There are few honest people of any political persuasion, and perhaps no serious ones, who would say that they are happy with what our nation has become. The United States is now a bloated technocratic empire bearing little resemblance to the democratic republic envisioned by its Founders. We are still nominally governed by our eighteenth-century Constitution, but the real sovereignty of this vast, centerless regime seems to be diffused among a multitude of governmental and para-governmental agencies, each with its own mechanisms of enforcement and which together comprise a complex organism that somehow gives each of us unprecedented power—we can communicate at the speed of light with anyone and everyone in the world; we can call up information on any subject whatsoever by simply moving our thumbs; we can even instigate social unrest on a massive scale—while nevertheless leaving us powerless. It’s as if the Hobbesian ambition to create and submit ourselves to an artificial god has been realized on a technological plane, the monster reaching its tentacles into every nook and cranny of our lives. Islands of opulence, particularly along the coasts, are surrounded by whole regions, once thriving, that have been all but left for dead. Talk of the “common good” sounds antiquated and is met with suspicion and derision from all sides as the common world that undergirds any political society seems to disintegrate before our very eyes into a chaotic stew of private pronouns. And, in reaction to all this, Donald Trump is the twice-elected president of the United States. If the Trump years turn out to be a test of whether a ‘great man of history’ can survive the posthuman age, history will be cunning indeed.
For progressives, or course, Trump’s election merely confirms all their long-held priors and justifies the use of any means necessary to oppose the threat of “fascism,” by which they seem to mean the order of being itself, and achieve revolutionary social and political change. But even if you are an unconflicted Trump supporter, bored with all this winning, you must surely concede that Trump is perhaps the most unlikely ‘great man of history’ in the history of great men of history and that his electoral victories say something about the dire state of our civilization. And you know in the back of your mind that it’s all just one election away from being reversed. The retribution, when it eventually comes, will almost certainly be brutal.
You cannot begin to appreciate what the Death of God in the West might mean, how it unchains the earth from its sun and erases the difference between up and down, unless you first understand what the life of God has meant in the history of our civilization.
How did our great experiment in ordered liberty come to this? It seems to me that any attempt to account for the nature and principles of American order at this stage in our history must also account for the seemingly vast discrepancy between what our Founders thought they were creating and what we have actually become. Obviously no monocausal explanation will suffice. There are countless empirical factors and historical contingencies that have helped bring us to the present, and we can conjure up endless counterfactuals to imagine how it all might have all turned out differently. But unless we are historicists and believe that history itself is just one damn thing after another, or unless we believe in behavior rather than action, then we believe that meaning is causal—actually I would argue that this is one of those things we cannot not believe though we may try—and we therefore have an obligation to try to trace these phenomena back to the ideas, the horizon of meaning, that give them form and finality. So, granting contingency and empirical facts their full weight in the mystery of historical causation, it nevertheless behooves us to ask whether the general shape of this unhappy present is somehow fated by a recessive gene in America’s DNA.
Two answers to this question will most likely be familiar to you already, at least in general outline. I don’t mean to caricature either of them, but I generalize to get on to the meat of what I have to say. For many latter-day progressives at least, Donald Trump justifies their lost faith not only in America, but in the deepest principles of our civilization. That there is really no outside these principles, or that their own sense of justice or democracy is indebted to them, is beside the point, except that it provides the spirit of negation something to destroy, as oxygen fuels fire. For them, Donald Trump’s rise to power only manifests the white supremacy constitutive of the American system and inextirpable from it. For conservatives, things are obviously a little more complicated. While liberal thinkers like Locke obviously exercised influence, albeit overstated, on the eighteenth-century mind, America is not the ex nihilo creation of Lockean political philosophy, itself a problematic heir to deeper springs within the Western tradition, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Biblical religion. Philadelphia, as it were, is downstream from the confluence of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. This is the thesis that Russell Kirk labored so hard to demonstrate. If this is true and these principles are sound, then America’s fall, so to speak, must be accounted for as a deviation from these principles, whether this be understood intrinsically as a moral departure from the founding vision or extrinsically by the introduction of extraneous factors. In lesser thinkers than Kirk, a now familiar cast of villains is often trotted out to bear the burden for this corruption: Darwin, Hegel, Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson among them.
