What John Adams can teach us about feeling like a failure.
Click-bait subhead: "It's not what you think!"
“I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors. . . . I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.”
These were the private thoughts of John Adams in his 20th year, as noted in his diary. Peter McCollough, who recounts them in his biography John Adams, then tells us:
“But the next morning he slept until seven and a one-line entry the following week read, “A very rainy day. Dreamed away the time.””
Hey, we’ve all been there.
McCollough paints a picture of Adams that will be uncomfortably familiar to any intelligent, feeling person who wants to make their mark on the world: “By turns he worried over never having any bright or original ideas, or being too bright for his own good, too ready to show off…” He could be conceited, yet he also recognised this failing within himself and was his own worst critic.
Yet above all, the picture that emerges is one of someone who really valued honesty in thought and deed:
““Honesty, sincerity, and openness, I esteem essential marks of a good mind,” he [Adams] concluded after one evening’s gathering. He was therefore of the opinion that men ought “to avow their opinions and defend them with boldness.””
Twenty years later, this young man who feared he must “be contented to live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow” would be the main force behind America’s independence from England, having understood how great a nation America could potentially become, and was one of the most respected men in America’s Congress.
Fast forward 246 years, and we find a report in the Washington Free Beacon that Arizona's Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema “joked with Democrats about how easy it was for her to charm Republican men” and “boasted knowingly to colleagues and aides that her cleavage had an extraordinary persuasive effect on the uptight men of the GOP.”
Hey, I did say “how great a nation America could potentially become.”
Before you dismiss this with ‘there’s always been venal people in politics’, on the other side of the pond the big story last week was that some Tory MPs had told the Mail on Sunday that Labour’s deputy leader has a habit of crossing and uncrossing her legs, Sharon Stone style, in order to throw Boris Johnson off his game by flashing her “ginger growler”. In response, Boris Johnson threatened to “crush” whichever of his MPs was responsible for such “misogynistic” behaviour and vulgar language, while the Speaker of the House, apparently unacquainted with the concept of freedom of the press, summonsed the editor of the Mail to his office in some sort of misguided attempt at chivalry (the editor, thankfully, refused to go).
Yesterday the whole story unraveled when it emerged that the source of the story was none other than the deputy leader herself, who had been boasting of this habit during fag breaks on the Commons terrace. She has ambitions to overthrow Sir Keir and take the leadership for herself, potentially placing her as the next Prime Minister of Great Britain. Yey.
It’s hardly original to note that the standards of our age are not what they once were. Clearly Kamala ‘Russia is big; space is bigger’ Harris is not on the same intellectual level as the founding fathers were. In the immortal words of Sleepy Joe: “C’mon, man!”
But what struck me as I read about John Adams was the reception his intellect received from his compatriots.
It’s often assumed, as we look at the sorry state of our own parliaments, that there are no men of intelligence, morality or spirit nowadays. After all, aren’t our representatives our best and brightest? They were democratically elected, so they must be! That’s how the system works, right?
Well, there may not be any clever, decent, moral people in parliament, but they still exist. John Adams, with his morals, passions, fierce intelligence, would have fit quite neatly within our time. No doubt he would still have been moved to rail against the corruption and stupidity of our age. But his trajectory through life would have been markedly different: instead of rising to become a great statesman, ambassador and eventually president, he would have been working an overtaxed, underpaid job in obscurity, sneered at on Twitter on a daily basis as he tried to point out the folly of our times to an indifferent, if not actively hostile, audience. Let’s face it, he probably would have been called a conspiracy theorist by stupid people who would have laughed and called him stupid.
In short, the great tragedy of our age is not that we have no-one capable of greatness. It’s that we do, but we mock them for it.
I began this by saying that McCollough’s portrait of Adams as a young, ambitious man who was aware of his capabilities and fretted that they may be wasted was “uncomfortably familiar”. I think it’s natural to want to do great things with one’s life, if capable of it. I know a number of people who are intelligent, observant, witty and capable, well-read, erudite, insightful. To a man (and woman), their talents are currently being wasted in obscurity, and I know many of them fret about it, in the same way Adams did.
Friend, if you are one of those people, fret no more. Console yourself with this thought: Ibram X Kendi, who was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential people 2020, and last year won the MacArthur Prize, otherwise known as the “Genius Grant” of $625k, is primarily famous for writing Anti-Racist Baby, a board book exhorting parents to raise their children to be actively racist. That’s the sort of person our society rewards nowadays.
What I’m saying is: we have the misfortune of living in a society in which the most stupid, the most ignorant, the most immoral and the most self-serving are raised up as national heroes. Under these circumstances, wear your obscurity as a badge of pride and honour. No one who truly deserves esteem should want to be esteemed by these utter idiots.
What John Adams can teach us about feeling like a failure.
The I Ching calls times like these the times of "the little people".