I am currently reading a biography of John Adams by David McCullough, the widely-respected, Pulitzer-Prize-winning American historian. A decade ago, his work on Adams was adapted by HBO into a seven-part mini-series. On the basis of his popular acclaim, I have always assumed that McCullough couldn’t write. I’ve been wrong.
In 1780, with the outcome of the War of Independence still very much in doubt, Adams left France for Holland to secure a loan from Dutch bankers for the American war effort. While residing in Amsterdam, he enrolled his thirteen-year-old son, John Quincy, in the ancient and prestigious University of Leiden. John Quincy had accompanied his father two years earlier on the arduous trans-Atlantic sea-voyage from Massachusetts to France, and during his two months aboard ship, redeemed the time by studying and becoming sufficiently fluent in French to serve as Adams’ interpreter at the French court. At the University of Leiden, John Quincy took classes in philosophy, classics, law, science, and medicine. The lectures were delivered in Latin, of course.
As an accomplished classicist himself, Adams was delighted; the only thing that disturbed him about his son’s course of study was the absence of Cicero and Demosthenes from the curriculum. When he learned of this egregious and incomprehensible oversight, Adams was indignant, and briefly considered withdrawing John Quincy from the university. Once over his pique, he admonished his son to study Cicero and Demosthenes on his own, and offered to tutor him himself.
As a young teen, then, John Quincy was already fluent in Greek, Latin, and French. And while he was obviously precocious, there was nothing extraordinary about his education. Adams senior had come into the world as the son of a shoemaker-farmer, neither wealthy nor high-born. Homer, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid—these were the authors that every young student read, and the maturity, dignity, thoughtfulness, and humility gained from that reading were amply on display in the letters that the thirteen-year-old John Quincy wrote at the time.
That was only a little over two centuries ago, though it seems like a geological eon. I need hardly point out that, notwithstanding their significant material and social advantages, the graduates of today’s universities are barely literate in a single language, and Cicero for them might as well be the name of a star in a distant galaxy.
Reading McCullough’s account, I scarcely recognize myself as a member of the same species as Adams, who seems by comparison to have come from a race of gods and heroes in some Homeric age. But McCullough also reminds me that I don’t recognize my own contemporaries as members of the same species as that into which I was born, a little less than seven decades ago.
Since then, we have “progressed”, morally and intellectually, at the ever-accelerating speed of a collapsing building (to borrow an image from the writer David Warren). The rapidity and glibness with which we have undermined and overthrown centuries-old democratic liberties (freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equality before the law), not to mention the rudimentary principles of logic and objectivity–according to which feeling “offended” is hardly in itself evidence of a crime; that you can’t ontologically “be” this or that “gender” because you subjectively intuit that you are–, has been the incessant theme of these pages. The Western-Civilizational edifice, erected slowly, brick by brick, storey by storey, century by century, has been brought down in a matter of a few decades, demolished by the wrecking ball of progressive ideology. But more depressing than the demise of the natural reason and liberty that Adams’ generation so cherished is the permanent injury that “progress” has inflicted upon the human character.
“Character” is not a word much used any longer. It was a ubiquitous term of moral discourse—neither is moral discourse much used anymore–in Adam’s Enlightenment world, and probably last appeared in the civics textbooks of my schooldays in the early Sixties. It has by now, of course, been wholly supplanted by progressive weasel-words like “values”, “tolerance”, “diversity”, and “rights”.
But character cannot be abolished, suppressed, or prettified by ideology, and it remains everywhere on display: in the spectacle of our Prime Minister on tour in India, turning merely cynical multicultural pandering into a full-on parade of his own foppish, selfie-immortalized vanity (but then what does it tell you about the character of a nation that it would elect a man of such meager intellectual attainments for the principal reason of his family name and pleasing appearance?); in the fist-pumping triumphalism and nauseating self-absorption of Olympic sport; in the screaming, feral arrogance of pubescent Florida high school students calling U.S. senators “murderers” and “terrorists” on CNN, and lecturing them on the abstrusities of the American Constitution; in the unctuous self-praise of a sheriff, whose officers’ incompetence and cowardice caused the deaths of at least some of those students, retailing his department’s (that is, his own) selfless dedication, life-saving courage, and noble compassion. Such recent events, trivial in the grand scheme of things, tell us the story of the building’s collapse at the small, unremarked level of the crumbling human character.
