The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  Historical pessimism of the sort that Nixon and Kissinger entertained must have a profound influence on a foreign policy agenda. Kissinger would later deplore Woodrow Wilson’s susceptibility to “the irrepressible American conviction that understanding between peoples is normal, that tension is an aberration, and that trust can be generated by the strenuous demonstration of good will.”115 Daniel Patrick Moynihan had Kissinger in mind when he acidly described those who would completely purge US foreign policy of Wilsonian aspects as “men who know too much to believe anything in particular and opt instead for accommodations of reasonableness and urbanity that drain our world position of moral purpose.”116 That moral purpose is, strictly speaking, congenital: from birth. It is encoded in America’s national DNA. It is admirable. And it is problematic.

  In 1989, at the United Nations, Mikhail Gorbachev said, impertinently: “Two great revolutions, the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, exerted a powerful impact on the very nature of history…those two revolutions shaped the way of thinking that is still prevalent…”117 Two great revolutions? Trust a historicist to miss one of the largest lessons of history. It is that the American Revolution unleashed the most potent force surging through the last two centuries, the passion for freedom grounded in respect for natural rights. The man who would bring Gorbachev into the liquidation of the Cold War understood this force, if not its provenance. “You can call it mysticism if you want to,” said Ronald Reagan amiably but mystically, “but I have always believed that there was some Divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans, to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.”118

  Once you postulate divine guidance of the planet’s drifting tectonic plates, it is only natural to assume a continuing divine interest in the nation that dominates its continent. The American Revolution was, at bottom, about the right of a distinctive people, conscious of itself as a single people, to govern itself in its distinctive manner, in nationhood. Here was a great eighteenth-century insight: Popular sovereignty is inextricably entwined with nationality. The nation-state has been a great instrument of emancipation. It has freed people from the idea that their self-government is subject to extra-national restraints, such as the divine right of kings, or imperial prerogatives, or traditional privileges of particular social classes. Certainly Americans will not passively watch their nation’s distinctive ideas of justice be subordinated to any other standards. Most Americans are not merely patriots; they are nationalists, too. They do not merely love their country; they correctly believe that its political arrangements, its universal truths, and the understanding of the human condition that those arrangements reflect are superior to other nations’ arrangements. They believe, but usually are too polite to say, that American arrangements are not suited to everybody right now. These superior American arrangements are suited to culturally superior people—those up to the demands made by self-government.

  Lincoln correctly said that ours is a nation founded on permanent truths “applicable to all men and all times.”119 So the permanent puzzle for the nation’s foreign policy is: How are these truths “applicable”? The answer is: By implacable but delicate insistence that fidelity to these truths demands US fidelity to the painstaking process of preparing the social soil of other nations to receive and express those truths in institutions and practices. Among the most frequently quoted lines of English language poetry are from William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.120

  The world has suffered much from nations with dangerous convictions that fuel missionary impulses to conquer the backward and recalcitrant, and to coerce them into obedience and virtue. Hence, the peculiar delicacy required of those who formulate and conduct the foreign policy of the United States, a nation whose identity is inseparable from its conviction—its correct conviction—that it is the pioneer and bearer of certain universal truths.

  Nothing would be more gratifying than for America to lose much of its exceptionalism because its premises have become universally embraced, as Jefferson hoped would happen and as he tentatively expected. In a letter written on June 24, 1826, eleven days before his death on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he said of that document: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.… All eyes are opened, or are opening, to the rights of man.”121

  Today, however, the immediate danger is an American apostasy, a slow, shambling slouch away from its exceptional premises, in foreign as well as domestic policies. Americans should not regret the fact that their nation’s foreign policy will always have a meliorist dimension. It flows from two premises. First, America has a mission to make the world better because the American model of a pluralistic commercial republic is a universally valid aspiration. And exporting the model is in the national interest because spreading bourgeois civilization, with its preoccupations with pluralism and prosperity, is a way to tranquilize an often murderous world.

