The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  Having no religious affiliation is not, however, the same as having no affinity. I began in journalism, after a brief sojourn in academia, as the first Washington editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine. Buckley was a devout Catholic who believed that a real conservative need not be religious but could not be hostile to religion. Some atheists (and some theists) might think such an attitude is impossible, but as we have seen, our nation’s Founders surely thought, and proved, otherwise. The Founders created a distinctly modern regime, one respectful of rights that exist before government and are natural because, as Locke said, they are not creations of the regime that exists to secure them. Locke’s theory of knowledge, which was that all knowledge and every individual’s inner life come from external prompts, sped the displacement of the soul by the mind as the basis of individual identity and agency.

  When John Adams said that asserting the divinity of Jesus was “awful blasphemy,” he was, strictly speaking, saying that the assertion was an affront to God, although it is not clear how, or how often, Adams thought about God.46 Adams did believe that religion was indispensable in a republic: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”47 Adams, however, insisted that a republic “is only to be supported by pure religion or austere morals.”48 Note the “or,” which implies that an acquired morality can be independent of, and an alternative to, religion in sustaining republics.

  In the middle of the twentieth century, however, the revival of conservatism was partly propelled by some prominent thinkers who insisted on the indispensability of theism. Whittaker Chambers, in his characteristically extreme recoil from his characteristically extreme commitment to the materialism of Communism, said that a man without mysticism is a monster. A person capable of saying this is capable of monstrous thoughts and, perhaps, monstrous deeds. Chambers was, so to speak, excommunicating atheists, agnostics, and skeptics—any person without a theism—from the human community. He thereby sided with those who are always with us, those who reduce others to a status less than human. By making religiosity a defining attribute of men who are not monsters, Chambers, like others of the same mentality before and since, planted the predicate for committing monstrosities against those who they see as not fully human. The fact that Chambers continues to occupy a place in what many American conservatives consider the pantheon of their persuasion must make conservatism at least problematic, and often off-putting, to temperate theists as well as the non-mystics—meaning non-theists—whom Chambers execrated. Such conservatives are courting political difficulties. Between 2007 and 2017, the non-religious portion of the American population rose from 16 percent to 29 percent. This portion now outnumbers the combined congregations of all the mainline Protestant churches.

  Another luminary of mid-twentieth-century conservatism, Russell Kirk, said, “Until human beings are tied together by some common faith, and share certain moral principles, they prey upon one another.”49 To which three responses are required. First, religion can be socially useful without being true. Second, human beings can share many ethical principles without sharing the same faith, or having any faith. Third, people who share a faith or moral principles frequently have preyed upon one another, and on others. It is false, and politically ruinous, for conservatives to assert that conservatism requires a shared religion or even ubiquitous religiosity. The assertion that particular virtues depend, or that virtue generally depends, on religion is an empirical claim, and demonstrably false. There are many virtuous unbelievers, and many virtues with no religious provenance, and many religious people who are not virtuous.

  In The Conservative Mind, one of postwar conservatism’s canonical texts, Kirk asserted that a defining attribute of a conservative is the belief that “revelation, reason and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists.” So all those who are lacking this “assurance beyond the senses” are ineligible to join, or must be excommunicated from, conservatism. So, too, are those who are blind “to the effulgence of the burning bush” and deaf “to the thunder above Sinai.” Kirk’s stark dichotomy is between believers and “restless, shallow, self-intoxicated” atheists. Defined in such gaseous terms, conservatism can sink, and with Kirk it did sink, into a romantic longing for aristocracy, about which Kirk gushed: “To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy.…” Good grief. (Kirk, living in rural Michigan, had met few actual aristocrats.) For Kirk, it was a short step from asserting that “the foundation of social tranquility is reverence” to revering social hierarchies. And to a recoil against urbanity, as in Kirk’s dismissal of Alexander Hamilton: “For he was eminently a city-man, and veneration withers upon the pavements. ‘It is hard to learn to love the new gas station,’ writes Walter Lippmann, ‘that stands where the wild honeysuckle grew.’” It is hard to convince Americans to embrace a conservatism that presumes an alienation from life amidst the pavement of their modern, urban society. Kirk did not try to disguise his detestation of “the enormous smoky cavern of modern American life.”50 But a conservatism that is restricted to the devout, and that is inhospitable to those who like and feel at home in modern America, is a persuasion that will never persuade an American majority.