I am sympathetic to certain aspects of all these positions, even the progressive one. I am particularly appreciative of the elemental depth of these roots in Kirk’s account and how they inform the basic, everyday notions of order, justice, dignity, and reason whose theological and philosophical origins are long since forgotten. It reminds me of a point once made by David Bentley Hart about the poor quality of contemporary atheism in comparison to a figure such as Nietzsche. You cannot begin to appreciate what the Death of God in the West might mean, how it unchains the earth from its sun and erases the difference between up and down, unless you first understand what the life of God has meant in the history of our civilization. There is also more than an element of truth in the litany of villains. The liberalism of the progressive era, what Dewey called renascent liberalism, does depart substantially from the liberalism of the eighteenth century, prioritizing the social whole over the atomic parts and regarding liberty not as an a priori endowment but as a future state to be realized through the administration of what he called “organized intelligence.” There is no law of nature in Dewey, because there is no nature in Dewey except historical flux and Darwinian trial and error.
So, my thesis is not intended to repudiate Kirk’s account so much as complicate it a bit. It is that the roots of American order and the roots of American disorder are the same, at least in part, that what has made America great—and I affirm that America is great, astonishingly so, in fact—what has made it possible to build an empire of unprecedented wealth and power in a blink of historical time, is also a fundamental ingredient of our present undoing. This imputes to America something of a tragic quality largely lacking in Kirk’s vision—though he might have agreed with it had he lived to see our own day—that might help us move beyond both the self-hatred of the left and the jingoism one often encounters on the right. After all, he does cite with approval Eric Voegelin’s remark that civilizations can advance and decline at the same time, though not forever.
Making good on this will require us to travel from “Rome,” or the Christian Middle Ages, to a side of London and Philadelphia that Kirk mostly neglects, not the London of Thomas Browne, John Bunyan and the judicious Hooker, but of the three greatest men who ever lived, at least as reckoned by Thomas Jefferson: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke and the Royal Society of London. From there it is but a short step to the Philadelphia of Franklin, Jefferson and the Philosophical Society of America. The justification for this lies in the problem with which I began, that of explaining the discrepancy between what our Founders meant and what they did, between the neoclassical republic they intended to build and the technocracy we have become. For if there is an ur-text that anticipates with prophetic foresight what we would become, I would argue that it is not Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise, or the Federalist Papers of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, but Bacon’s New Atlantis. In the passage from “Rome” to this London and Philadelphia there occurs a revolution, not a political revolution merely, but a revolution in the metaphysical dream entailed in every political society. This revolution transforms the meaning of fundamental terms whose use remains constant on either side of the revolution and thus belies the continuity of tradition: Church and State, yes, but also God, being, nature, freedom, law, and even truth itself.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the introduction to his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics,says that as a human artifact, the political order of the city has its source in the human intellect which in turn is derived from and resembles the divine intellect, the principle of all natural things. This is the foundation of two subsequent claims or sets of claims. The first is that art imitates nature and uses nature as a model. The unstated but implicit premise of this assertion is that while political philosophy may be architectonic among the practical sciences, “inasmuch as it is concerned with the highest and perfect good in human affairs,” it nevertheless presupposes the speculative sciences of physics or natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ultimately theology or sacra doctrina, which together supply the criterion of truth for the goods sought in the life of the city. This does not mean that political philosophy necessarily deduces its conclusions in Euclidian fashion from the premises of natural philosophy but that these more fundamental sciences will always be revealed to be operative in any political order. This is reflected in the importance Thomas accords to prudence, a virtue at once speculative and practical, and in the second set of claims to issue from these premises: that every society is established for the sake of some good, whether it be truly good or not, and that political society, as a whole that contains all other human societies, “necessarily seeks in the highest degree the good that is the highest among all human goods.” The statement is not exhortative. Aquinas does not say that political societies should seek the highest good in the highest degree but that they necessarily do, by nature, whether they know it or not and whether the highest good be truly good or merely seem so. We might say that every political society necessarily enacts what Richard Weaver called a “metaphysical dream” for itself, though as is typically the case with dreams, the dreamers do not necessarily understand its meaning or even know that they are dreaming.
