In 1862, at twenty-one, my great-great-grandfather John Hodges Wadhams left Goshen, Connecticut, to seek his fortune in the West. In 1992, almost exactly 130 years later, I began keeping seriously the journal of my own early adulthood.
John was the son of an old Connecticut farming family. Church, town, party, father and Civil War supplied most of the categories by which he understood himself. I was a late-twentieth-century graduate of Reed College, formed by anthropology, martial arts, travel, postmodern suspicion and a much less settled relationship to inherited authority.
Neither young man accepts existence as self-validating.
John leaves Connecticut because he feels he “ought to try to do something for myself.” Almost immediately the journey becomes an examination. He hopes to “make a strike.” He imagines returning home with his standing enlarged. Surrounded in Illinois by drinking, gambling and swearing that offend his New England sensibility, he prays for strength not to do anything his “home friends would be sorry to hear of.” He states the hierarchy plainly: next to seeking the “kingdom of God & his righteousness,” the duty of a man is to make an “honest endeavor to secure a competence.”
My journal starts from a different intellectual world but with similar symptoms. Travel cannot simply be travel; it has to be legitimate travel. Anthropology cannot merely be interesting; experience somehow has to earn the authority of fieldwork. I repeatedly ask where legitimate experience begins, whether an observation deserves authority, whether a teacher or technique is the real thing.
The shared axiom is simple: I cannot merely want a life. I must earn the right to regard that life as meaningful.
John seeks what I would now call earned belonging. His question is essentially: can I become a man worthy of the people from whom I came? His tribunal is visible: God, father, family, Goshen, public reputation. His youthful fantasy is not escape from Goshen. It is departure, ordeal, proof, and return.
My younger self creates a harder problem. I do not merely ask whether I meet the standard. I ask whether the standard itself is legitimate. Then every favorable verdict can be appealed. Perhaps the judge lacked standing. Perhaps the credential came from the wrong institution. Perhaps I understood it only superficially.
John seeks legitimacy through conduct: experience → judgment → correction → life resumes.
I seek it through authenticity: experience → interpretation → critique of interpretation → critique of the category used in the interpretation → critique of myself as interpreter. The examiner examines the examination.
Most important, John’s world contains a tribunal capable, at least in principle, of acquitting him. My younger self keeps appealing favorable verdicts. That was where an old phrase of mine, New England Pathology, began to look less like a joke and more like a question.
*
David Hume belongs near the beginning of the answer. In the third book of the Treatise, he notices how easily moral philosophers move from propositions about what is to propositions about what ought to be, the transition often passing without argument.[1] Description does not manufacture obligation.
Genealogy invites a related error. Kinship among the living carries obligations because living people make claims upon one another. Kinship with the dead is different: it establishes connection, not obligation. Yet genealogy tempts us to ask ancestry to do more. We look backward not only for historical explanation but sometimes for permission, wanting to discover that a conviction or disposition is older than we are because antiquity seems to give it weight.
The danger is obvious. A seventeenth-century minister begins to look like an argument. An ancestor’s character begins to look like destiny.
My original article was always tongue-in-cheek. I never really needed a Puritan gene. A theology can settle over a region for centuries. It enters churches first, then laws, schools, households, marriages, work habits, and notions of what a proper person owes himself and others. Eventually descendants may no longer know the doctrine at all. They simply inhabit its categories. At that point cultural continuity can look genetic.
My maternal line descends directly from Rev. Richard Mather, immigrant to Massachusetts in 1635. Not through his famous son Increase or grandson Cotton, but through the non-clerical son Timothy, remembered as the farmer Mather. Timothy inherits the society Rev. Richard’s generation built by crossing an ocean because of questions serious enough to reorganize ordinary life.
On my paternal side, nearly two centuries later, an independent strand of English Reformed dissent appears among the Barkers of the Upper Calder Valley. Abraham Barker, born at Stansfield in 1819, was baptized at Myrtle Grove Independent Chapel rather than the established parish church. The record establishes Nonconformity.
By his generation, dissent no longer required an Atlantic crossing. Religion traveled with the migrant rather than causing the migration.
His grandson, Dr. Abram James Barker, eventually met the much older Connecticut inheritance carried by Lucy Burr Wadhams.