  Kirk and Chambers were extending an old and, truth be told, tiresome argument that at least was fresh when Locke said, “Those who deny the existence of the Deity are not to be tolerated at all. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon or sanctity for an atheist.” This, too, is an empirical claim the truth of which is not dependent upon a Deity actually existing. Locke is saying only that fear of divine punishment, which can be a groundless fear, is all that guarantees “the bonds of human society.”51 And even this claim is empirically false: There are multitudes of conscientious promise keepers who are not faithful; conscientiousness is not coterminous with faithfulness. And there are multitudes of people who subscribe to theisms but are not exemplary respecters of the bonds of society.

  The fact that the religious impulse is so ubiquitous as to seem intrinsic to humankind may be of practical importance. It is, however, not of any importance in establishing the truth of any religion, any theism, or any theory of transcendence. Granted, many people do reason that the fact that so many people seem designed to yearn for God is evidence of the existence of that for which they yearn. But it is not such evidence. Furthermore, it is arguable that the more the religious impulse is found to be intrinsic—that is, to be, so to speak, part of the wiring of most human beings as the species has evolved—the more religion seems to be merely an adaptive phenomenon. However, in an increasingly secular society, in what Max Weber called the “disenchanted world,” religious faith decreasingly infuses life. It organizes neither space (towers of commerce, not the spires of cathedrals, are at the center of the modern city) nor time (schools, even religious ones, have spring breaks, not Easter breaks). Given the number of fighting faiths that have taken political form, and the number of casualties claimed by these secular faiths, it is wise to worry about the political consequences of what Matthew Arnold called “the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith leaving the culture, and leaving it susceptible to feverish quests for redemption through political action.

  Would, however, the world be worse—because of a decrease in individuals’ happiness and virtue, or because of collective pathologies arising in the vacuum left by withdrawing religion—if the world were entirely secular? This is possible. Religion valuably informs, affirms, and motivates many aspects of many people’s lives, from social institutions such as family formation through marriage, to art and sustaining rituals. Many human beings have needs, or at least anxieties and desires, that
religion serves or assuages. Perhaps a sense of incompleteness is natural, as is a desire for collective amelioration of that sense. Certainly throughout history almost every society has had at its core some idea of the transcendent. Perhaps those religious people are correct who assert that all religions are in some sense true, in that they are durable responses to important constants in the human condition. Perhaps secularists are mistaken, and themselves are incomplete, in not sharing an aching need for completion, or in not embracing religion as a reasonable, or at least a practical, response to this need. Perhaps it would serve the greatest happiness for the greatest number if people were encouraged to embrace theisms. But then, by this utilitarian calculus, a case could be made for a pharmacological approach to the delivery of happiness. At least a case can be made for such a “brave new world”—Aldous Huxley made it, darkly, in his dystopian novel with that title—if one is indifferent to the quality of the happiness pursued.

  Jefferson was a utilitarian when he undertook to separate the “diamonds” of rational Christianity from the “dunghill” of revelation; he was attempting to reduce this religion to a branch of ethics.52 This project produced Jefferson’s truncated and expurgated version of the Bible. The immaculate conception and divinity of Jesus, his miracles and resurrection, the trinity—all were discarded as “artificial scaffolding” obscuring a rather agreeable ethical system.53 Jefferson remained a materialist, which involved for him quite enough of a puzzle. In a March 1820 letter to John Adams, he wrote that, like his hero Locke, he preferred to live with “one incomprehensibility rather than two.” He accepted that the cerebrum possesses “the faculty of thinking,” and therefore he accepted “the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought.” He saw no need to embrace a second, involving two dubious propositions: “first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then, secondly, how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs in motion.”54

  Jefferson the utilitarian regarding religion was also an empiricist: The senses provide all the fodder that the intellect has to work with. And the logic of empiricism propelled him to a severe—or, better, pure—individualism, wherein every person must, and has a right to, conduct his life according to his reason as it works with the data provided by experience. This individualism took Jefferson beyond Locke regarding toleration. “Locke,” wrote Jefferson, “denies toleration to those who entertain opinions contrary to those moral rules necessary for the preservation of society,” such as atheists. It was, he wrote, “a great thing” for Locke “to go so far,” but “where he stopped short we may go on.”55

  Tocqueville thought that religion, true or false, was a social necessity, especially in a democracy: “How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people which is its own master, if it be not submissive to the Divinity?”56 Tocqueville’s assumption is that the “political tie” that binds is necessarily weaker—more “relaxed”—in a democracy than under a monarchical, aristocratic, or other authoritarian regime. This, however, has not proven to be the case. With the help of party allegiances, which were not anticipated by the Founders, and the regular emersion in politics by participation in frequent elections, the political tie has proven to be stronger than Tocqueville anticipated.

