Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
these later years he called himself half whimsically a “conservative
Christian Anarchist”[717] and the explanation probably is to be
found in his shift from intellectualism to emotion as the crown of
a satisfying life. “The two poles of social and political philosophy
seem necessarily to be organization or anarchy; man’s intellect or
the forces of nature.”[718] In rare and happy periods--as in the
glorious Transition--freedom finds its fullest life in a spontaneous
drawing together of the whole; but as the social _élan_ dies away,
institutions, organization, remain. Thomas Aquinas follows Saint
Francis, form remains after emotion has subsided. Nevertheless the free
man must cling to his freedom, in spite of society, in spite of the
political state.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is
restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible
only to himself. This principle is the philosophical foundation of
anarchism, and, for anything that science has yet proved, may be
the philosophical foundation of the universe; but it is fatal to
all society and is especially hostile to the State.[719]
Though he lived in the midst of a centralizing politics and found
his friends in such servants of centralization as John Hay and Henry
Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams had no faith in the dominant ideals. He was
never a friend to an acquisitive society with its engrossing political
state. In the light of his favorite dictum that “Power is poison,”
he may perhaps be regarded as an old-fashioned Jeffersonian; it is
another evidence of the persistence of his eighteenth-century mind. He
was an arch-individualist who would go his own way and reach his own
conclusions, quite unconcerned that his views were wholly at variance
with those of his generation. How could it be otherwise? How should
men who lived in the counting-house understand even the language of
this pilgrim returned from other and greater worlds? It was foolish to
talk of what he had seen. And so when he wrote _Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres_ he published it privately, and was incredulous when it was
proposed to republish it and give it to the world. What had he, or the
twelfth century, to say to the land of Theodore Roosevelt and Pierpont
Morgan? Was not this America of theirs peopled by the descendants of
the _bourgeoisie_ who, six hundred years before, resentful at having
been cheated--as they supposed--in their heavy investments in shrines
and churches of Our Lady, had turned away from all such unprofitable
business, and put their savings in lands and houses and ships and
railways and banks--of which things politics was the sluttish servant?
How should one who had known Saint Francis and Eleanor of Guienne take
such men or such a world seriously?
III • Brooks Adams--Rebel
The difference between Henry Adams and Brooks Adams is, perhaps,
sufficiently revealed in the distinction between the intellectual and
the rebel. The youngest of the brothers was a militant nonconformist,
a searching and outspoken critic of all the faiths of his generation.
In Brooks Adams the family skepticisms were pointed and barbed,
and the family distrust of capitalism issued in a broadside attack
upon the hateful system. Few Americans of his day were so little
pleased with the bankers’ Utopia dreamed of by the middle class,
or subjected the capitalistic mind to such critical analysis. Not
content with rejecting that Utopia, he pursued his studies in the
history of western civilization with a view to determining whether
the economic mind, instead of being the friend and ally of a human
society--as it professed to be--were not rather the foul wellspring
of a disintegrating egoism that must destroy every civilization that
yields to its siren appeal. In the theory he eventually elaborated,
the capitalistic mind proves to be a greedy spider spinning his web
to catch the simple imaginative minds--warrior and priest and artist
and craftsman--and suck them dry. The sterile middleman becomes master
of society and with the inevitable enslavement of the producer, and
the drying-up of production at its source, civilization withers and
decays, to be followed by another cycle in the long struggle between
the creative and acquisitive instincts.
None but a congenital rebel could have arrived at such conclusions from
the studies in which his youth was passed. As a son of the house of
Adams the profession of the law was the predestined path to politics
and diplomacy, and like Charles and Henry he devoted his younger
years to the ancestral study, receiving such training as the Harvard
Law School could give. He made greater progress than his brothers,
eventually getting so far as to write legal treatises; but finding such
work a bit arid he supplemented his legal studies with the writing of
Massachusetts chronicles. His dissatisfactions seem to have culminated
in the late eighties, during the lean years that preceded the crash
of 1893; and he turned away from local chronicles to speculate on
the deeper causes of social vigor and decline. The result was the
publication in 1895 of _The Law of Civilization and Decay_, a study
in social dynamics that took its point of departure from psychology,
and based its conclusions on physics and economics. Before Henry Adams
he elaborated the theory that civilization is the product of social
energy, and social energy obeys the physical law of mass, accelerating
or retarding in ratio to the density of population reduced to order.
As society draws together in great centers its activity increases
until exhaustion finally slows it down; whereupon follows a period
of disintegration that breaks up the integrated mass and disperses
its energy. The social ebb and flow, therefore, is always from
decentralization to centralization and back again to decentralization,
and as it flows it thrusts into the foreground different types of mind
that express themselves in diverse ideals.
