In “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, I noted that Melville thought Emerson and Thoreau to be morally insane — Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. agreed. Melville noted in one place that the morality of those Cambridge sages was a spiritualized materialism that masked a total lack of charity, a total lack of love of others. Captain Ahab was seemingly intended to be a more courageous and more consistent Emerson: My means are sane, it is my ends which are mad. So said the prosperous captain of the Pequod.
Melville feared that Emerson and Thoreau were typical Americans, perhaps a bit more advanced than the ordinary citizen, but typical. In simple words, Melville feared that the Americans of his time were highly competent in pragmatic, worldly matters but morally insane.
Since Melville’s time, the American situation has developed in a very strange direction — though one predicted in a general way by clear-headed thinkers who knew history, such as Hannah Arendt. We were like Ahab, or gave a good impression that we were. We were competent sailors, whalers who brought back shiploads of whale-oil to build great houses in Newport and Boston. True it was that the construction of many of those houses in New England and New York was actually funded by similar practical skills in the capture and transportation and selling of human beings — to his credit, Lincoln knew this and he really wanted to be merciful to the Southern states out of simple justice. He knew the Southern states had simply lost in a game of musical chairs where all the participants were evil in some substantial way.
Both industries played a role in the formation of the American character. No one who has intelligently read “Moby Dick” could believe that it was a modern discovery that the whaling industry was an immoral operation. As the scene of slaughter in the great whale nursery shows, Melville knew that it was an industry in which prosperity was had by those who were ruthless and unscrupulous. This is not a discovery of the modern environmental activists. Nor was the evil nature of slavery a discovery of the generation of Lincoln and Garrison. Some Southern leaders, as I remember matters, had tried to end the slave trade by a provision in the Constitution and New Englanders had helped to kill the possibility — money was still to be made in the capture and selling of human beings. Lincoln himself later suspected the sudden surge of New Englander support for abolition in the 1850s was due to the new economic needs of the New Englanders and New Yorkers. They’d invested huge amounts of money in the upper Midwest and were afraid they’d not get proper returns if the Southerners were to control passage on the Mississippi River.
In any case, it’s hard to imagine better cases than the whaling and slave-trading industries of practical intelligence and moral insanity. And we are talking about two major industries of 19th century New England and New York, two industries which provided a lot of the money to build up the fledgling industries of those regions becoming so prosperous.
After deciding how to make their livings on purely pragmatic grounds — what can bring in a good return on a modest amount of capital and a large investment of labor? — those New Englanders and New Yorkers then started the strangest sorts of moralistic dances. When the slave-trading industry became very dangerous because the British Navy was hanging officers on slave-trading ships and imprisoning the men at the same time that the farms and industries of Minneapolis and Chicago promised better and safer returns, those citizens of the Northeast of the United States changed. Oh they changed. The people of Boston had not only sought jobs in the slave-trading industry, they’d also tarred and feathered William Lloyd Garrison more than once for his opposition to the slave trade. All of a sudden, New Englanders looked South to see the suckers who were holding the hot potato and saw them as being the most evil human beings the world had seen. So far as I can see, the transition took only a few years — at most. Morally insane and also wretchedly shallow. And the true evil of the Southern slave-owners, in the eyes of New Englanders, was the power they might have to prevent high rates of return on investments in the upper Midwest.
One of the marks of our practical intelligence and moral insanity is the tendency to first decide how to make our livings to secure our comfort and safety and then to start thinking in a moralistic manner about our chosen situation. This can be difficult when you chose to make your living by the brutal and large-scale slaughter of species of animals known to be vulnerable to extermination. It can be even more difficult when you chose to make your living by capturing human beings, transporting them across the ocean under miserable conditions, and then selling them as if they were cattle. But those New Englanders had good teachers in these mysterious arts of justifying evil by way of feeling good about yourself, Emerson and Thoreau among others. And maybe Emerson and Thoreau were simply children of their times, not creators but expositors of commonly-held feelings and ideas.
Well, now we’ve advanced to a new stage. Not only are we morally insane, we are also stupid when it comes to the practical arts of making things. All those factories built by whale-blood and human-blood are being turned into condos or art coops. Our stores are filled with a vast array of goods carrying the inscription: Made in China. Our colleges are dropping the requirements for graduation even in such modern subjects such as computer science. We depend upon the Indonesians and the Taiwanese to do the difficult work of design and manufacture for us. Our novels, magazines, and newspapers are written at a sixth-grade level and good readers retreat to earlier times or else read the latest novels from Chile or Columbia or even oft-maligned Portugal. I could go on, but I’ve spoken on these matters elsewhere and so have many others.
A people long insane in moral matters and more recently rendered stupid will be incapable of seeing their own situation. There have been a few maverick thinkers, such as Paul Craig Roberts — the supply-side theorist from the Reagan administration, who have been warning us for a while that we were selling off (cheap) or otherwise wasting our productive capabilities. More recently, I read an editorial in the Springfield Republican in which an economic journalist wrote of his realization that the great results on Wall Street are due to the speculators liquidating our productive capabilities to provide short-term gains. In some of my writings, I’ve been pointing out that this liquidation of a large economy provides the conditions for the development of a central, imperial government. It’s far from clear that our corporations have made profits in many a year — the ones officially in the red are simply those who were not able to sell off enough assets at discount to the Asian entrepreneurs. As for the politicians: they have a major stake in such a system where the huge cash flows in the marketplaces provide the taxes which power the growth of the welfare and military systems that define an empire.
Morally insane and now stupid in the ways of the world. Except for those scoundrels who work on Wall Street or in those massive buildings in Washington, DC. They’re morally insane and stupid in the ways of doing things that increase true wealth but they’re very smart when it comes to seizing control of assets built up by prior generations and liquidating those assets to fund their schemes.