I am neither a historian nor a scholar of medieval political theory. So, at the risk of seeming abstract or obscure, I’m going to confine myself to a few general and somewhat speculative insights about the “metaphysical dream” represented by Aquinas and enacted, albeit very imperfectly, in medieval political order. The first is that Aquinas embeds political order within a theological cosmology, the order of creation if you will. This, he regards, in Platonic and Aristotelian terms as un-hypothetical, as containing structural exigencies presupposed and affirmed in human thought and action, even in the attempt to deny them. The presupposition of unity as a transcendental attribute of being, and thus the so-called principle of non-contradiction, the necessity of willing under the aspect of good and knowing under the aspect of true, and here, the political order’s necessary affirmation of a summum bonum, all fall within this category. Transposed into the terms of natural law, which governs both moral subjects and non-moral objects, this order is intrinsic as well as extrinsic. That is, the law does not merely govern things from without, as if it were merely an arbitrary imposition, but from within, in the formal and final causes that constitute things in their very nature and in the natural motions that follow upon them—in fire’s tendency to move upward or the stone’s tendency, which Aquinas describes as a kind of natural love, toward its proper place, its home near the center of the earth.
Embedded within the ontological order of creation, political order and political rule thereby acquire an inherently symbolic function; they represent and body forth a natural and divine order that exceeds and transcends them. That is, they represent and indeed bear responsibility for ultimate things in a penultimate way, politically and not sacerdotally. And this too, I would suggest, is indicative rather than exhortative. Just because modern political order, as a kind of self-enclosed field of power relations subordinate to no higher order over which it does not preside, seems to be symbolic of nothing, that does not mean that it is not symbolic.
This, in broad outline, is the metaphysical dream half-consciously underlying the Gelasian dyarchy of the two swords, and it would of course give rise to all manner of conflicts over jurisdiction—controversies over investiture, for example, or the right of popes to command armies or depose kings…or deny the king a divorce—and to questions about the sacramental status of kingly anointing. There may be something to Rousseau’s contention that Christians never succeeded in creating a good polity, though it is tempting, especially in the aftermath of twentieth-century carnage, to reply that theirs was the worst polity in the world except for every other. But the underlying point is that political order in this vision is inherently related to sacramental order because Church and State are not two self-enclosed institutions or entities external to each other and lying side by side. Political and ecclesial or sacramental order were two aspects of the one order of creation redeemed and elevated by Christ, each with its own relative primacy within this sphere. It is substantially for this reason that we can speak of “Europe” as more than a geographical designation. To paraphrase Chesterton, the English and the French might sometimes be at war, but no Englishman or Frenchman would imagine that St. George and Joan of Arc were ever at war.
Dreams die hard, and even then, not entirely or all at once. Elements of this vision would survive even the Reformation, a catastrophe—I mean that in a technical sense—at once religious, political, and cosmological, and could be found centuries later in the pious habits of an industrious people and in the unlikeliest of places, in the latent Platonism of a neo-Puritan like Jonathan Edwards, for example. Kirk provides us with many examples, from which he seeks to demonstrate the “conservative” character of the American Revolution and the order to which it gives rise, how its principles and its original self-understanding are rooted in an ancient and venerable tradition that extends from Plato on through to Cicero, Aquinas, and Hooker. There is a reason why Roman temples line the banks of the Potomac River (and why Gothic structures do not). But it would not take a great adjustment to see these same elements, or the forms of indigenous American Christianity described by Kirk—individualistic, moralistic, fideistic, unmystical, and eminently practical—through the lens of something like Alasdair MacIntyre’s “disquieting suggestion” in the opening pages of After Virtue:as the flotsam and jetsam left to us in the wake of an enormous civilizational and cosmological cataclysm.
Personal faith would survive the cataclysm, as well as elements of the Faith, but these would increasingly have to be carved out or set off in positivistic fashion against the inertial backdrop of what George Grant called the monism of meaningless that increasingly defines the new unsymbolic universe, superadded to an apprehension of reality that is essentially atheistic. We might half-will ourselves to believe that the sun in its very being is a visible image of the intelligible good, whose blinding light, invisible in itself, illuminates everything it touches, but that conviction will always be stalked by the still deeper sense, imbibed with our mother’s milk and buried in our heart of hearts, that it’s just a big ball of gas. I think this is what the French poet Charles Péguy meant in defining the modern Christian as one who does not believe what he believes.