  What Bismarck said in the nineteenth century is even more true in the twenty-first: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.”122 As the Second World War approached and then began, it almost seemed as though the civilized were too civilized to protect their civilization. In his 1946 memoir Not So Wild a Dream, perhaps the best nonfiction book to come out of the war, Eric Sevareid, the broadcast journalist, told of a small episode during the 1939–40 “phony war,” before Germany lunged west in May 1940. During a night that Sevareid spent with French forces near the Rhine, a young corporal who had been working with a spade was killed by a German sniper across the river:

  Just one man, one soldier out of millions of soldiers who presumably were expected to die. The lieutenant in charge was close to tears as he described the terrible tragedy—how the boy had fallen, what he had told them to write to his parents before he died. The other men in the pillbox scarcely spoke all evening, but stared at the floor, thinking of the frightful thing that had just happened. It was awful; it was murder.…It was not that the French were not brave.…They were not afraid of death; they were unprepared for death. It was not true that they did not think their country worth fighting for; they wished to avoid defeat, but they had no particular wish to win a war. Their last experience had taught them that there is no such thing as a true victory for civilized men who have no desire to conquer others. Their tragedy was that they had reached a high point of human progress too soon; they were living before their time. They were the last people on earth who should have had Germany for a neighbor.123

  But is it actually progress if one is paralyzed by a challenge from barbarism? A nation living before its time may not live to see its time. Just a generation earlier, these two contiguous nations had suffered hitherto unimaginable slaughters during the first industrial war. In 1939, one of those nations flinched from another war, the one for which the other nation had prepared. The cultural divide between France and Germany then was much wider than the Rhine. Nations can pick neither their neighbors nor the time in which they live. In today’s world of ballistic missiles, cyber threats, and democratized air travel that facilitates small bands of terrorists, every nation is every other nation’s neighbor, and there are clashes between civilizations that are more unalike, and more mutually unintelligible, than France and Germany were in 1939.

  “This nation,” said Woodrow Wilson of the United States, “was created to be the mediator of people, because it draws its blood from every civilized stock in the world and is ready by sympathy and understanding to understand the peoples of the world.”124 Again, w
e encounter the cheerful progressive premise: Conflicts arise from misunderstandings and hence can be prevented or ended by the dissemination of clarifications. Machiavelli knew better. He became a permanent torment to the Western mind by saying something that, once said, forced us to face a permanent difficulty. He said that the question of how people should live—which human goals should be exalted—will never result in a single, universally satisfying answer. As Isaiah Berlin wrote, Machiavelli still disturbs our peace by “the planting of a permanent question mark” over society; by, that is, his coldly matter-of-fact recognition that, in Berlin’s words, “ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration.”125 So people must either be prepared for perpetual fighting against divergent views or they must find paths to accommodations.

  Progressivism holds out the hope that human material is malleable, that the present is endlessly manipulable, and that the future is predictable. From this flows the recurring belief—it recurs soon after events refute it—that peace is the natural relation between nations and that war is an aberration explainable by the bad character of rulers and by benighted traditions and institutions. For two centuries progressives have been explaining the obsolescence of war—their explanations often hard to hear over the roar of cannon—in terms of the spread of democracy. Or the disappearance of religious and ethnic and nationalistic fervor. Or the pacifying power of commerce. Or the increase of travel. Or the communications revolution. But, as Yale classicist and historian Donald Kagan notes, “Over the past two centuries the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself.” Kagan says that “statistically, war has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states.” Given what Kagan calls war’s “ubiquity and perpetuity,” the first duty of political leadership is to act on the axiom that “peace does not keep itself.”126 Leaders must act also on the probability, for which there is accumulating evidence, that nations that are respectful of natural rights domestically will be disposed to peace in dealing with other nations. This is only a probability. But life is, at almost every turn, a wager on inconclusive evidence. To think otherwise is to embrace what could be a truly fatal conceit.

  Chapter 9

  WELCOMING WHIRL

  Conservatism Without Theism

  Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.

  Aristophanes1

  As Huck Finn and Jim floated down the Mississippi River on their raft, they occasionally indulged in theological—more precisely, Deistic—ruminations. “We had the sky up there,” Huck recalled, “all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.”2 This question has been asked since the dawn of human curiosity, which means since the emergence of beings who were recognizably human. But perhaps the most pertinent answer to this question today is another question: Without divine revelations, what difference does the answer—“was made” or “just happened”—really make?

