The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  The question is: What should the United States do to encourage, in the words of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, “the survival and the success of liberty”?95 What can US foreign policy do to expand the recognition and enjoyment of the natural rights essential for human flourishing and therefore conducive to peace among nations? In moral reasoning, “ought” implies “can”: There is no duty to do the impossible. The last fifty years have been a painful tutorial in the limits of the possible. This has been instruction in the relevance to foreign policy of Friedrich Hayek’s idea of the fatal conceit, the dangerous belief that we can know, and can control, more than we actually can. The good news from the twentieth century is that because human nature is real, human beings are not as malleable as is presupposed by the authors of the worst political practices.

  Extravagant political aspirations breed dangerous political practices: Hitler’s Holocaust, Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Culture Revolution. And they breed weird aspirations like this: Leon Trotsky concluded his 1924 book Literature and Revolution with the prophecy that under communism “man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”96 It is important to take seriously the fact that a man of undoubted intelligence and substantial political talents could think like this. There are many more forms of political intoxication than Americans’ relatively tame political experience encompasses. In Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, set in 1917, a character is told that a “social revolution” has erupted in Russia. He asks, “A social revolution? Unaccompanied women smoking in the Opera, that sort of thing?” He is told, “Not precisely that, sir.”97 The distinctive radicalism of twentieth-century revolutions was incomprehensible to people who, being sensible, did not understand the new totality of revolutionary aspirations—the aim to take control of consciousness itself.

  The twentieth century’s two most dreadful inventions were nuclear weapons and totalitarianism. In the physics and politics of these, a crucial concept is “critical mass.” In physics, it can be the key to huge explosions. In politics, the cardinal tenet of totalitarianism is that the masses must not be allowed to amass on their own, spontaneously. Totalitarianism is a mortar and pestle, grinding society to dust, atomizing individuals and assembling them only into compounds controlled by the state. The twentieth-century’s art, literature, and morals reflected pervasive anxiety about impermanence: everything from empires to atoms had been shattered. Yet amidst all the disorienting flux, totalitarianism suggested the possibility of an awful permanence. Armed with modern communications and other technologies of social control, totalitarians tried to immunize themselves against internal change that would challenge the state’s total sovereignty over society. Imagine, said Orwell, a boot in your face—forever. His nightmare is the totalitarians’ dream, the terrifying promise of permanence.

  The totalitarian pretense was the claim to have broken history, and all human spontaneity, to the political party’s will. Plato, who sought ways to prevent cycles of civic virtue from decaying into tyranny, had comprehensive prescriptions for education, poetry, rhetoric. Modernity has meant preoccupation with history as linear, not cyclical. That is, history as a narrative infused with the drama of the possibility of progress. The last two centuries have given birth to various historicisms, theories stipulating that history is a series of inevitabilities independent of individuals’ political wills and choices. The totalitarian impulse arises from the claim that a particular party has a monopoly on understanding history’s dynamic and therefore has a right to unbridled administration of its insight, however brutal this administration might be for those who contest its monopoly of interpretation. Paradoxically, in the twentieth century, when history accelerated giddily, the great political invention, totalitarianism, promised regimes that would perpetuate themselves forever. The world has been haunted by the specter of permanence, the permanent boot in the face.

  In 1951, Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe, published The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her thesis was that induced ideological intoxication, combined with modern instruments of social control, such as bureaucracy and mass media, might make totalitarianism an unassailable tyranny, immune to all dynamics of change from within. Terrorism—the end of legality; random violence—is but one totalitarian instrument. Another is gray bureaucracy controlling all cultural institutions. Totalitarianism aims at the conscription of the citizen’s consciousness—state ownership not merely of industries but of minds. So, totalitarianism requires control of the flow of information, which means the central scripting of all public argument, which means no real public argument. Intermediary institutions standing between the individual and the state—schools, churches, clubs, labor unions, even families—must be pulverized or permeated by the state. The totalitarian aim is the atomization of society into a dust of individuals, a dust blown around by gusts of ideology emitted by the tutelary party. The totalitarian enterprise is the extirpation of all autonomous institutions and hence of autonomous impulses in society. Instead of Marx’s withering away of the state, there is the withering away of society through the unlimited penetration of life by the state—by politics.