It was still possible during America’s formative years to speak meaningfully of human nature and the moral law; in fact, the “laws of nature,” as Amos Funkenstein once said, enjoyed their finest hour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Architects of the new metaphysical dream did not reject God, at least not explicitly. Rather their program was theologically warranted. Law was indispensable to the new mechanical conception of the universe, which spawned all manner of creative retrievals of the Old Testament in both natural and political theory, in Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example. But whether in the guise of Descartes’s lazy gentleman or Newton’s busy Lord God of Dominion, the God of this new universe is a far cry from Aquinas’s ipsum esse subsistens, the subsistent act of being, more interior to the world than it is to itself, not least because the new mechanical universe lacks an interior horizon to be related to. No longer fully immanent within the world, God ceases to be fully transcendent either. As Funkenstein observes, the seventeenth-century drive toward univocity in language and method and homogeneity in nature transmuted the question of God’s eternity and ubiquity into a straightforward physical problem, an idea that would later be echoed by Jefferson, who had little patience for immateriality. Newton would conclude, astonishingly, “that the quantity of the existence of God was eternal, in relation to duration, and infinite in relation to the space in which he is present,” even going so far as to say that “if ever space had not existed, God at that time would have been nowhere.” This signifies an utter loss of the analogical difference between God and the world that was a cardinal principle of the medieval Catholic vision—and a mostly “quantitative” conception of the difference between divine and creaturely attributes. And it marks, for all intents and purposes, an end to the “Platonic” metaphysics of participation which undergirded the symbolic cosmos of the Middle Ages and the metaphysical articulation of the world as creation. An ironic consequence of this reduced sense of both God and nature is that it was much more common to invoke directly the agency of a “contriving” God in the new “secular theologies” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to explain complex features of the world that seemingly defied mechanical explanation—the organized complexity of living things, language, human fellow feeling and sociality—than in the thirteenth, when a more radical sense of divine transcendence and a metaphysics of participation sustained a robust distinction between primary and secondary causality.
The “laws of nature” in the eighteenth century were by and large a replacement for the substantial form abolished by the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth. The paradigmatic example is Newton’s laws, which would represent the ideal of scientific objectivity in the English-speaking world deep into the nineteenth century and which apply indifferently to sticks, stones, and sparrows, the only relevant difference between a sparrow swooping and a stone falling being their respective mathematical variables.
All of this can be found in John Locke. Locke would still affirm a moral Law of Nature. In fact, his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, once it had dispensed with religious enthusiasm and metaphysical speculation as insignificant speech, leaves us with little but the pursuit of life’s conveniences and a Christianity that is little more than morality. After Locke, there will be a universe of things that is no longer meaningful to think about. He would sound very traditional in insisting that liberty and license are not synonymous. But such affirmations are not easily reconciled with his underlying ontological and epistemological convictions. Like Hobbes and other seventeenth-century thinkers, Locke empties the cosmos of form and finality; there is no place in the Hobbesian-Lockean universe for a summum bonum, so he conflates goodness with pleasure. Freedom is no longer realized as the actual undivided enjoyment of the good, now deprived of any ontological foothold, but instead becomes pure potency, the power to act or refrain from acting. But this eliminates any intrinsic reason to act this way rather than that, so Locke resorts to theological positivism, the promise of eternal pleasure and the threat of eternal pain, to justify our being moral at all. It is a tactic he will return to repeatedly.
The problem is that this sort of theology comes with a kind of built-in obsolescence. Knowledge of God is irrelevant to knowledge of the world machine and to a knowledge reduced to engineering and becomes a redundant hypothesis redundant once an alternative mechanism such as history or natural selection can be found for the phenomenon in question. Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection is the apex of this trajectory.
Now, my point is not the genealogical point that Locke, or Hume, or Newton exerted an outsized influence on the early American political imagination. Rather it is that political imagination is never merely political and that residual concepts such as human nature and the moral law that survived into the eighteenth century would lose their ground of intelligibility in the new world and the new concept of nature then being dreamed into being.