  Those whose answer concerning the stars—and everything else—is “was made” are theists. The “just happened” contingent consists of those who think that invoking transcendence as an explanation for everything that exists is neither necessary nor persuasive. To ask why the dispute between the “was made” and the “just happened” schools matters is not to doubt or disparage the history-shaping saliency of religions. They infuse individuals’ lives and animate nations and other collectivities. Those who dismiss religion as fossilized philosophy neglect the obvious fact that religions often do what philosophy rarely does: They set in motion cascading events. After all, the most consequential life in human history was lived twenty-one centuries ago in the eastern portion of the Roman empire by a person who never traveled a hundred miles from his birthplace, never held public office, never wrote a book, and died at the hands of the state in his early thirties. The second-most potent life was that of Muhammad. He was born in the second half of the sixth century and died in the first half of the seventh century without ever having ruled a state, but his effects are not merely still radiating, they are increasingly important as the twenty-first century lurches on. Religions have shaped world politics and culture more broadly and lastingly than any political philosophy has done. This lesson of humanity’s experience is clear: Intangibles, such as religious faith, have historic heft. “A flame rescued from dry wood has no weight in its luminous flight yet lifts the heavy lid of night.”3 So wrote the poet who became Pope John Paul II, whose large role in ending the Cold War was a riposte to a materialist’s—Stalin’s—dismissive question, “How many divisions does the pope have?”4

  For the purpose of this book, however, the question is not whether religion does or should matter, but rather whether religious faith is, or ever has been, necessarily integral to American conservatism or a prerequisite for a conservative sensibility. The argument of this chapter is that not only can conservatives be thoroughly secular, but that a secular understanding of cosmology and of humanity’s place in the cosmos accords with a distinctively conservative sensibility. Philosophy is downstream from sensibility, which cannot be disentangled from philosophy because sensibility disposes a person to see the world and experience life in particular ways.

  Huck Finn’s creator, Mark Twain, said: “What God lacks is convictions—stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something—not try to be everything.”5 Ah, there’s the rub. “To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion,” wrote George Santayana, “is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.”6 Of course, many people do attempt that, tarting up any yearning for “meaning” or any hope for eternity as a religious episode, so almost anyone who is occasionally “spiritual” can consider himself or herself episodically religious. But go beyond speaking about religion in general, go beyond Huck’s brand of natural theology to particular religions involving divine revelations, and religion becomes subject to interpretations. It becomes more than an explanation (of, for example, Huck’s stars) but less than a source of universally acknowledged moral imperatives.

  If God is uninterested in humanity’s undertakings or prayers, He is uninteresting and need not impinge upon humanity’s political or ethical thinking. Religion becomes politically relevant and problematic when divine revelation enters the picture, with God taking an active interest in, and intervening in, human affairs, and supplying strictures about how people should behave. People will differ about what all of this means, and these differences are not easily splittable. Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter, “I read the book of Job last night—I don’t think God comes well out of it.”7 Woolf was channeling her inner Huck, the empiricist. Let us leave it to theologically grounded persons to decide whether, or how, the progressive doctrine of a changing human nature can be squared with the teachings of various religions. This much, however, is clear: A nation such as ours, steeped in and shaped by Biblical religion, cannot comfortably accommodate a politics that takes its bearings from the proposition that human nature is a malleable product of social forces, and that improving human nature, perhaps unto perfection, is a proper purpose of politics. Biblical religion is concerned with asserting and defending the dignity of the individual. Biblical religion teaches that individual dignity is linked to individual responsibility and moral agency. Therefore, Biblical religion should be wary of the consequences of government untethered from the limited (and limiting) purpose of securing natural rights.

  Some keen observers of America could see this long before the advent of modern progressivism. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America just two generations after the American founding—two generations after Madison identified tyranny of the majority as the distinctive political evil that democracy could produce. Tocqueville had a different answer to the question of what kind of despotism democratic nation
s should fear most. His warning is justly famous and more pertinent now than ever. This despotism, he said, would be “milder” than traditional despotisms, but

  it would degrade men without tormenting them.… That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood.… For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

  Thus, it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.… Each nation is reduced to being nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.8

  Each of us must decide to what extent Tocqueville’s foreboding is being fulfilled. People of faith, however, should ask this: Does the tendency of modern politics to take on more and more tasks in order to ameliorate the human condition tend to mute religion’s message about reconciling us to that condition? And people of faith should worry about whether religious institutions can flourish in the shade cast by government that presumes to supply every human need and satisfy every appetite. Secularists must confront the other side of the same question: Can our limited government and free society long endure if the work of civil society, which often is the work of our religious institutions, is taken up instead by the government? To the extent that the politics of modernity reduces the role of religion in society, it threatens society’s vitality, prosperity, and happiness. Irving Kristol understood this. Although not an observant Jew, he described himself as “theotropic,” by which he meant oriented to the divine. He explained why in these words: