A Bonus Post

I have already seen the movie A Complete Unknown and enjoyed it very much.  It took more than a week, however, for me to be reminded of one of the funniest things I have ever seen on youtube, which is highly relevant to the movie.  Enjoy.

Adams and Jefferson and us

 It was more than 40 years ago, I am sure, that I first purchased a one-volume paperback edition of the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Its 614 pages are actually two very different books, separated by a brief interlude.  The correspondence begins in the midst of the outbreak of the American Revolution, but really gets going in 1786, in the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the two men took over the new nation's most important diplomatic posts, Adams in London and Jefferson in Paris.  They wrote frequently until they both returned to the United States in 1789 to become Vice President and Secretary of State in Washington's administration.  During that administration they became the leaders of the rival Federalist and Republican parties, and an unfortunate provision of the original constitution made Jefferson Adams's vice-president in 1797, after Adams had won the electoral college over him.  They did not exchange a single letter until Jefferson was about to succeed Adams in 1801, and none afterwards for nearly a dozen years.  The volume includes seven letters between Jefferson and Abigail Adams in 1804, occasioned by the death of one of Jefferson's two legitimate daughters.

When Jefferson left the White House in 1809, he, like Adams, had lost most of any popularity he had enjoyed.  Three years later, in early 1812, Adams, then 77, re-opened the correspondence by sending Jefferson a book of lectures given by his son John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of Jefferson's party and had served in the Madison administration as Minister to Russia.  Jefferson was then 68 and the correspondence continued--with Adams contributing about two thirds of the letters--until shortly before they both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Finally picking up the book recently, I decided to begin that last chapter in their correspondence, while planning to tackle the earlier periods subsequently.  They promise a fascinating account of the diplomacy of the first, deeply flawed phase of our national history from 1781 to 1789.

I have now made my way from 1812 until the middle of 1816.  The letters are fascinating, not least in what they do not discuss. They include almost nothing about the progress of the War of 1812, although Adams in 1814 mentioned that he had become deeply unpopular in Massachusetts for supporting that war, which had harmed New England very badly and led in that year to talk of secession.  They say just as little about other contemporary political controversies or elections.  Religion occupies the most space of any topic in the correspondence so far.   Both men were Unitarians in the literal as well as institutional sense: they regarded Christ's teachings as the finest guide to human behavior ever written, but they denied his divinity and rejected the authority of all the great religious institutions that had been built around it.  They shared pride in the 18th century which had tried to elevate reason over faith.  Yet between 1812 and 1815, they observed momentous developments in Europe which cast some doubt on their shared gospel of human progress.  They were delighted in 1814 by the fall of Napoleon, but distressed to see the old order reassert itself in the Congress of Vienna, which divided whole nations like Poland among the victorious conservative powers.  Jefferson also commented that there was really nothing to choose between Napoleon and the British government that had helped defeat him, since neither seemed to care about anything but their own power.  When Napoleon returned from Elba in early 1815 they thought he still enjoyed the support of the French nation, but he lasted, of course, only 100 days before Waterloo.  Then the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne again.  The two men began to wonder where history was going, 

Jefferson on January 11, 1816, commented on the impact of the ideas of the 18th century on European politics.  "With some exceptions only," he wrote, "through the 17th and 18th centuries morality occupied an honorable chapter in the political code of nations."  He regarded the partitions of Poland as an unfortunate exception for which the "barbarous government" of Russia was chiefly responsible.  "How then has it happened," he continued in reference to the last three decades, "that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation in character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right? . . .Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300 years before"--and, he might have added, with vastly greater forces at their disposal.  

Adams replied on February 2.  "I can only say it present, that it should seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human enthusiasm. . . .You ask, how it has happened that all Europe has acted on the Principle "that Power was right"  I know not what Answer to give you, but this, that Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon[sic] Foi, believes itself right.  Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws."

My entire life as a student of history has taught me that Adams was right, and I have seen how power can persuade itself of the justice of its aims again and again in  my own country, first in Vietnam, then in the Middle East.  With war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and threatening over Taiwan, the noble dream of a world ruled by law, as promoted by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and embodied now for 80 years in the United Nations.  And a parallel drama has played itself out in our domestic affairs.  It has taken half a century since the Powell memorandum for corporate America to convince itself that its power must serve the interests of all, even as its insatiable greed drains more wealth and income from the mass of the people every year.  

Yet I believe that the conflict between reason and passion is more complicated than Adams made out.  Both have a profound appeal to human nature--but neither ever wins a final victory over the other.  Reason has now been retreating for more than half a century and passion may have more terrible victories yet to win.  Eventually, however, passion's excesses, I think, will lead to a new round of restraint based upon reason--domestically, in foreign affairs, and even personally.  This has happened many times before.  That eternal conflict remains the source of what progress we have been able to make, and ensures that every victory and every defeat will always be incomplete and only temporary.  That, I have decided, is where real hope for humanity and progress must come from.