  But in 1956, in the streets of Budapest, Arendt’s profoundly pessimistic theory was slain by a luminous fact. For twelve days, Hungary flung its unconquered consciousness in the face of the totalitarian state. There was no civil war because the nation was not divided: Ideological indoctrination had left the public utterly unmarked. In Budapest, tanks prevailed, but Arendt rejoiced in the refutation of her hypothesis. In an epilogue to the 1958 edition of her book, she wrote: “The voices from Eastern Europe, speaking so plainly and simply of freedom and truth, sounded like an ultimate affirmation that human nature is unchangeable, that nihilism will be futile, that even in the absence of all teaching and in the presence of overwhelming indoctrination, a yearning for freedom and truth will rise out of man’s heart and mind forever.” Arendt saw in this a spontaneity that was “an ultimate affirmation that human nature is unchangeable,” that no state succeeds in “interrupting all channels of communication,” and that “the ability of people to distinguish between truth and lies on the elementary factual level remains unimpaired; oppression, therefore, is felt for what it is and freedom is demanded.”98

  Human nature is real and unchangeable; national characters, however, are real but, over a long time, changeable. History is, to a significant extent, a story of hostilities between groups—tribes, clans, cities, nations. They are hostile because they have different characters. Hence the idea of national character, which became of intense practical interest during and after World War II, when policy-makers turned to scholars in the hope of finding predictive guidance for dealing first with Germans and Japanese, then with Russians. The idea of national character should rescue us from having our intelligence bewitched by anesthetizing language about the “community of nations.” Nothing can be properly called a “community” if it jumbles together entities as different as Saudi Arabia and New Zealand, Japan and Sudan, Italy and Iran, Norway and North Korea. The phrase “community of nations” may seem harmless, if hackneyed, but it is a symptom of a blinding sentimentality. Different nations involve different notions of justice. A “community” consists of people held together by a broad, deep consensus about justice under a common sovereignty.

  The stubborn persistence of nations and nationalisms is a redundant refutation of Marx’s core contention: economic determinism. Marx’s belief in the sovereignty of economic forces over ethnicity and other cultural factors is just another failed prophecy from “scientific socialism.” Because Marxism was so boastful about its predictive powers, Marxists suffered traumas when events refuted it, as in August 1914 when Reichstag deputies representing working-class parties, supposedly the most “progressive”
in Europe, voted to finance Germany’s war effort. This nationalist behavior stunned those who believed, as Marx did, that the proletariat has no fatherland. When Stalin, who was Lenin’s commissar for nationalities, said, “Marxism replaces any kind of nationalism,” he was echoing Lenin, who said socialism “abolishes” and “merges” nations.99 Lenin had correctly represented Marx: “There is not a single Marxist who, without making a total break with the foundations of Marxism and Socialism, could deny that the interests of Socialism are above the interests of the right of nations to self-determination.”100 Marx said in The Communist Manifesto that the acids of international capitalism would dissolve “every trace of national character.”101

  A steady aim of US engagement with the world should be to create incentives for the slow, incremental modification of certain nations’ characters to bring them more into conformity with the universalism of the American creed. Pressure can come from the United States by the constant support—rhetorical, financial, diplomatic—of people in those countries who are asserting natural rights that have been denied recognition. This can prudently increase internal pressures on repressive regimes. And this places the United States where it belongs, in the vanguard of the most powerful force in the modern world, the demand for recognition of dignity.

  Human beings differ from other animals in having a sense of their dignity, and a desire for its recognition by others. This, a manifestation of what Plato called the soul’s “spirited” part, is as important to politics as the soul’s reasoning part. Francis Fukuyama credits Hegel as the first to understand that “the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition.” Fukuyama’s “end of history” hypothesis was this: With the end of the Soviet Union and the exhaustion of socialism’s intellectual confidence as a fighting faith, mankind’s ideological evolution might have reached its terminus. This would be so if liberal democratic societies satisfied citizens’ material needs—and their desires for recognition. If they did, history, for all its violence, irrationality, and detours, would be revealed to be, after all, not “a blind concatenation of events” but rather fundamentally directional, universal, and coherent, vindicating the idea of progress.102

  Most of the twentieth century had been hard on this hypothesis. The century, Fukuyama says, had “made all of us into deep historical pessimists.”103 The century had begun full of confidence that science would transform nature from mankind’s adversary into its servant. Evil was supposedly a manifestation of backwardness, which was well on its way to being banished by universal free public education and the application of science to society. The cumulative nature of scientific discovery seemed to refute the age-old belief that history is cyclical, an endless repetition. Science certainly nourished hopes for social progress. And Machiavelli had provided the foundation for modern political confidence—meaning modern politics—by asserting that mankind, properly led by political people who are properly emancipated from moral strictures inappropriate to politics, could subdue fortuna, meaning history’s contingencies. So the twentieth century ended with Americans hoping that foreign policy could recede from the center of the nation’s consciousness.

  A NORMAL COUNTRY?