Three distinct traditions, Puritan Massachusetts, Connecticut Congregational, and Yorkshire Nonconformity, travel by different routes before coalescing in one descendant. That does not prove temperament. It establishes the historical availability of a recurring moral grammar.
Over time doctrine can soften into assumptions about which professions embody the proper virtues. My grandmother was very specific: legitimate careers were teacher, lawyer, doctor. She did not name her own husband’s profession as a banker. Transmission through preference. People choose schools, churches, associations and disciplines that tell them what competence looks like and how it is certified. My own later institutions bear an uncanny structural resemblance to the older ones despite having very different content.
Reed, anthropology, Japanese martial arts and genealogy all ask versions of the same questions: Who taught you? Through what lineage? What authorizes your interpretation? Have you undergone the necessary ordeal? May you now speak?
Successive environments keep rebuilding courts in which legitimacy must be demonstrated.
*
Investigating the genealogy also forced a correction in my theology. I had sometimes described the inherited problem as Puritan perfectionism. That was too simple.
St. Augustine did not teach that fallen human beings can perfect themselves by sufficient effort. He taught the opposite: human beings cannot restore themselves by their own powers, and the attempt to become one’s own sufficient ground is itself part of the disease. Calvin sharpens the problem further. Election belongs to God; merit cannot purchase it; the individual cannot inspect the decree.
The psychological difficulty is therefore not simply become perfect. It is more troubling: How do I know what I am?
A believer cannot manufacture election. Yet he understandably wants assurance that grace is present, so he looks for evidence in conduct, vocation, religious affection and the testimony of the community. Puritan spirituality developed elaborate methods of self-examination because false assurance remained possible; Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections is, among other things, an attempt to distinguish genuine transformation from counterfeit experience. Even certainty comes under examination.
A doctrine can disappear while that question survives. John Hodges Wadhams’s diary shows how easily it migrates.
*
John was born in Goshen in 1840, more than two centuries after Richard Mather reached Massachusetts. He was no theologian. His diary is mostly weather, hay, cattle, butter, roads, elections, court cases, investments, family and money. The mundane shows something useful: the theological vocabulary has receded, but the structure remains visible.
A man insults John; he retaliates; then he judges himself. The other man’s failure to behave as a gentleman did not excuse his own. A violent family dispute requires his intervention; he worries about the consequences for the children involved; he concludes the affair was one of “the responsibilities of life” he could not escape.
The surrounding pages contain actual ledgers about butter, cattle, feed, legal fees, debts down to the cent, and then, periodically, he applies the same accounting instinct to himself.
In 1885 John writes that his life “seems to be a failure in many respects.” He enters the offsets: a healthy family, freedom from disease, and the hope that “the next generation will develop more capacity and a philosophic mind that adjust itself to circumstances.” He resolves to meet what remains with “courage, self control, and perseverance.” He performs the audit and carries the unresolved balance forward, hoping some descendant will possess more capacity for the problem than he did.
His theology recedes as his life proceeds. After his father’s death he writes that he must be “a good and true man, for this world and in preparation for the next,” and on the anniversary: “I have endeavored to be a good man for the year and keep his place good.”
At fifty-seven, having moved into state administrative work in Hartford, he gives thanks for “good health, a pleasant family & an honorable position.” If advancement comes, fine. If not, he has “done my duty.” That is not a Puritan divine examining signs of election. It is a late-nineteenth-century New England man evaluating a life. The theology has thinned. The grammar has survived. He is still asking whether the accounts balance.
In 1899 he records the return of an “old trouble” of despondency and insomnia and lists the evidence against despair: “I have an abundance of this worlds goods, a good position, and a nice family. Cheer up old man.” Two days later he feels better and thanks God.
On Tuesday, October 21, 1902, John Hodges Wadhams died by suicide in his office at the Connecticut State Capitol. He left a note apparently accusing himself of embezzlement. The state comptroller told reporters within a day that Wadhams’s duties gave him no access to funds in a manner that would have permitted the theft he confessed to, and colleagues described him, on the record, as trusted and honest. Contemporary accounts noted that his physical health had been poor and that his family believed his mind had become affected by illness.
I do not know why John Hodges Wadhams killed himself. Whatever broke in John in his last days, it broke in the specific shape of his life’s argument. He did not merely despair. He produced a confession to a specific moral failure, judged by a specific standard and delivered to a specific public. The community that received it immediately testified that the charge was false. The court he had spent so much of his diary trying to satisfy returned a verdict he apparently could not accept even in his own favor.