In spite of his formidable intellectual and political accomplishments, John Adams, it seems, was constantly questioning his worthiness for the epochal roles to which fate had assigned him; and the one temptation (as he tells us repeatedly in his letters) against which he was ever on his guard was vanity, a vice that has now become a virtue.
Is there any moral trait that more perfectly defines our times than this: the grasping pursuit of celebrity, public approbation, and “self-esteem”? A few years ago, at the end of a class on the House of Pride in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and after a long excursus on the medieval doctrine of the Seven Deadly Sins, a female undergraduate approached my desk to ask, “Do you mean to say that pride isn’t a good thing?” How is that we have completely forgotten that overweening pride, vainglory, hubris, amor sui, amour-propre, giving oneself airs, puffing oneself up, cravenly suing for the approval of the mob—however it has been described over the centuries–has always, in every age and culture, been rightly despised as the most contemptible and malignant of vices? Even if the current generation of “peoplekind” is completely innocent of the moral tutelage of Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and all the other writers on this theme, the innate and instinctive human revulsion against presumption in others, if not in ourselves, ought to have restrained our collective enthusiasm for it.
It seems, rather, as if technology has invented Facebook, the smartphone, and the selfie stick as the instruments and allegorical emblems of the insouciant Narcissism of our times. I remember being taken aback the first time I watched a steady queue of tourists, in St. Peter’s Basilica, waiting to take their selfies in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, thereby relegating the artist’s sublime achievement as background to their own image. The point of all great religious art is to provide a vehicle by means of which the spirit may take flight above and beyond the narrowness of the ego and the flatness of the world. Today’s tourists use it to snuggle back inside.
As the “trivial” examples above illustrate, the potentiating principle of the human character in the progressive age is a monstrous self-regard, which, amongst other pathologies, never allows those who are demonically possessed by it to admit that something might be their own fault; or that, as students still in high school or minor celebrities enjoying the adulation of the concert, film, or television audience, they might be too young, too poorly educated, or wholly unqualified to hold forth on the difficult moral and political questions of the day.
From daycare to eldercare, everyone, as we know, is exhorted to “feel proud” of himself: we have black pride, gay pride, female pride, indigenous pride, disabled pride, blind pride, fat pride, prizes for coming last in your high school soccer tournament, awards for scholastic mediocrity.
As Chesterton presciently observed a century ago, it is the mark of the modern to everywhere and always subordinate the normal to the abnormal. We are now beginning to understand the perverse moral dynamic that underlies this historical paradigm shift. Abnormality (as in homosexuality, the transgendered, even the grossly obese) now evinces, neither sympathy nor morbid curiosity, but public admiration and esteem. Gays and the transgendered are instructed to be proud of their psychological disorders (although how you can be proud of a condition you have supposedly been assigned at birth is never explained.) Notwithstanding the excruciating surgical and pharmacological interventions required, changing one’s sex is now faddishly promoted (including by parents) as a statement of moral enlightenment, “diversity”, and authenticity; and it has become, accordingly, an ever more popular option even for pre-pubescents. In the same way, obesity is simultaneously exculpated as a “disease”–when it isn’t being blamed on the fast-food industry–and proudly embraced by its “victims”, who brandish their corpulence in purple spandex in every mall and fitness club throughout America. Why shouldn’t the abnormal take pride in their abnormality, when they have been fawned over, looked up to, and championed by their cheerleaders throughout the progressive beau monde?
The entire victimological ethos of modern liberalism is rooted in this self-exculpating, self-aggrandizing reflex. Whether it’s women, racial minorities, homosexuals, the indigenous, or illegal immigrants, being a victim, identifying with victims, or advocating for victims is the fastest route to public approbation and celebrity, which, along with power (and rather more than wealth), are surely the most greedily desiderated worldly goods of our post-philosophical age. Blaming others for one’s plight, once regarded as mean-spirited and self-deceiving, now merely increases the sympathy and respect one can look forward to. Suffering, always counted as noble when borne with quiet resignation and equanimity, is now admired in direct proportion to how theatrically it is shared with the world.
