen who pursued more and more sums of money were rather pathetic creatures, for they were trying to purchase affection with a currency that would never fetch much in the only emotional exchange that mattered: “Riches force the opinion on man that he is the object of the congratulations of others,” Adams wrote. “His imagination expands, and his heart dilates at these charming illusions. His attachment to his possessions increases as fast as his desire to accumulate more; not for the purposes of…utility, but from the desire of illustration.” Over a century later Thorstein Veblen would develop a similar theory of economic behavior and give it the memorable label “conspicuous consumption.” Adams had early on encountered the same psychological dynamic inside his own soul, where the lingering vestiges of New England Puritanism also made him familiar with the futility of amassing wealth as a way of persuading oneself, and others, that salvation was assured.
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Adams was less interested in the theoretical or theological origins of the insight than its political applications. He claimed that “the science of government, may be reduced to the same simple principle,” namely, the act of “conducting, controlling, and regulating the emulation and ambition of the citizens.” There was no way, he was at pains to insist, that the drive for “the attention, consideration, and congratulations of our fellow men” could ever be eradicated. “Nature has taken effectual care of her own work,” he declared; it has “wrought the passions into the texture and essence of the soul, and has not left it in the power of art to destroy them.”

Here was another instance in which Adams warned against the folly of any political scheme that attempted to remake human nature. Moreover, the primacy of this particular passion helped explain why he could never accept political prescriptions built on the principle of social or economic equality. It was not just that human beings were born with inherently different talents and abilities. It was also that the deepest compulsion in the human soul drove men to distinguish themselves from others, to accrue property, status, and honors in ways that defied all egalitarian ideals. Adams put the point succinctly in a letter to a grandson: “In all the democratical governments I have ever read [about], heard or seen, there is little real love of equality,” he wrote in 1821. “In all governments, in every individual, there is an eternal struggle to rise above somebody or other, or to depress somebody or other who is above him….” The egalitarian schemes of those French
philosophes
and their American counterparts within the Jefferson camp had the singular disadvantage of running against the deepest grain of human motivation.
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It was not only folly to oppose the elemental urges of mankind, it was also counterproductive. The passion for distinction had been woven into the fabric of human nature for a purpose. “Nature has ordained it, as a constant incentive to activity and industry,” Adams proclaimed, “that…men might be urged to constant exertions of beneficence.” Because of the irresistible impulse to win the approval of others, “men of all sorts, even those who have the least of reason, virtue or benevolence, are chained down to an incessant servitude to their fellow creatures; laboring without intermission…slaves to mankind.” The social consequences of this powerful drive would, he predicted, become most visible in America, because “the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest….” Adams was careful not to claim that the relatively open and uncrowded conditions in America would allow for the emergence of social equality. In fact, he thought that greater freedom in this richer environment would produce greater inequality. But he did think that the combustible combination of the drive for distinction with the more wide open American environment would generate unprecedented levels of productivity.
⁴¹

The pursuit of profits and wealth, no matter how successful, was only one way to satisfy the craving for respect. Adams thought that most Americans would opt to release their ambitious energies along this avenue, in part because it was the most visible and obvious course and in part because the economic opportunities were more prolific in America. A smaller number would choose to distinguish themselves outside the marketplace, pursuing what Adams called “reputation.” Many members of this group were likely to be successful merchants and businessmen who realized that wealth itself was inadequate to quench their thirst for recognition and who eventually graduated to a higher plateau, where they could release their passions in philanthropic causes. Public officials, men of letters, and military men also lived at this level; they could be expected to talk in terms of “a sense of duty, a love of truth,” but their deeper and often unconscious motives were decidedly selfish. “It is the
notoriety
, the
celebration
,” Adams argued, “which constitutes the charm that is to compensate the loss of appetite and sleep….”
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The most successful players on this plateau might expect public recognition in the form of titles, statues, and even a place in the history books. “The wisdom and virtue of all nations,” Adams explained, “have endeavored to regulate the passion for respect and distinction, and to reduce it to some order in society, by titles marking the gradations of magistracy….” By creating separate honors to aim for, the government encouraged greater exertions on behalf of the public and was simultaneously able “to prevent…collisions among the passions of many pursuing the same objects.” One of the reasons Adams proposed fanciful titles for the leading public officials in America—a proposal that his critics denounced as evidence of his aristocratic and un-American sensibility—was to ensure an adequate supply of honorific rewards. Since America lacked the kind of aristocratic titles and emblems that had grown up over time in Europe and Great Britain, Adams thought they should be created for distinguished public servants in order to guarantee that the drive for distinction would be attracted into government and public service and not fall back into the merely material rewards of the marketplace.
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On the other hand, Adams himself acknowledged that the quest for titles or statues or a place in the history books was an irrational drive: “For what a folly is it!” he observed. “What is it to us what shall be said of us after we are dead? Or in Asia, Africa, or Europe while we live. There is no greater possible or imaginable delusion. Yet the impulse is irresistible.” What made it irresistible he did not say. Like a primordial instinct, it was simply there, festering away in the souls of all human beings. Perhaps it was some hidden urge to deny one's mortality, to live on in the imaginations of others. Perhaps it was some conditioned reflex that God had built into nature in order to guarantee public spiritedness. Whatever the ultimate source of the urge, Adams was clear about two points: first, he knew its power first hand and could testify personally to its dominance over purely rational approaches to life; second, given the undeniability of the passion for distinction, the proper function of government was not to pretend that such forces did not exist, but rather to assure they were “directed to virtue, and then encouraged by generous applause and honorable rewards.”