That does not explain the suicide. It does illuminate the form his despair took. The accounts could balance and the feeling could still be absent. Peace was never merely a function of the evidence.
*
Seven days later, on October 28, 1902, his daughter Lucy Burr Wadhams married Dr. Abram James Barker of Torrington, as planned. A newspaper covering her father’s death, printed the day after he died, already reported that a daughter was “to be married next week.” The wedding was on the family’s calendar before the suicide violently inserted itself.
Lucy was thirty years old. Within one week she confronted the public suicide of her father and then proceeded with a marriage that had evidently been arranged months before. Whatever the private emotional history of those seven days was, I do not have it.
Lucy’s mother, Mary Pelton Wadhams, continued keeping the family diary after John’s death. In those later entries Abram does not appear as an outsider grudgingly admitted to the family. Dr. Barker recurs prominantly within family life. That makes Lucy’s much later description of her husband as a “Johnny-come-lately” more interesting, but not easier to explain.
The remark survives as a grandmother’s quip remembered by her eldest male grandchild, my Uncle Tony. Tony remembered it from Lucy as his grandmother, at least four decades after her father’s suicide and after her marriage to Abram had become one of the settled facts of family life.
Lucy came from a Connecticut family whose claim to belonging rested partly on duration: generations in the same towns, marriages among old families, participation in familiar institutions, until belonging itself became inevitable.
Abram’s standing was of another kind. His Barker line was first-generation recent in America and more recent still in Connecticut, but Abram possessed achieved standing: education, medicine, professional competence, civic usefulness. Decades later Lucy could still joke that his people were newcomers.
October 1902 does not explain that remark. It gives it an unsettling backdrop. A woman who later placed value on inherited depth had experienced, brutally and in public, the fact that it was powerless to protect her father from illness, despair, scandal or self-accusation. A family could be old, locally prominent and socially embedded and still suffer catastrophe in full public view.
That fact did not cure her of valuing oldness. Perhaps “Johnny-come-lately” was exactly what it sounds like: a grandmother teasing her Barker grandson with the superior antiquity of the Wadhams side of his own pedigree.
Perhaps it carried more weight. The documents cannot decide between those readings, and October 1902 cannot be made to explain either of them. It can only make the joke stranger. Lucy had experienced that an old name was no protection against catastrophe. Decades later, she could still take pleasure in having one.
*
Adin Ballou is not an ancestor, but he is a namesake and is the figure who shows what happens when a similar moral demand is externalized differently. He founded Hopedale.
Hopedale was a theological argument instantiated as a community: Here is the world as it is; here is the world as Christian reason says it ought to be; here is an attempted bridge between them, engineered and inhabited. Ballou does not solve Hume’s is-ought problem. He rejects the premise that the ought must be extracted from the is in the first place. Revelation, conscience and Christian reason provide normative premises independently. Hopedale is the attempt to make those premises material. My maternal ancestors were founding members of Hopedale.
There is an important distinction in the questions my ancestors were asking based on a difference in approach: utopian institutionalization versus civic institutionalization. Thus, Ballou asks: How should society be reconstructed so that its institutions embody the ought? But John asks: How should I discharge my duty honorably within the institutions that already exist?
Ballou tries to alter the world sufficiently to satisfy conscience. John tries to alter himself sufficiently to deserve his place in the world. One builds the tribunal. The other reports for examination.
*
Once moral vision becomes institution, another problem begins.
Thomas Sowell is useful here. His recurring challenge to visionary reform is that intentions are cheap compared with consequences, that intellectual systems often underestimate dispersed knowledge and incentives, and that people insulated from the costs of their prescriptions can continue believing in them after ordinary evidence has turned against them.
But the institutional mechanism I am interested in has an older and broader sociological pedigree.
Max Weber describes the routinization of charisma: the extraordinary authority of a founder or movement cannot remain extraordinary forever. If it is to survive, inspiration must become office, rule, calendar, hierarchy and procedure.
Robert Michels supplies the darker institutional corollary: organizations develop interests of their own. Leaders acquire information, position and incentives unavailable to ordinary members, and institutions formed to advance an ideal increasingly devote energy to preserving the institution capable of advancing it.