The vociferous victim-sufferer is anointed with the chrism of superior moral authority, which he lords over everyone else, especially the members of the oppressor-group. And in an age of suffocating political correctness, moral superiority can only descend into a rankly Tartuffian self-righteousness and condescension, the most obnoxious species of spiritual vainglory. From the fascist violence of the anti-fa social justice mob—oh, for some merely micro-aggression!–to the gentler, authoritarian coercion of the guardians of progressive orthodoxy in the academy, on the bench, and in the legislature, modern progressive culture floats above the dull earth in a tumescent blimp held aloft only by its proponents’ intellectual and moral self-inflation. The progressive says: I am right; you are wrong. I am enlightened; you are stupid (behind the times, out of the mainstream, credulous, blind, bigoted). I am righteous; you are evil (racist, sexist, homophobic). I have been treated unfairly. I have been offended. I feel unsafe. I need. I deserve. I demand. I…I…I. These are the lyrics of the whining, grasping anthem of progressive orthodoxy. To which anyone with the smallest vestige or native touch of philosophy in his soul must reply, simply: Yuk.
The moral clues enjoining us to progressive self-esteem confront us everywhere, and by now, everyone has learned to obey them. Thus, if you are a minor government official and there is a “tragedy”, you will know instantly to hold a news conference, report nothing (because there is nothing to report), but milk the event for all the bathos you can suck out of it; emphasize the enormity of what transpired (for in aggrandizing it, you aggrandize yourself and your role in it); tell us that you and your colleagues are working tirelessly, day and night, doing everything you can to “find the perpetrator”, and “ensure that this will never happen again”. (But don’t even consider the possibility that, had you done your job properly, it never would have happened in the first place.)
And if you are a member of the “suffering community”, thrust yourself before the cameras; for you too deserve a little celebrity; you too deserve to bask in the pity and compassion that a cruel world has for so long withheld from you. And even if you’ve never met an actual victim, don’t just get through it, but tell us that you and your suffering community will get through this, because by doing so, you reveal your own fortitude and endurance. Then, when you tire of the pose of Stoic sage, assume the heroic persona of the social activist. Stand up, in righteous indignation, to the evil NRA and their tools in Congress. Scream at them like a two-year-old in the grip of a tantrum, while at the same time talking down to them as if you were the adult in the room, declaring, “We are sick and tired…Enough is enough…”, and other expressions of condescendent impatience with the stupidity and venality of your non-progressive elders.
If you are an athlete marching into the Olympic stadium, forget about those archaic Olympic ideals of sportsmanship, gentlemanly decorum, and teamwork, but make the procession all about you. Break from the formation, and take a selfie. Mug for the audience. Point at yourself, while gesticulating goofily before the crowd, in some Tourette’s-inspired parody of your upcoming free-style moguls routine.
If you are a figure skater at the end of your skate, collapse dramatically to your knees, elbows folded and hands around the back of your head, exhausted from your Herculean labours, and in utter amazement at the sheer magnificence of your own performance (thereby telling the judges how magnificent it was, lest they fail to recognize the obvious).
When you enter the “kiss and cry”, do likewise. Mug, again, for the cameras. Hold up to them the little heart-shaped pillows and stuffed toys provided there to prove that you care about the world with all the innocence of childhood, even if you are long past the stuffed-animal-cuddling age of five.
If you are a member of the Canadian women’s hockey team, throw away your silver medal. You are worth more. It’s an egalitarian age: everyone deserves gold, especially you, who have striven so hard and sacrificed so much for it—sorry–for your country.
As the tectonic plates of western society abruptly shift beneath us, you may append to this Jeremiad the observation that personal autonomy has now risen above duty, sacrifice, morality and even honour as the principal principle of modern ethics.