It was the ultimate gathering of statesmen,
thinkers and artists, the likes of which aren't likely to be found in Davos
or at any Renaissance
Weekend. "The Club," as it was simply known, was founded in 1764 by
the moralist and polymath Samuel
Johnson, and included the likes of political philosopher Edmund
Burke, painter Joshua
Reynolds, naturalist Joseph
Banks, historian Edward
Gibbon and economist Adam
Smith.
Over Monday night dinners at London's
Turk's
Head tavern, members would chew over everything from philosophy to
rhetoric to art to questions of human character and nature. It's been said
that the late 18th century was the last time in history a well-educated
person could have a mastery of every great scholarly discipline. But it's
also true that the greatest minds of the era believed that there was an
essential unity of knowledge, and that the natural and humane sciences,
or the moral and the political, could only be properly comprehended together.
We could use a club like that today,
or at least we could attend more closely to what some of its members thought
about the world they knew—and how they thought about it. That goes especially
for Johnson, who is remembered mainly as the author of the first authoritative
dictionary of the English language, but whose thoughts on human nature,
morality and commerce are a timely antidote to the anticapitalist ethos
that's become increasingly fashionable in the wake of the financial crisis.
Johnson believed that human happiness
could be achieved through great acts of striving rather than in states
of placid contentment. "Do not suffer life to stagnate," opines a character
in "The
History of Rasselas," his 1759 novel. "It will grow muddy for want
of motion." The novel tells the story of a restless young prince of Abyssinia
who, for lack of ordinary wants, escapes from an Eden-like existence in
order to find some greater thing to reach for. Seeing the pyramids in Egypt—which,
unlike the Great Wall of China, have no practical function beyond the extravagant
glorification of a single man—the prince's tutor observes that "those who
have already all that they can enjoy must enlarge their desires."
Man, in other words, is desirous, ambitious
and perpetually dissatisfied with what he has, a fact endlessly lamented
today by socialists, environmentalists and other sundry moralists who tell
us we'd be better off saying "enough" and being happy with what we have.
Johnson took a different view. Though he warned against the moral and emotional
pitfalls of unbridled or misplaced ambition, he also knew it could be a
force for good, and the lack of it an even greater force for ill.
In "A
Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland," an account of his travels
with James
Boswell through the Hebrides in 1773, Johnson vividly described the
desolation of a feudal land, untouched by commercial exuberance. He was
struck by the utter hopelessness in a country where money was largely unknown,
and the lack of basic material improvements—the windows, he noticed, did
not operate on hinges, but had to be held up by hand, making the houses
unbearably stuffy. (1)
He was even more struck by the contrast
between places where markets thrived and those where they didn't. In Old
Aberdeen, where "commerce was yet unstudied," Johnson found nothing but
decay, whereas New Aberdeen, which "has all the bustle of prosperous trade,"
was beautiful, opulent, and promised to be "very lasting."
Johnson also understood that what Smith
would later call the division
of labor was instrumental for human happiness and progress. "The
Adventurer 67," which he wrote in 1753 at the height of a commercial
boom (and 23 years before Smith published "The
Wealth of Nations"), delights in the sheer number of occupations available
in a commercial capital like London. The insatiable demand for the most
specialized goods and services means employment for anyone who wants to
make a living: ". . . myriads [are] raised to dignity, by no other merit
than . . . contributing to supply their neighbors with the means of sucking
smoke through a tube of clay."
"[E]ach of us singly can do little for
himself," he wrote insightfully, "and there is scarce any one amongst us
. . . who does not enjoy the labor of a thousand artists." He also saw
the market as the only mechanism by which the diversity of human desires
could be satisfied: "In the endless variety of tastes and circumstances
that diversify mankind, nothing is so superfluous, but that some one desires
it . . ."
Johnson described what today we would
call the capitalist system. Of course, the term "capitalism" was unknown
in his day (though "capitalist" was; Johnson pithily defined it in his
dictionary as "He who possesses a capital fund"). Also unknown to Johnson
was the notion of "ideology." Rather, what he wrote was drawn from observations
and reflections on human nature as he saw it—a nature that always aspired
for more and better and (when properly instructed) nobler things. That
nature is still with us, as is the economic system that Johnson observed
is best adapted to it.
Our latter-day moralists shouldn't lightly
throw it away. |