  The act of associating in religious communities helps to develop what Tocqueville called “the art of association” and the “habits of the heart” that augment the stock of social capital that contributes to social cohesion. “It turns out,” says Britain’s Rabbi Lord Sacks, “that Western freedom, the thing that was born in England in the revolution of the 1640s and in America in 1775, is not the default setting of the human condition.”57 Rather, it is the result of a culture deeply conditioned by the Judeo-Christian tradition of individual autonomy and dignity. This culture is susceptible to decay: Individualism can beget hedonism and atheism with consequent loss of social cohesion and energy. This is not, however, an argument that establishes the social necessity of religion. Whether or not religion is true is, of course, an important question. But so is this: Is a moral sense independent of religion constitutive of human nature? Again, most things likely to produce lasting happiness—education, employment, stable families—require us to forego immediate pleasures. Religion can help with this. It is not, however, indispensable.

  “Religion,” wrote Tocqueville, reflecting on his American sojourn, “is considered as the guardian of mores, and mores are regarded as the guarantee of the laws and pledge for the maintenance of freedom itself”: “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot.… What can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?”58 Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville wrote that, it is clear that in an increasingly secular America the moral ties between citizens are loosening and the self-mastery of the populace is weakening. Perhaps America will demonstrate the utility of religions, the veracity of which cannot be demonstrated. But one difference, and perhaps the most important difference, between the modern age and all previous eras is this: It is no longer considered extraordinary to believe that one can understand the world without reference to a transcendent power that shapes human destinies. The mood of modernity is impatience with reasoning that must be explained or defended by appeals to some authority beyond reason.

  COSMOLOGY AND THE CONSERVATIVE SENSIBILITY

  Theism is an optional component of conservatism. Cosmology, however, can nurture a conservative sensibility, beginning with this fact: Already 99.9 (and about fifty-eight more 9s) percent of the universe is outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and the universe is expanding lickety-split. Into what? No one knows, but never mind. Hold a penny at arm’s length and you block from your field of vision three galaxies, including billions of stars and other things, that are 350 million light-years away. And these three galaxies are right next door to us in our wee corner of the universe, although of course the universe cannot be said to have corners. There is a lot more space than there is stuff in space: If there were only three bees in America, the air would be more crowded with bees than space is with stars. What, you may wonder, has any of this to do with conservatism? The answer is: It fuels the capacity for wonder and for finding beauty and exhilaration in the unplanned complexity of the whirl that has driven out Zeus.

  It is astonishing that we do not live in a state of perpetual astonishment. Conservatism should embrace and cultivate a cheerful, even exuberant acceptance of the unplanned and the undersigned, in the cosmos and in society. In the cosmos, because it is a great given that we must accept. In society, because of the fecundity of spontaneous order in an open society. Second only to Einstein’s famous question, Did God have a choice in the creation of the world?, is this one: How did matter, which is what we are, become conscious, then curious? The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79), an early authority on Saturn’s rings, had, as a cosmologist should have, a poetic bent:

  At quite uncertain times and places,

  The atoms left their heavenly path,

  And by fortuitous embraces,

  Engendered all that being hath.59

  A contemporary of Maxwell was born in 1838, the great-grandson of the second president, grandson of the sixth. Henry Adams watched with mingled awe and dismay the swift transformation of an agrarian republic into an industrial society, and eventually he “found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of forces totally new”:

  The year 1900 was not the first to upset schoolmasters. Copernicus and Galileo had broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross.…To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity…he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the
early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed…before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.60

  No doubt all this, which was said about “mere” electricity, today seems quaint and overwrought. We, after all, have discovered the neutron and the force it can unleash. Modern people, unlike Adams, have a slight sense of awe about the world around them. But before condescending to Adams, modern people should consider that, in a sense, they take more things on faith than did a thirteenth-century peasant tilling the fields in the shadow of Chartres. When the peasant wanted light, he built a fire from wood that he had gathered. Modern people flip switches, trusting that someone, somewhere, has done something that will let there be light. How many switch-flippers can say what really happens in the flux of electrons when a generator generates? The most advanced form of travel for the peasant was a sailing ship or a wagon; their mechanisms were visible and understandable. In a normal year, more than 75 million passengers pass through Chicago’s O’Hare airport, obedient to disembodied voices, electronically amplified, telling them that it is time to get into cylindrical membranes of aluminum that will be hurled by strange engines through the upper atmosphere. The passengers will not understand, and will be quite content not to understand, how any of this works. Yet they think the fourteenth century was an age of faith.