The insurrection against Aristotle and, by extension, the larger tradition of Christian Platonism—the synthesis of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem if you will—would eliminate from nature the indivisible, existential unity, intrinsic intelligibility, form and finality that Aristotelian substantial form and Christian esse had conferred upon it, the very thing which for Aristotle was the thing distinguishing “things existing by nature” from artifacts. The new conception of nature as artifice had manipulability built into its theoretical core from the outset, and this was mirrored in the new, functionalist conception of knowledge and truth. Descartes and Bacon had their methodological differences, but each understood just how radical their proposals were, that they entailed not merely a new and better method for achieving the same contemplative end as Aristotelian science, but a transformation of the very meaning of nature, knowledge and truth and a new point and purpose for our knowing that would make traditional contemplation obsolete. And they were in remarkable agreement as to what this goal was. Near the end of his Discourse, Descartes writes,
For these notions made me see that it is possible to arrive at knowledge that would be very useful in this life and that, in place of the speculative philosophy taught in the schools, it is possible to find a practical philosophy, by means of which, knowing the fore and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all other bodies that surround us, just as distinctly as we know the various skills of our craftsmen, we might be able, in the same way, to use them for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus render ourselves, as it were, master and possessors of nature. This is desirable not only for the invention of an infinity of devices that would enable to enjoy trouble-free the fruits of the earth and all the goods found there, but also principally for the maintenance of health…
Francis Bacon is no less emphatic about the goal of the new science. “The task and purpose of human Power,” he writes, “is to generate and superinduce on a given body a new nature or natures,” “to effect the transformation of concrete bodies from one thing into another within the bounds of the Possible.”
Here we come near to the heart of this metaphysical revolution, when viewed from the perspective of the world it overthrew. It represents, among other things, an inversion of the Aristotelian priority of actuality over possibility, which is the priority of given forms of order, things being what they are doing what they do in virtue of what they are. Increasingly, the possible will become the measure of the actual, what we can do the measure of what things are. This is the meaning of the famous Baconian conflations of knowledge and power, truth and utility. The relation between experimental knowledge and power is not merely a means-end relationship; nor is the will to power merely a moral failing, an expression of inordinate desire or illicit ambition—which is why a moral critique of technology, while necessary, cannot comprehend what technology is for us. The will to power, rather, is built into the very structure of scientific cognition and necessitated by it. The scientific knowledge of nature is not merely knowledge for the sake of control, but knowledge by means of control. We know nature by controlling it, and the truth of our knowledge is measured by the various forms of control we are able to exercise. The so-called technological imperative, that what can be done must and will be done, inheres in what we now mean by reason and thought.
Descartes had proposed a “new practical philosophy” to replace the speculative philosophy taught in the schools. Francis Bacon was the first to envision a realm where this new practical philosophy, and not politics, was the architectonic science. Bacon’s New Atlantis is the first “post-political” order, where the scientific conquest of nature gives political order its telos and the whole society its collective raison d’être. “The End of our Foundation,” says the father of Salomon’s House in his New Atlantis, “is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”
Nowhere are “all things possible” celebrated, or realized, like they are in America; it is what makes us so attractive to the rest of the world that people will do almost anything to come here. “The impossible is what we do best,” as President Trump said in his second inaugural address. Our mere existence is a wonder. The allure of the call to subdue this indomitable tabula rasa of a continent, a prehistoric land that had never even experienced the Middle Ages, where you could see the state of nature, must have been irresistible. And it elicited innumerable acts of almost unimaginable daring, sacrifice, generosity and heroism arguably without parallel in the world. It is little wonder that Thomas Paine and others thought their generation had been given an opportunity not seen since Genesis to “begin the world anew.” That this was done in a mere blink of historical time is nothing short of breathtaking. Gordon Wood observes that in 1760, America was a collection of disparate colonies on the edge of civilization huddled along a narrow strip between the Atlantic coast and the Appalachians. He writes,
The less than two million monarchial subjects who lived in these colonies still took for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency and that most people were bound together by personal ties of one sort or another. Yet scarcely fifty years later these insignificant borderland provinces had become a giant, almost continent-wide republic of nearly 10 million egalitarian-minded citizens who had not only thrust themselves into the vanguard of history but had fundamentally altered their society and their social relationships.[1]
Between 1790 and 1820 New York’s population quadrupled, Kentucky’s multiplied nearly 8 times, and within a single generation Americans occupied more territory than they had occupied during the entire 150 years of the colonial period.[2]
In the space of a historical instant, the American people were transformed from a collection of backwater provincials into “the most liberal, the most commercially-minded, and the most modern people in the world.”[3] The physical completion of this project was not only a political achievement. It is equally, and perhaps even more so, a technological achievement. Stephen Ambrose reflects that George Washington’s world, measured by the time required to travel between distances, was roughly the same size as Julius Caesar’s. The steam engine, the railroad and the telegraph, the first steps, as it were, in the technological conquest of space and time, would fundamentally alter that and exponentially hasten the completion of the American empire. Ambrose marvels that
The United States was less than one hundred years old when the Civil War was won, slavery abolished, and the first transcontinental railroad built…. [T]he Americans did it first, [before Russia or Canada]. And they did it even though the United States was the youngest of countries. It had proclaimed its independence in 1776, won it in 1783, bought the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, added California, Nevada and Utah to the Union in 1848, and completed the linking of the continent in 1869, thus ensuring an empire of liberty running from sea to shining sea.[4]
Wood notes that this astonishing project was launched “without urbanization, without railroads, without the aid of any of the great forces we usually invoke to explain ‘modernization.’” What did transpire in this period, though, was revolution, and not just in the narrow, political, sense of the term, but a revolution in our most fundamental conceptions of being, nature, knowledge, and truth. The Revolution did more than just eliminate monarchy and create a republic, Wood observes. It “actually reconstituted what Americans meant by republic and state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic office-holder.” It “not only changed the culture of Americans,” he says, “but even altered their understanding of history, knowledge, and truth.”