The originating grievance can therefore survive while changing form. The Puritan crosses the Atlantic because the inherited church has drifted from what conscience requires. He and his descendants build settlements meant to embody better order. The settlement acquires churches, offices, property, schools, procedures and families who know how things are done.
Eventually membership in the community itself becomes evidence of standing. The boundary begins as theology. It hardens into institution. Eventually it softens into manners.
By Lucy’s generation, no one needs to reconstruct seventeenth-century covenant theology before noticing that some families have “always” been there and others arrived later. The doctrine can disappear while the social distinction it once helped produce remains perfectly intelligible.
Lucy did not need Puritan theology to make a joke about Johnny-come-latelies. She inherited a world in which duration itself had become a form of social capital.
*
Weber tells you why the founding passion goes quiet. By John’s generation it plainly has. What remains in his diary is not evangelical fire but bookkeeping: an “honorable position,” a father’s “place” to be “kept good,” duty discharged rather than grace sought.
The Puritan settlement that began as urgent, world-historical obedience to conscience becomes, five or six generations later, a respectable New England household keeping its accounts, civic and moral, in order.
But Weber does not entirely explain why the underlying inquest survives, why a man with almost no theological vocabulary left is still, in his sixties, asking whether his life has amounted to enough.
*
I have assembled several centuries of ancestry around a disposition that feels inherited. I do not know that it was.
The genealogy cannot establish psychological transmission, and I distrust precisely the kind of ancestral determinism such a claim would require. Yet the recurrence remains difficult for me to experience as accidental.
That subjective impression is part of the evidence I am examining, not proof of the mechanism that produced it.
What the genealogy can actually establish is the ingredients for such an inquest were repeatedly available: cultures that valued conduct as evidence; families in which public standing mattered; dissenters who rejected one establishment and then formed durable communities of their own; institutions that certified competence through lineage, ordeal or recognition.
The mechanism may be less inheritance than repeated selection. People who already possess a disposition choose spouses, professions and institutions that reward it. Their children grow up inside the resulting environment and then make choices of their own. No one needs to sit at the dinner table explaining Calvin for the pattern to reproduce itself.
My own son supplies an accidental test of that same mechanism, and I offer it with more wry humor than confidence.
I named him Adin for my maternal great-grandfather, Adin Freeman Messinger, without knowing at the time that the name descended in turn from Adin Ballou himself. The name traveled downstream in much the same way I suspect some of these habits may have: without instruction, without doctrine, simply because people valued it enough to keep repeating it.
My son does not appear to have inherited the court along with the name. He decides easily. He fails early, and seems to feel little need to appeal the failure. He appears to know what he wants without cross-examining the wanting. Whatever machinery this essay is describing, he appears to run far less of it. He is, so far as a father can judge his own son with any objectivity at all, something close to the perfection of non-reflection.
I have an entirely unscientific suspicion that his mother’s latent Catholic inheritance may have introduced a different architecture of judgment: the idea that confession can end in absolution pronounced by someone other than oneself. And then he anointed himself his own confessor. That is importantly different from a system in which assurance must continually be inferred from one’s own conduct and inner condition.
I do not offer this as theology-by-sample-size-one, much less as proof. It is exactly the kind of evidence Hume would want marked anecdote. But if the mechanism is cultural environment rather than genetic inheritance, a child raised amid competing moral grammars is at least an interesting natural experiment.
My son may simply be the first person in this family in three centuries to embody the right religion before he was old enough to choose.
*
For me, the ancient Greeks offer the corrective.
Achilles pursues kleos. Odysseus survives through mētis. There is nothing modest about aretē, but one fact never disappears: you remain human. Mortal.
The tragic hero’s catastrophe often begins when he forgets the boundary. The Greek problem is therefore less perfection than measure. Not why have I failed to become perfect, but have I forgotten what kind of creature I am?
Oedipus is not stupid. He is brilliant. That is what makes the play work. Intelligence does not solve the problem of being a creature who lacks a god’s view of his own life. More examination does not necessarily produce the standpoint from which final examination becomes possible.
I find that merciful. Not soft. Merciful.
The Greeks allow ferocious striving without promising transcendence as the reward. Chance remains. Error remains. Death remains. The human condition remains an is.
John Hodges Wadhams believed in an external court capable of acquitting him. Yet in the end he seems to have supplied his own accusation. My younger self inherited the appetite for a court, combined with the trained suspicion that kept disqualifying anyone who tried to occupy the bench.
