As Russell Kirk suggests in his classic, The Conservative Mind, <\/i>there is no one among America\u2019s Founding Fathers that provides as articulate and discerning a vision of genuinely conservative thought as John Adams.<\/p>\n
Adams was a man of great learning and genius.\u00a0 He also is among the most prolific political authors that the United States ever produced.\u00a0 Kirk says that his \u201cbody of political thought exceeds, both in bulk and in penetration, any other work on government by an American.\u201d Yet uniting his voluminous writings are certain characteristically conservative themes.<\/p>\n
Regarding the egalitarian\u2019s dream regarding \u201cthe natural equality\u201d of all human beings, Adams is dismissive.\u00a0 In a letter to his friend, turned adversary, turned friend again, Thomas Jefferson, Adams is blunt: \u201cJus cuique, <\/i>the golden rule, is all the equality that can be supported or defended by reason or common sense [.]\u201d<\/p>\n
In his correspondence with John Taylor, Adams writes: \u201cThat all men are born to equal rights is clear.\u00a0 Every being has a right to his own, as moral, as sacred, as any other has. This,\u201d he says, \u201cis as indubitable as a moral government in the universe.\u201d\u00a0 However, as for the egalitarian fiction that was taking his world by storm, \u201cfor honor\u2019s sake,\u201d and \u201cfor truth and virtue\u2019s sake, let American philosophers and politicians despise it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adams remarks: \u201cBut to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life, is as gross a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n
The egalitarianism of his contemporaries is an \u201cideology.\u201d\u00a0 For Adams, this meant that it is \u201cthe science of Idiocy.\u201d Moreover, it is \u201ca very profound, abstruse, and mysterious science\u201d that yields no \u201cdiscoveries\u201d and \u201cno bottom.\u201d\u00a0 The ideology of egalitarianism is \u201cthe bathos, the theory, the art, the skill of diving and sinking in government.\u201d\u00a0 It is what\u2019s \u201ctaught in the school of folly,\u201d \u201cthe academy\u201d of which, along with several prominent French thinkers, such notable defenders of the American Revolution as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine \u201cwere the great masters [.]\u201d<\/p>\n
Adams warns his American and French contemporaries that \u201camid all their exultations,\u201d these utopians would be well served to recognize that \u201cthe perfectibility of man is only human and terrestrial perfectibility.\u201d Their best efforts will never change the fact that \u201ccold will still freeze and fire will never cease to burn; disease and vice will continue to disorder, and death to terrify mankind.\u201d\u00a0 Human beings are motivated by \u201cself-preservation\u201d and \u201cemulation.\u201d Adams adds that only \u201cthe balance of a well-ordered government will\u2026be able to prevent\u201d the latter \u201cfrom degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, wasting seditions, and bloody wars.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, even if the human perfectibility of the egalitarian dreamers was possible, it wouldn\u2019t be desirable.\u00a0 \u201cGrief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart; it compels them to rouse their reason, to assert its empire over their passions, propensities, and prejudices, to elevate them to a superiority over all human events [.]\u201d\u00a0 Adams concludes that \u201cin short,\u201d grief makes human beings into \u201cstoics and Christians.\u201d<\/p>\n
Particularly in our day, when it has become second nature for Americans, including self-described \u201cconservatives,\u201d to turn to their government to satisfy their material needs and desires, Adams\u2019 individuality is a tough pill to swallow.\u00a0 But it is true.\u00a0 Just as importantly, he knew that grief, in conjunction with \u201cthe balance of a well-ordered government\u201d\u2014a government comprised of \u201ca balance of power,\u201d as Adam described it\u2014is necessary for the preservation of liberty.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty, when they have been in competition.\u00a0 We must not then depend alone upon the love of liberty in the soul of man for its preservation.\u201d\u00a0 The love for liberty is no \u201cmore rational, generous, or social, in one\u201d man than in another \u201cuntil in man it is enlightened by experience, reflection, education, and civil and political institutions [.]\u201d<\/p>\n
Liberty is not an abstraction, Adams knew, but a culturally-specific good dependent upon institutional arrangements and moral tradition.<\/p>\n
This Independence Day, let us recall the largely lost wisdom of the man who probably is the most conservative of the Founding Fathers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Russell Kirk suggests in his classic, The Conservative Mind, there is no one among America\u2019s Founding Fathers that provides as articulate and discerning a vision of genuinely conservative thought as John Adams. Adams was a man of great learning and genius.\u00a0 He also is among the most prolific political authors that the United States…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n