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.

Meantime, it is singular that the English settlers in America, of the Puritan strain, who were predestinarian by religion, should have stood by free will in their secular affairs, against the drift of Europe, but they did. They were able * It is reported of a group of Cartesians at Port Royal (the Jansemst center) : "They beat their dogs without remorse, and laughed at those who were sorry for the beasts when they whimpered. 'Mere clockwork,' they replied, saying that these yelps and cries were the result of a little hidden spring inside the animal, who was no less devoid of feeling." Holding this opinion, they vivisected animals to study the circulation of the blood. These were the extremists; a moderate enquirer protested that one need only observe his turnspit dogs—one was lazy and would hide when it was time for him to go to work, while the other would hunt out the delinquent and fetch him to the task—to realize that something more than clockwork was involved.... When Berkeley got lost in a maze of argument on whether anything existed objectively, Dr. Johnson made a similar appeal to commonsense, with pardonable exasperation, kicking a stone as refutation.

It was a cogent answer; subjective my foot. The subjective is inconceivable without the objective.

THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO I47 to achieve this intellectual feat by narrowing predestination to its exact and literal meaning of an ultimate destination, heaven, or hell. On this earth, they had managed to get to America by their own efforts in the teeth of authority ; then they conquered the enormous odds of the wilderness, incidentally setting up local government. So they could hold the conviction of political or temporal free will; and in good time they proved it, with the grand demonstration of the revolution. (It is not suggested that none but the Puritans or their descendants contributed to this result; but they did their share, whereas in Europe men who were originally of the same persuasion pressed the determinist doctrine into the service of the Absolute State.) The mechanistic philosophy is a very late importation to America; and it is wholly imported. It did not derive from our machinery, any more than it created the machine age. When Americans began inventing and using machines, they were of the firm opinion that they did make and run those machines at their pleasure, with no nonsense about the machines "determining" or "creating" anything whatever.

Machines to an American are still an expression of free will. It is difficult for an American to ride in a motor car as a mere passenger; mentally he drives it. But what Europeans wanted was something that would run itself and humanity with it, requiring nothing of men except passive submission. Refusing to recognize that even the life of a savage calls for extremely active, voluntary adaptation, Europeans rationalized themselves back below savagery. "Nature" became personified in "enlightened despotism"; before the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was asking in plain words for a dictator. "The central clue to the reform program of the philosophers was their faith in natural law All that was needed to unlock the millennium was a supreme legislator, a Euclid of the social sciences, who would discover and formulate the natural principles of social harmony. The mathematical genI48 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE eralizations which formed the ground plan of physics had been propounded by a few bold thinkers, and it seemed a reasonable surmise that the fundamental laws of human society would likewise be discovered by some inspired genius rather than by a parliamentary assembly." * Though they talked of science, they did not give themselves the trouble to use the scientific method of definition of terms 5 they used the words monarchy, democracy, and republic interchangeably, and most conveniently for any dictator who might take advantage of their standing offer.

Napoleon was the answer. "By leaving the ideal form of government undefined, they made it possible for Napoleon to unite the republican and monarchical tradition in a formula of democratic despotism." Napoleon was the creation of the academic planners. But he was by no means the first attempt, though his predecessors are generally unrecognized. The consort of George II, Queen Caroline, held the same doctrine, and believed she was putting it into execution, unknown to her subjects, with Walpole as her agent 5 but no harm was done, since Walpole had to get his policies carried out by Parliament 5 the roundabout method, by which Caroline managed George and Walpole managed Caroline, merely completed the transfer of power from the crown to the Commons, though the landed gentry still retained, during the process of transition, the main share of executive offices. Caroline had got the idea of "benevolent despotism" from her grandmother, the Electress Sophia, who had learned it from Leibnitz. By another channel, it was subsequently imparted to George III, who tried to fill the bill as the "Patriot King." His wellmeant efforts were incomprehensible and infuriating to the English, who had not divorced reason from commonsense; and when George became certifiably insane, nobody was surprised.

But on the Continent, it was in consonance with this theory of an autocratic lawgiver inexplicably empowered to dispense * EUROPE AND THE FRENCH IMPERIUM. By Geoffrey Bruun.

THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO 149 "natural law" that Voltaire made friends with Frederick the Great, and Diderot with Catherine the Great 5 and Madame de Stael was eager to flatter Napoleon, and told Alexander of Russia: "Your character, Sire, is a constitution." Turgot is credited with the statement: "Give me five years of despotism, and France shall be free." Since France had had a hundred years of despotism, and was not free, it would seem that the only objection the philosophers had to the Bourbons was that they were not despotic enough. These were the advance guard of the modern "liberals." Europe has never given up this fantasy of the deus ex machina; it reappears at every turn of events. It is revealed in the words of the Empress Eugenie, speaking of the ephemeral empire of Maximilian in Mexico, when she said that Maximilian should have set up a dictatorship on the pattern of that of Napoleon III, "a dictatorship which should bring liberty, and a man able enough to maintain them side by side." The words mean nothing at all; she had them by rote. Maximilian himself explained that he "needed a strong force in order to impose reforms and improvements 5 the people here have to be compelled to what is good." His empress Carlotta, when she went mad, dreamed of Maximilian as "king of the earth and sovereign of the universe."

During the French Revolution, Burke remarked of the French royalist exiles in England that excepting for professions of attachment to the persons of the King and Queen of France, these aristocratic refugees "talked like Jacobins." Obviously they were unaware of it; and Burke might have added with truth that the Jacobins, along with most of the European revolutionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, talked like absolute monarchists. The slogan of the English Chartists was: "Political power our means, social happiness our end." The Marxian "dictatorship of the proletariat," after which "the State would wither away," was a later repetition. The current version of this fatal twaddle was echoed by an American journalist after a visit to Com150 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE munist Russia; in his version, "Russia was laying a new foundation for an evolutionary society, which was to pass through foreseen and planned for stages of growth from an absolute and political dictatorship through industrialism to liberty, democracy and peace.... A scientific, not a moral culture." The slaughter and starvation of millions of people, selected as victims specifically because of their productive character and free intelligence, was the long-term result of the mechanistic theory of the universe. And the attendants of the Sacred Juggernaut form a remarkable procession: Frederick, Catherine, Caroline, Mme. de Stael, the two Georges, the two Napoleons, Eugenie, Carlotta, Marx, Lenin, and an obsequious train of journalists.

In the meantime John Stuart Mill, professing to be the champion of liberty, sold it out again to "society." That is, he assumed that personal liberty was justifiable only if it served the collective good. Then if a plausible argument can be put forward that it does not—and such an argument will seem plausible because there is no collective good—obviously slavery must be right. The persistent dreams of humanity are of eternal youth and beauty and absolute power. The first two must be sought for their own sake, since they cannot be disguised by a moral pretext. In the early mythologies they are imagined as gifts of the gods to some fortunate mortals. With the dawn of science, the hope was transferred to expectation of an Elixir of Life, to be discovered by research. Neither of these wishes could do much harm. Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher, was mysteriously convinced that tar-water was a panacea for almost every bodily ailment. One cannot guess why he endowed this irrelevant prescription with such magical properties ; he had no ulterior motive. The significant point is not merely that tar-water cannot do what Berkeley thought it could. Nothing can. What he desired is unrealizable in the nature of things. There are deadly drugs 5 but there is no elixir of life for the physical body. Yet the desire has a THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO residual intelligence, which yields beneficial results in the improvement of health and comeliness through rational study of biology and hygiene.

In mechanics a similar impossibility was imagined, a Perpetual Motion Machine. Here genuine science confronts a difficulty, so far unsolved, in defining energy or discovering its ultimate properties. Strict science is confined to measure j its findings must be quantitative. Dealing with inorganic matter, science postulates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that energy "runs down," by conversion from a kinetic to a static manifestation. The two aspects of energy are exemplified in a man walking, moved by kinetic energy, and bumping into a stone wall, in which he encounters static energy. The wall has resistance, which is measurable in terms of energy by the force required to break through it 5 and the kinetic energy conversely is measured by what it can move, in static form. Now if the energy of the whole universe, by which it moves, is considered to be fully defined in terms of its properties as manifested through inorganic matter, the universal energy must be a fixed quantity j and must also be subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, by which the whole universe is bound to "run down" ultimately, to become a motionless frozen lightless mass, absolutely static, so to remain forever after. Certainly the Second Law of Thermodynamics is valid in respect of energy utilized through inanimate materials j engineering and mechanics must be governed by this principle to get results. But if the same principle is assumed to govern the universal energy as such —instead of being merely a phase of its transmission through certain inorganic elements—it evokes an initial phenomenon, the "starting" of the universal mechanism in the first place by the primary existence of a fixed quantity of kinetic energy: how or from whence the hypothesis cannot pretend to explain nor even contemplate.