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union sealed the US victory in the Cold War, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador was an architect of that victory, wrote an essay in which she welcomed a new era in which the United States could become (this was the essay’s title) “a normal country in a normal time.”104 During the Cold War—what John Kennedy in his inaugural address called “a long twilight struggle”—foreign policy had taken on, Kirkpatrick said, “an unnatural importance.”105 Unnatural, that is, in that there seemed to be no limits to what implicated US national interests important enough to require at least the threat of military force. She said: “There is no mystical American ‘mission’ or purpose to be found independently of the U.S. Constitution.…There is no inherent or historical ‘imperative’ for the U.S. government to seek to achieve any other goal—however great—except as it is mandated by the Constitution or adopted by the people through elected officials.” Kirkpatrick was expressing understandable relief, tinged with fatigue, after more than four decades of Cold War tensions. Her wishes, however, gave rise to a thought that was not quite right. Kirkpatrick correctly said that “a good society is defined not by its foreign policy but by its internal qualities.”106 But what is normality for this nation regarding the rest of the world? Kirkpatrick was correct that “America’s purposes are mainly domestic.”107 Mainly. But not entirely. Here is the rub:

  The Declaration of Independence is the continuing “conscience of the Constitution,” and hence of the American regime. Intelligent people of good will can and do debate what this means for America’s engagement with the world. But surely it means something. From the nation’s beginning, with varying intensity and involving varying specifics, most Americans have felt that the nation does have some sort of mission. It is independent of the Constitution in that this document allocates powers; it does not direct the purposes to which the powers shall be put, beyond those mentioned in the Preamble, only one of which (“provide for the common defense”) is germane to foreign policy. But the national mission is not independent of the Constitution’s conscience. The Declaration’s declaration that rights, being natural, are universal must in some way inform this nation’s foreign policy.

  While he was president, the author of the Declaration wrote, “We feel that we are acting under obligations not confined to the limits of our society. It is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all of mankind.”108 Two centuries later, Henry Kissinger, no Jeffersonian, argued that Americans’ belief that their principles are universal implies that governments with other principles are “less than fully legitimate” and that much of the world “lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement.”109 American universalism, combined with America’s geography and geology—America’s location between two broad oceans; its endowments of natural resources—made Americans “uncomfortable with the prospect of foreign policy as a permanent endeavor for contingent aims.” Until the Second World War, Americans could and frequently did “treat foreign policy” as an “optional activity.” Optional and hence intermittent. And eventually, they hoped, unnecessary.

  The belief that American principles should be universal begets the belief that America’s ambitious purpose in the world should be to shape the world in such a way that America will no longer have to have ambitious purposes. American’s Lockean belief in humanity’s natural sociability has disposed America to believe that peace among nations is natural and spontaneous, or would be if other nations would clear their minds of the superstitions that prevent them from recognizing the universal validity and demonstrable utility of our self-evident truths. Small wonder that in 1890, at the dawn of the decade that would end with a burst of American imperialism, the US army was only the world’s fourteenth largest, behind Bulgaria’s.110

  Twenty years after the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of the Philippines in 1898, the United States had a president, Woodrow Wilson, who proclaimed the First World War to be “the culminating and final war for human liberty,” and who traveled to Paris to get on with the business of implementing universal principles right now. This could be done because America’s principles “are also the principles and policies of forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community.” All that would be required would be to codify everyone else’s commitment to modernity and enlightenment. A quarter of a century later, when Franklin Roosevelt, a Wilson protégé, was president, he reportedly assured his former ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt, that he had a “hunch” that Joseph Stalin was not going to be a postwar problem: “I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return,
noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”111 FDR did not have the tragic sense of life that is a facet of the talent for pessimism that in turn is a facet of the conservative sensibility.

  Kissinger, brooding about the long peace between the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the cataclysm of 1914, wondered whether the century of calm “might have contributed to disaster. For in the long interval of peace the sense of the tragic was lost.”112 But, then, those Americans who think human nature inclines humanity toward common objectives really have no tragic sense to lose. “Any society,” Kissinger wrote as a thirty-four-year-old academic, “faces a point in its development where it must ask itself if it has exhausted all the possibilities of innovation inherent in its structure. When this point is reached, it has passed its zenith. From then on, it must decline, rapidly or slowly, but nonetheless inevitably.”113 This was the European Kissinger, a historicist comfortable with theories of inevitability and with the Hegelian ideas of possibilities dictated and limited by social structures. Two decades later, Kissinger worked for a leader who was susceptible to similar thoughts.

  On one occasion, President Richard Nixon mused about thoughts he occasionally had when seeing the tall columns that flank the entrance to the National Archives building on Constitution Avenue: “I think of what happened to Greece and to Rome and, as you see, what is left—only the pillars. What has happened, of course, is that great civilizations of the past, as they have become wealthy, as they have lost their will to live, to improve, they then have become subject to the decadence which eventually destroys a civilization. The United States is now reaching that period.”114 This was unlike anything ever said publicly by an American president. Of course, the Western intellectual tradition is replete with philosophers, historians, and others who have wondered whether history is cyclical, driven by seeds of social decline that were sown by the processes of social ascent. The thoughts stirred in Nixon by the National Archives’ pillars were spoken by the highest elected official of a nation founded on, and still steeped in, the Enlightenment belief in humanity’s ability to make informed and rational—enlightened—choices that can master impersonal forces.