Chapter XIV. The Virgin and the Dynamo

CHAPTER XIV The Virgin and the Dynamo The United States was bound to affect the mind of Europe because it was a projection of European experience and hopes, put to the proof in the supposed conditions of nature, as a test case against tradition. The early settlers brought to this country their crafts and tools, arts and letters, theology, morals and science, customs and law; but they left behind most of the apparatus of enforcement. They did not bring either the closed economy or sacramental religion \ and the wilderness afforded sufficient recourse against the remainder of official authority. Whatever survived on its own might be assumed to have validated itself. Liberty emerged and triumphed. A subtle critic has said: "The Declaration of Independence blew Europe off its moral base." * The phrase is exact; for Europe was not placed on a new base. The American idea never got back to Europe at all (as in like circumstances the idea of Roman law was never comprehended in Asia). Instead, the attendant phenomena encountered a profound misinterpretation, being fitted to a divergent European theory. The physical consequences of this moral discrepancy became immediately evident in the French Revolution, with the Terror and the Napoleonic outburst j but the full effect was delayed until this century. At one remove, the United States has caused the present explosion and disintegration of Europe. None of the harm was done in enmity. On the contrary, while the antagonism indicated by the Monroe Doctrine persisted, Europe had a chance of adjustment. The * FROM THESE ROOTS. By Mary Colum.

H3 144 THE G0D OF THE MACHINE friendship of America, which turned in the torrent of energy, was fatal. While the United States was in the making, as a few happily neglected colonies, something queer happened to European thought; by way of science, it reverted to determinism in the social and political sphere. Free will as positive doctrine was the original affirmation of Christianity. Death is the one inevitable event in every human life; so it had been taken by the pagan world as final evidence that "the fate of every man is bound about his forehead." When death was regarded rather as an event in time emancipating the soul from temporality to a wider sphere, free will entered into faith. (The major heresies from Christianity have always been lapses back toward fatalism.) * Christianity tended toward Rome as its center of organization, because in the Roman political system free will was given legitimate play, not on a precarious margin, but as the operative principle, in contrast to the mass determinism of Greek democracy or the dead-end of Asiatic despotism.

But the thousand year regime of status in Europe, in spite of the modification maintained by the church, had bred in its subjects a deep weariness. The breakdown of the Roman empire was hard to forget, since men had struggled unavailingly to keep it going; their failure left them dubious of their own abilities and faculties. The figure of the Noble Savage signalizes the discrediting of status government, but only by negation. The gradual merging of church and state —which occurred in the Protestant no less than in the Catho* The tendency might not be visible at once In these variations, but would develop by a secondary aberration of logic. The larger doctrine of Christianity embraced both Divine Law and natural law acting upon a grand general principle, and an Intercessor to temper justice with mercy in consideration of human imperfection and human striving toward truth and right. The lapse into fatalism might occur in either direction; the explicit dualism of the Manichean heresy handed this world over to the dominion of evil; and on the other hand, absolute unitarianism could be construed into a mechanistic view of the universe. Even the Jansenist interpretation of the doctrine of grace made grace a compulsion rather than an opportunity of liberation by choice and acceptance.

THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO I45 lie countries—deprived the church of its function of opposition to the secular administration, and facilitated the rise of the Absolute State. At the same time, Galileo's exposition of the solar system, on first view, lent itself to a mechanistic philosophy. Applied science in mechanical invention seemed to confirm this implication; and it was carried over into speculations on social relations, including political economy. Altogether, free will practically disappeared from the intellectual context of Europe. Not quite consciously, but in the back of their minds, Europeans felt that they had tried both politics and religion, and neither would "work." This is the undertone of Montaigne's deceptively noncommittal reflections. He did not reach the conclusion, but he stood at the turning point. He would never attack either church or state directly 5 he sought a by-pass instead; his outward conformity was a tacit escape.

When he said that if he were accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame, he would fly the country sooner than attempt to defend his innocence in court, the inference is plain; there was no justice to be had from the law. The attitude is legitimate as a starting point for inquiry, but rationally it should lead to an examination of the existing system of law and the proper axioms of law, a course which was to be pursued subsequently with useful results. What Montaigne was doing was to assemble bit by bit fragments of evidence of human behavior from which "natural" man might be synthesized. But he never said that either; though his evidence tended mainly to indicate that man was a product of environment. Later, when the theory of "natural" man was formulated, the mechanistic theory of the universe had gained credence in European philosophy. God was a mathematician; Descartes and Newton were His prophets. To be sure, Descartes allowed man to be an exception in his mathematical philosophy, man being "continually in touch with the Divine Idea," but Cartesians of a later generation went so far as to assert that animals were mere machines, in146 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE capable of feeling pain.* One step further, and strictly "natural" man is also reduced to mechanism in such a mechanistic universe.

At this point, some social thinkers said that if the artificial restrictions of society were abolished, man as mechanism would function perfectly and precisely as he was designed to do; but they did not attempt to explain how an absolutely natural mechanism in a strictly mechanistic universe could have devised and imposed "artificial" restrictions on himself, contrary to his own nature and machinery. When the question was put, how could the rigidly mechanistic school deny that "whatever is, is right," because it could not be otherwise? Yet if they wished to change "society," they must suppose something was wrong with it. At the moment, they were obliged to ignore this difficulty 3 and when Marx came up against it later, in his dialectical materialism, his alleged solution merely burked the issue, by postulating that some parts of the mechanism could obey the advice of the whiting to the snail, and move a little faster if they chose, or hang back, if they were obstinate. The perfect and absolute universal machine had a propensity to go haywire.