The religious hypothesis of the nature of the universe is 152 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE actually much more rational, postulating a First Principle (God), the Source of energy, which does not "run down," is not measurable, and is manifest to our rational faculties in both eternal and temporal aspects, by the measurable phenomena of inorganic matter, and through the rational faculty itself, which is of the nonmeasurable order, indicating a divine element in man, the immortal soul. On such a First Principle, the universe need not run down 5 the phases of inorganic elements which are subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics would be secondary to the Creative First Principle which completes an eternal circuit, eternally selfrenewing, through further processes man has not yet fathomed. Now the "perpetual motion" crank, in a muddled manner, is approximating the absurdity of the strict quantitative mechanistic view of the universe, which does imply that somehow the cosmic machinery was set up in posse, and then kicked into gear with a given quantity of kinetic energy which has to be assumed as "there" already 5 after which it went on running "of itself," with no further supply, and must continue to do so until it runs down, by exhaustion of the quantity. Thus the perpetual motion crank, approaching his alleged problem, admits that he has to get his engine started by a normal introduction of energy from an external source. After that, he says, it will keep on running on its own indefinitely.

This is the claim and the demand made by all the promisers of eventual felicity through an initial despotism. A few years of external force, the dictatorship of the proletariat or the elite, absolute government—and then no more effort, no need of intelligence, a machine running on—to a dead end. The theory of Marxist Communism is precisely that of the Perpetual Motion Machine, point by point, for it stipulates that the productive system created by free enterprise is a prerequisite, to be taken over by the Communist machine.

THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO 153 Thus the dream of power is also susceptible of two interpretations, one incalculably beneficial, the other vicious, the cause of infinite misery. When it is directed toward the mastery of nature, the ordering of inorganic matter by knowledge of natural law, it is creative, not only in material goods but in enrichment of human personality. The latter development occurs because in man, the being who thinks, reason is the individuating attribute. Acute observers have found that primitive peoples, such as the Eskimos, do exhibit a "collective" psychology, to such degree that in group actions the consciousness of individuality is blurred. Whatever reason lies in the action has been merged with instinct by habit. It is neither the joint action nor thinking alike in conscious reasonable terms which induces this collective "unity"; it is not thinking at all at the given moment or occasion. The exercise of intellect in abstract reasoning will lead intelligent men to like conclusions through logical sequences, and at the same time develop their individuality; because thinking is an individual function.

Therefore the collectivist, to attain his objective, the collective society or state, seeks the one type of organization, the political agency, which is directly prohibitory and must tend to stop men thinking. This is the evil interpretation of the dream of power, its perversion into the lust for power over other men, instead of mastery of nature. The lust for power is most easily disguised under humanitarian or philanthropic motives. It appeals naturally to people who feel a sentimental uneasiness for the misfortunes of others, mixed with the craving for unearned praise, and most especially if they are nonproductive.* An amiable child wishing for a million dollars will usually "intend" to give away half of this illusory wealth. The twist in the motive is * The tax farmers in France lent their patronage to the proponents of rigid political systems, such as the Physiocrats, and other absolutist theorists who brought on the Terror. Incidentally, at least a few of the tax farmers were strung up to the lamp posts when the Terror broke loose—but only a few.

154 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE shown by the fact that it would be just as easy to wish such a windfall directly to those others without imagining oneself as the intermediary of their good fortune. The child may imagine earning the money, though even so imagination might as well extend to others earning theirs; but as a rule it is to come from some undefined available effortless supply already extant—a perpetual motion machine. The child does not even conceive that persons in need of help can also imagine a million dollars for themselves. The double gratification, of personal wants and of power through "doing good," is innocently stipulated. Carried into adult years, this naive self-glorification turns to positive hatred of any suggestion of persons helping themselves by their own individual efforts, by the nonpolitical means which imply no power over others, no compulsory apparatus. The hatred has a deep motive back of it; for it is true that nothing but the folitical means will yield unearned public adulation. Let it be asked how any person wholly devoid of talent, skill, accomplishment, wit, beauty, charm, or even the practical ability to earn a living by routine labor, can conceivably become an object of flattering attention, greeted with applause and given a hearing for the feeblest inanities—obviously nothing will serve except political position. A large private fortune may procure a private circle of sycophants; but only the imperial decree could have gained Nero an audience for his singing or extorted applause for Caligula from the crowd.

But the rationalized dream of the Absolute State has a special historic connotation on its recurrence. The periods in which it has crystallized in literature are vastly significant. The three most famous paper schemes of this type are Plato's "Politeia," or ideal state, mistranslated as the "Republic," * More's Utopia, and Marx's nameless Promised Land * If any meaning is to attach to language, it is by distinctions. Rome supplied the form and meaning of Republic, with the word; and the Greeks of democracy. Plato's model of organization was the Spartan collective, a democratic military Absolute State. The distinction between a Republic and a Democracy was made THE VIRGIN AND THE DYNAMO 155 to come after the destruction of capitalism. What they have in common in their form is that all of them are final 5 they are arrangements in which human beings fit as specialized parts of a pattern. Their social and economic relations admit neither the biologically natural but mathematically irregular and interwoven order of the family, nor the unpredictable creative faculty of the individual. The mold is set, to preclude variation or change. They are static societies. Plato and More made the individual subject to the civic organization, and Marx made him subject to mechanized industry.

But what they have in common in respect of the times when they were imagined reveals their true significance. Each of the three marks an era in which new developments had already occurred which must make a static society impossible. The men who wrote these dreams were seismographic. They had felt the impending change, as if the earth had shifted beneath their feet; and their minds took refuge in a fantasy of a world which should not be subject to change. Plato lived in the age when the Greeks were formulating the basic principles of science. Sir Thomas More lived in the dangerous years of the Renaissance, the revival of science. Marx witnessed the industrial revolution, the application of science. All three fantasies are reactions from the Age of Energy. Plato was a literary man 5 it was his artistic sense of form which was disquieted, and which he sought to compensate with a rigorous design. More was an intelligent man and a wit; he labeled his creation frankly for what it was: Utopia means Nowhere. Marx was a fool 5 he offered his scheme as a prediction of the future.

It is through this imposed model for clockwork that in the very words; democracy literally means the rule of the people, a concept which will not admit any limitation in the political power. A Republic signifies an organization dealing with affairs which concern the public, thus implying that there are also private affairs, a sphere of social and personal life, with which government is not and should not be concerned; it sets a limit to the political power. The facts in each case corresponded to the meaning of the words.

I56 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE Europe has observed the United States since its inception; stultification could go no further. The principle of social harmony is liberty, the rights of the individual; that is the natural law of man, which the United States had discovered and formulated, before the French Revolution. Henry Adams, who witnessed the Energy Age after it was well under way, spent his life endeavoring to trace the connection between the last century of the Middle Ages, and the modern outburst of energy in kinetic uses. He picked up the clue, pondered it, and let it slip. What was the relation, he asked, between the Virgin and the Dynamo? His question was neither irreverent nor irrelevant. He perceived that after the majesty of Divine Law had been established in medieval philosophy by severe logic, the image of the Virgin then became more prominent in religion, as the recipient of honors and petitions. He recognized that this was because the Virgin represented an unconstrained element, grace or mercy, which implies free will in man, being available to continual choice. Then man was not to be bound by any irrevocably determined sequence, as a machine is. Man is not a machine. But at this point Henry Adams failed to realize that it is by freedom of personal volition that man is capable of pursuing his intellectual inquiries and making his inventions. This is the genesis of the dynamo. Being constructed according to the laws of mechanics, the dynamo itself is deterministic; that is to say, left to itself, it will stop.

Then if it is to run, it must be by the will and intelligence of man. A machine economy cannot run on a mechanistic philosophy.