The American Revolution may have been conservative in comparison with the French or Russian Revolutions, but the scientific revolution was not. And that has not ended. Recall the words of Francis Bacon: “The task and purpose of human Power is to generate and superinduce on a given body a new nature or natures” “to effect the transformation of concrete bodies from one thing into another within the bounds of the Possible.” But the ultimate limits of possibility can only be discovered by perpetually transgressing the present limits of possibility, by doing the heretofore impossible. The Baconian conflation of truth and possibility thus inaugurates a permanent revolution against the limits of antecedent order, aided and abetted by the conception of freedom as possibility, which converts the a priori given reality of God, the Church, the moral order—even more own nature, into possible objects of choice, thereby destroying them while appearing to uphold. And since possibility is infinite, and the infinite cannot be traversed, this revolution is quite literally interminable, without end. There may be what Hans Jonas called “built-in, unwanted automatic utopianism” inherent in the structure of scientific civilization, but it is a utopianism without a utopia, that promises an endless pursuit of happiness but precludes its arrival.
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society, the colonial counterpart to the Royal Academy in London and L’Académie des sciences in Paris, founded in the preceding century to implement the Baconian vision. The purpose of this new Society was to further the quest for “useful knowledge,” which “if well-examined, pursued and improved, might produce Discoveries to the Advantage of some or all of the British Plantations, or to the Benefit of Mankind in general.” Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Marshall, and Thomas Paine would be numbered among the members and officers of the fledgling Society, which still exists today. Thomas Jefferson served as president of the Society for eighteen years, which he thought his most important work. Jefferson also thought such societies transcended politics and comprised “a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth,” whose “correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation,” remaining “always in peace, however their nations may be at war.”[5]
There is little hope for a renewal of moral order without a renewal of intellectual order that allows us to glimpse the true principles of ontological order, in other words, without a recovery of that sight that was once the goal of human life in the Christian synthesis of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.
Such “useful knowledge” had already proven instrumental in forging a home on these shores, as Charles Jared Ingersoll noted in his 1823 address to the Society, “The Influence of America on the Mind,” a “sketch,” as he put it, “of the philosophical condition of the country.” By “philosophy” Ingersoll means what he calls “the philosophy of comfort,” evidence that the metaphysical revolution, which made the old “speculative sciences” obsolete, had already been won. Ingersoll, too, marvels at the celerity with which America has taken shape. “France and England were enjoying Augustan ages,” he says, “when the place where we are met to discourse of literature and science was a wilderness.” He catalogs an impressive list of the young nation’s technical achievements and anticipates many more by which Americans might eventually be “freed from European pupilage,” “Steam navigation, destined to have greater influence than any triumph of mind over matter, equal to gunpowder, to printing, and to the compass…belong to America.” “Poetry, music, sculpture, and painting may yet linger in their Italian haunts. But philosophy, science, and the useful arts, must establish their empire in the modern republic of letters, where the mind is free from power or fear, on this side of that great water barrier the creator must have designed for the protection of their asylum.”
