The intergenerational John Adams

CEI’s annual Julian L. Simon Memorial Award Dinner is on September 23. The theme is American Treasures. This post celebrates two of the most precious of those treasures: upward mobility and human progress.

John Adams knew his place in history, and not just because he could be a little vain. He was a driving force behind the Declaration of Independence. He was a diplomat during and after the Revolutionary War. He was America’s first vice president, and its second president. Future generations would remember him, and he knew it. Adams also knew that the reason for his life’s work was to set up a better life for those future generations.

This spirit animates one of his most famous quotes:

I must study politics and war that my sons have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

One needn’t take those disciplines literally to get Adams’ point. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. What Adams’ generation fought for was people’s freedom to make their own choices, whatever those might be. But first, Adams’ generation had to navigate through revolution, war, and crisis.

The next generation, their freedom secured, could build cities, roads, and industries. America was free, but there wasn’t much in it yet. Building it up was the next step.

Subsequent generations, their freedom secured and infrastructure built, could then live the good lives their ancestors couldn’t. Instead of the arts of war, they could study the arts of peace. They could pursue happiness in almost any way they chose. This, Adams hoped, would be the Founders’ gift to everyone who would come after them.

This was no guarantee. Adams knew this, and it shows in his word choices. He said that his sons “ought” to study mathematics and philosophy, not that they would. There was no guarantee they would make the right choice. One of John Adams’ sons, John Quincy, would cap a distinguished political career by himself becoming president. Another son, Charles, died at 30 of the alcoholism that ran in his mother Abigail’s family. The best Adams could do for the next generation was to guide and persuade. He could not guarantee.

Adams also knew that none of this project could happen without freedom. He wanted his grandchildren to have “a right to” study paintings, poetry, and anything else they might want to. But without earlier generations doing the work to secure those rights, those choices might never exist.

Adams’ pairing of progress and responsibility perfectly captures the Enlightenment mindset. Before the Enlightenment, few people gave much thought to change and progress, let alone shaped their families’ prospects around such ideas.

This was a new development. Today, we expect that our children will live better than we do. Adams’ generation was one of the first to realistically hope that their children might live better than them. Before that, for thousands of years, from ancient Sumer onwards, one generation lived almost exactly like the next.

Feudal Europe’s driving idea was the opposite of progress: the Great Chain of Being. Each individual was a link in that chain, and that was their place, forever. If even a single link were to break, the whole chain would collapse. The children of peasants had no choice but to become peasants themselves. A blacksmith’s son would also be a blacksmith, and his son after him. Those who did not accept their assigned place in life risked everything from ostracism to physical beatings and worse.

Among the few who benefited from the Great Chain of Being were hereditary nobles who enjoyed wealth and privilege whether they deserved it or not, hence the old joke about the word “nobility” being a contraction of “no ability.”

Upward mobility and the rejection of hereditary nobility were still unusual ideas in Adams’ time. America is the only country in the world founded from the start on liberal ideas of progress and entrepreneurship. This American attitude toward progress has done as much for human betterment as any of Adams’ political achievements to make future generations’ lives better.