My Puritan ancestors could not inspect the decree they hoped had been made in their favor. John could ask whether he had kept his father’s place good and, in the end, could not trust the evidence supplied in his favor. I repeatedly asked whether the experience, teacher, institution or achievement itself possessed authority enough to render judgment. The mechanisms changed. The demand for a verdict survived.
That is the formulation of New England Pathology I can presently defend: the demand for a verdict after the court of final appeal has been abolished.
Once the external court disappears, the danger is not merely that there is no judge. It is that defendant, prosecutor and judge become the same person.[2]
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[1] Hume’s full quote is almost never cited beyond the contraction of not deriving an ought from an is. The full sentence:
I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, T 3.1.1.27, SBN 469-70
The immediate implication is narrower than the slogan usually made from it: normative obligation cannot simply be smuggled out of description. Whatever supplies the ought must enter the argument from somewhere else. Hume’s broader moral psychology locates much of that source in sentiment and convention rather than reason alone.
[2] Only after finishing this argument did I notice that I had constructed, genealogically and without intending to, something very close to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the death of God.
The resemblance is not atheism. Nietzsche’s problem was never merely that educated Europeans might cease believing in the Christian God. The deeper problem is what happens when the transcendent guarantor of value loses its authority while the habits of judgment formed beneath it remain.
My family history happens to provide a small and accidental chronology of that transition. Richard Mather inhabits a world in which the final court unquestionably exists, however difficult its verdict may be to know. John Hodges Wadhams inhabits a later world in which theology has already thinned substantially into duty, reputation, usefulness and self-accounting. By my own generation the external court has largely emptied, while the appetite for its verdict remains.
In that sense Nietzsche was directionally right. Where I part company with him is over the heroic answer. Nietzsche was a classical philologist; I possess no Greek and know it only through comparative translations. But expertise does not prevent selection, and Nietzsche’s Greeks are necessarily selected Greeks: agonistic, tragic, aristocratic, affirmative, suspicious of Socratic rationalism and Christian renunciation. The solution he extracted from them remained partly the product of the northern European problem he was trying to solve.
Nietzsche’s answer to the emptied court is self-legislation at its most heroic. If inherited values are lost, the higher individual must cease asking for authorization and become capable of creating values independently. The old tablets are broken; new ones must be written. There is enormous courage in that answer. God no longer renders the verdict, so man must become sufficiently great to render it himself.
That strikes me as more Wagnerian than Greek. Nietzsche’s own relationship with Wagner makes the comparison deliberately unfair but not frivolous. Early Nietzsche could imagine art, tragedy and Wagnerian cultural renewal doing work that Christianity could no longer perform. Later Nietzsche rejected Wagner precisely as another temptation toward intoxication, redemption and theatrical transcendence. My objection is that something Wagnerian survived in the scale of the task: the demand that a sufficiently great human being answer a metaphysical vacancy through an act of creation.
By my read, the Greeks offer a different heroism. Achilles does not become immortal by achieving kleos. Odysseus does not defeat contingency through mētis. Oedipus does not acquire a god’s standpoint by being the cleverest man in the room. Aretē does not abolish moira. Excellence occurs inside the mortal condition rather than providing an escape from it. The heroes do not create their own values. They remain bound. All too human. And that seems to me harder because it offers less consolation. To act with excellence while abandoning the demand that excellence culminate in a final verdict.
One can, indeed must, strive without possessing the right, without being the sort of being who can act as the judge of whether the striving ultimately justified one’s existence.
All one can do is seek aretē without transcending and pursue kleos while remembering that, inevitably, death wins. That seems to me the more genuinely tragic answer to the death of God. Nietzsche correctly recognized that the old court could not simply be restored through nostalgia. His early hopes for Wagnerian cultural renewal demonstrate how powerful the temptation remained; his later repudiation of Wagner demonstrates that he recognized the danger himself.
Where I think Nietzsche still goes wrong is in believing that the disappearance of the old legislator requires a sufficiently heroic human being to assume some version of the legislative burden.
The Greek corrective is measure: act courageously, judge provisionally, accept correction, pursue excellence, and remember what kind of creature is doing the pursuing.
The belief that there ever was a court of final appeal was the mistake.
Protective Arts 