The master types that appear and disappear in this ceaseless flux are
determined by two psychological drives that always and everywhere
shape human activity--fear and greed: the one culminating in the
social rule of the priest, the other in the social rule of the usurer.
Decentralization with its isolation breeds the imaginative mind which,
seeing more devils than vast hell can hold, turns to the priest for
succor--to one who deals in miracles and professes to be able to fend
off malignant powers, and who in consequence grows rich by his traffic
in relics and rises to economic power. But imagination produces as well
the creative mind that finds in isolation the promptings to revery,
expresses its dreams in terms of beauty, and fashions a realm of art
in which to dwell. Priest, artist, and warrior,--shrine, cathedral,
and castle--were the creation of medieval times, the naïve products
of the golden age of decentralization. Whereas centralization, with
the rubbing away of singularity by daily contact and the greater
rewards that lie open to activity, breeds automatically the economic
mind--a mind that is necessarily unimaginative, practical, competitive,
acquisitive, skeptical, preferring administration to creation, and
setting exploitation as the single object of activity. And since
centralization offers increasing rewards to greed, the economic mind
subdues the imaginative, and the money-lender with his control of
wealth rises to mastery. As he expropriates the resources of society
he inevitably dominates the political state. His wealth enables him to
maintain a hired police to safeguard his gains, until expropriation
having run its course, the police fail to hold in check the mass of the
exploited, and an unmartial class discovers that money can no longer
buy security against the strength of numbers. The usurer is overthrown,
his wealth is expropriated, and the social cycle must be run again.
This suggestive theory, which he works out with conspicuous skill in
his interpretation of the Middle Ages and the rise of capitalism,
implies a perennial conflict between fear and greed, that turns finally
upon the relative development of the arts of attack and of defense.
Centralization, it is clear, results from the superiority of the
former; when attack is superior to defense the lesser strongholds of
exploitation must fall and the defeated must become subject to the
coalescing masters. After the disruption of the Roman Empire western
Europe created its feudal system, by means of which the baron in
his stout castle flouted the centralizing ambitions of the impotent
monarchy; and it was not till the wealth of the church and of the
_bourgeoisie_ was thrown on the side of the king, and the development
of the art of attack through the use of gunpowder, that the rise of the
monarchical state was possible. But having aided the king to reduce the
power of the barons, thereby rendering trade secure on a large scale,
the _bourgeoisie_ turned against the medieval church with its vast
wealth that invited expropriation. In the primitive age of faith, under
the dominion of fear, the burgesses had spent their money prodigally
to build shrines and churches and cathedrals--in France alone between
the years 1170 and 1270, eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred
large churches had been built, that by a calculation made in 1840,
would cost a billion dollars to replace[720]--but with the development
of the economic mind such amazing expenditures seemed wasteful, and
the _bourgeoisie_ looked about for a cheaper way of salvation. The
money cost to the worshipers of saints and relics was a sharp prod to
their skepticism as to the efficacy of such worship. This explains for
Brooks Adams the origins of the Reformation; it was due to the economic
dissatisfaction of the burgess class; the church had grown rich and
grasping from its monopoly power. Speaking of the rise of English
Lollardry, he argued:
The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the
miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain
return ... gifts as an atonement for sin were a drain on savings,
and the economist instinctively sought cheaper methods of
propitiation. The monied class, therefore, proceeded step by step,
and its first experiment was to suppress all fees to middle-men,
whether priests or saints, by becoming their own intercessors with
the deity ... [and] as the tradesman replaced the enthusiast, a
dogma was evolved by which mental anguish, which cost nothing, was
substituted for the offering which was effective in proportion
to its money value. This dogma was “Justification by Faith,” the
cornerstone of Protestantism....
But the substitution of a mental condition for a money payment
led to consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of
certain clerical revenues, for it involved the rejection of the
sacred tradition which had not only sustained relic worship, but
which had made the Church the channel of communication between
Christians and the invisible world. That ancient channel once
closed, Protestants had to open another, and this led to the
deification of the Bible.... Thus for the innumerable costly
fetishes of the imaginative age were substituted certain writings
which could be consulted without a fee. The expedient was evidently
the device of a mercantile community, ... and made an organized
priesthood impossible. When each individual might pry into the
sacred mysteries at his pleasure, the authority of the clergy was
annihilated.[721]
With warrior and priest superseded by the tradesman as the dominant
type--the imaginative mind by the economic--came the inevitable triumph
of greed over fear. The ancient defenses of the church were razed and