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Finally, some men were born at opportune moments in history, when nations were being founded or great crises that would shape the future of the world were in process. These rare historical moments often called forth the deepest reservoir of human ambition, the most ferocious form of the passion for recognition. “This,” wrote Adams—surely with a keen sense that he was describing his own generation and, he hoped, himself—“is the tribe out of which proceed your patriots and heroes.” Men like Jefferson and Taylor, who had fashioned a political rhetoric that stigmatized aristocratic power, were inadvertently condemning the very group of American leaders—the revolutionary generation—which had been responsible for creating the American republic. History only afforded a few opportunities to satisfy such leaders. “But there are but a few, and God knows but a few,” Adams noted, with the combination of talent and ambition to “aim at approbation as well as attention, at esteem as well as congratulation….” Only those leaders with the deepest craving for fame were candidates for this highest calling; and society sanctioned the full release of their egotistical impulses because circumstances demanded and required nothing less. “I have read in a book that Alexander did much good,” Adams recalled wryly, “and in another book that Caesar did great work, and in others, that English liberties are all owing to Cromwell; and I believe all these paradoxes.”
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The paradox derived from the fact that such leaders, like banks, were both indispensable and dangerous, that the very passion for fame and glory, once released, was also extremely difficult to control. Hamilton and Burr were his favorite examples of the built-in danger. Adams had given this lecture on self-control to himself countless times in his diary. In
Davila
it was elevated to the highest level of political theory: “But for our humiliation,” he warned, “we must still remember, that…the passion, although refined by the purest moral sentiments, and intended to be governed by the best principles, is a passion still; and therefore, like all other human desires, unlimited and insatiable.” He inserted a quotation from Samuel Johnson that put the question nicely: “Heroes proceed! What bounds your pride shall hold?” The autobiographical answer to that question he had always given to himself was clear: constant doses of humility, endless lectures on self-discipline. But at the national level more than trust in such personal admonitions was required. “The answer to that question can be nothing other than this,” he concluded, “that as nature has established in the bosoms of heroes no limits to those passions; and as the world, instead of restraining, encourages them, the check must be in the form of government.” This meant limited terms of office, checks and balances, and a constitution that explicitly precluded even the most charismatic and virtuous official from standing above the law.
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Whereas Madison thought that the vast size of the American republic served as a safeguard against despotism by assuring that the greater variety and number of interest groups would collide with one another in a continental version of Adam Smith's marketplace, Adams worried about the geographical size of the United States and the growing population. “National passions and habits are unwieldy, unmanageable, and formidable things,” he warned, and when “exposed to the observation of greater numbers of people, the effects…become more serious, interesting, and dangerous.” His primary concern was that vastness of the American republic would enlarge the size of the political theatre in which ambitious leaders played their roles, expanding the arena in which their urge to distinguish themselves could function, feeding that urge with continental conquests. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr troubled him in this connection, since they were energetic leaders with “an uncontroulable Tendency to ascend,” and the western territories afforded them every opportunity to stage adventurous expeditions. He also worried that personal rivalries for national attention would break down regionally, with sectional leaders vying for political power in elections that produced “slanders and libels first, mobs and seditions next, and civil war, with all her hissing snakes, burning torches, and haggard horrors at last.” Frequent elections, like so many other features of his political thinking, were double-edged weapons: on the one hand, they prevented entrenched power from becoming permanent; on the other hand, they multiplied the occasions when vanity could distort the national interest. But he offered such scenes as warnings rather than prophecies. They were also reminders that the American experiment with republican government over such a vast tract of land was an unprecedented undertaking of great promise and great risk, with the greatness on both scores deriving from the unprecedented scope America offered for the expression of humankind's most elemental drives.
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Davila
was like his other attempts at political theory, only more so: a disorderly collection of profound insights, both the disorder and the profundity deriving from the same source inside the Adams personality. Adams admitted as much to himself. Whenever he made marginal notes in his personal copy of
Davila
, he admitted disappointment at its rambling and disjointed form. “The Style has little fluency,” he scribbled in 1813, then added with obvious pride, “but the sense is as immortal as human nature.”
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The lack of what Adams called “fluency”—the ricochet style of
Davila
and the
Defence—
inadvertently expressed one of his deepest political convictions: namely, that comprehensive theories of politics were invariably too neat and rational to capture the maddening messiness of the real world. True, Adams did believe there was such a thing as human nature. He had studied it in written histories and, more tellingly, had confronted its emotional imperatives inside himself. But he did not believe that conventional forms of political philosophy did much justice to the complex irrationalities of the human condition. He associated elaborate theories of politics with French
philosophes
like Turgot and Condorcet, whose mental fabrications bore only a tenuous connection to history's machinations. As Adams saw it, political theory of the grandiose sort was invariably “ideology,” an organized collection of seductive hopes and wishes, a systematic way of going wrong with confidence. History and the human heart that propelled it could not be reduced to a set of accessible political prescriptions, which were, after all, merely pieces of theoretical wisdom, and therefore a contradiction in terms.