“To those who will inquire and reflect,” Ingersoll says, “the encouragement to philosophy is as strong as the instinct of patriotism.” Indeed, they had become fused, though it would take time for the deed to become equal to the ambition. The exaltation of science and its boundless possibilities had become integral to the idea of America and its boundless possibilities. Timothy Dwight, the future president of Yale, captures this spirit well in his 1787 paean “Columbia,” “queen of the world and child of the skies.” Dwight exhorts the young nation:“Let the crimes of the East ne’er encrimson thy name, / Be freedom and science, and virtue thy fame.” The theme would be repeated in Jezaniah Sumner’s “Ode on Science,” a hymn extolling science as a kind of divine illumination with freedom as her handmaid and performed, incidentally, by the Catholic University of America choir during a concert at the National Gallery of Art for Ronald Reagan’s 1981 presidential inauguration:
So science spreads her lucid ray
O’er lands which long in darkness lay:
She visits fair Columbia,
And sets her sons among the stars.
This identification of national identity and experimental science, the fusion of political and technological order, is reflected in the image of America itself as an experiment,” a common refrain that seems to have begun with Washington. It is which is certainly a novel way to think about a country and a strange one when you stop to ponder it, but one that attests to the power of the new scientific ideal in the self-understanding of the age and of the you nation. But more importantly, this self-understanding is built into the United States Constitution itself, which, though oddly silent on public morality or the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” nevertheless managed to assert the duty of government to promote the progress of science and the useful arts (Article I, sec. 8).
Even so, the Founders could have hardly intended to found the New Atlantis on American shores, the enthusiasms of Franklin and Jefferson, Dwight and Sumner, or Charles Ingersoll notwithstanding. (I doubt most of them ever read it).
But then they hardly needed to. Once the metaphysical premises of the Baconian vision are accepted and its cause-effect trains are set in motion, the New Atlantis practically builds itself. It is already contained in nuce in the scientific conflation of truth and possibility, which is by nature public and provisional, necessitating what Dewey called a “collective assault on nature” spanning generations, multiplying its accumulating effects in viral rather than linear patterns, like an organism increasing its bulk in three dimensions, eluding both the foresight and control of those who initiate them. What Dewey will later champion as “organized intelligence” might thus more aptly be called “self-organizing science,” an artificial organism whose ensemble behavior is an emergent property of the complex, semi-directed interactions of its individual components rather than a top-down imposition.
This is what is meant by a technological order. Technology is goal setting, as Hans Jonas observed, rather than goal serving. The replication of means often precedes even the will for what they make possible—twenty years ago I never imagined that I needed an iPhone; now it is a regime of necessity—and today’s scientific breakthrough becomes an indispensable component in tomorrow’s science fiction fantasy-cum-research program. It is typically only after we become enthralled or enmeshed in some new power that we discover what it’s for, by which time it’s usually too late.
Morality, long denied an ontological toehold in reality, has proven mostly impotent in slowing both the pace and scope of revolution, which has advanced to such a degree that it now calls into question the human future as human and the political future as political.It is now a real question whether the project of human self-government will be overwhelmed and supplanted by a Leviathan for which there is no precedent in human history and no name in classical political thought, ancient or modern. In comparison to the new forms of power generated by this dynamic system, a few hundred people gathering under a dome to contemplate policy seems positively antiquated, a relic of an analog world. Technology does not wait on politics. We now know how to do things, to ourselves and to our posterity, that we do not know how to think about, and we are now on the cusp of doing things that most of us, including many who are presently contributing to their eventuality, will scarcely be able to imagine until they are an accomplished fact. What cannot be anticipated cannot be legislated; there can be no law, as Shoshana Zuboff puts it, to protect us from the unprecedented.
It is not at all clear whether we have passed the point of no return, whether this revolution, which has taken on a life of its own, can be halted or reversed, and we ought at least to be asking how we might live faithfully, hopefully, and humanly if we cannot. If politics is never merely political, then neither question can be resolved by a political solution merely. Kirk’s analysis suggests the need to rediscover the roots of American moral and political order. That is all well and good. But there is little hope for a renewal of moral order without a renewal of intellectual order that allows us to glimpse the true principles of ontological order, in other words, without a recovery of that sight that was once the goal of human life in the Christian synthesis of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem and which became unintelligible in the metaphysical revolution that transpired in the interim between Rome, London, and Philadelphia. This revolution is advanced to the point that we hardly know what we are missing. But the deepest roots of American order, the font and source of every order, promises the hope of sight to the blind. And if this promise is true, we may still have to look very hard, but we do not have to look far.
[1] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 6.
[2] Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2.
[3] Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution,7.
[4] Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863–1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 18.
[5] Jefferson, 1809, to John Hollins.
