The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  Meanwhile, we need government to swear a version of the Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm.” Government needs to get back to basics. The political class, defined broadly to include persons actively engaged in electoral politics and policy-making along with those who report and comment on civic life, is more united by a class characteristic than it is divided by philosophic differences. The characteristic is a tendency to overestimate the importance of public policies, from which the political class derives its sense of importance. This is especially so regarding economic and social inequalities. These, the political class tends to believe, are largely the result of public policies and are therefore susceptible to decisive amelioration by better government actions. In the argument about which is primary, nature or nurture, the former receives an emphatic affirmation from the Founders’ philosophy. Beneath the myriad patinas of culture, there is a fixed human nature that neither improves nor regresses. What does change for the better is the capacity of certain portions of humanity to improve the legal, institutional, and social structures for coping with the constants of human nature.

  Founding this republic largely on interests rather than virtues was prudent because interests, unlike virtues, are always with us. They are spontaneous; everyone has them. To imagine not having them is to imagine being something otherworldly. Virtues are difficult to acquire, which is why virtuousness is much rarer than interestedness. This is why prudent people seeking to fashion a firm founding for a polity under popular sovereignty will not count primarily on virtue.

  Nevertheless, a function of law is to use incentives to point people toward worthy ways of living, thereby strengthening what the polity considers essential virtues. The assertion that virtues need no help from the law is an empirical claim, perhaps correct, perhaps mistaken, but in any case arguable. The assertion that there are no essential virtues, or none that is a proper concern of the law, is as absurd as would be the idea of a polity with no notion of the public good. In an open, pluralistic society, government concerns itself with a minimum of what can be called moral essentials. The family is one because much else depends on it. Government can at least avoid encouraging or enabling dissolute habits. It has done much harm by destigmatizing and encouraging dependency.

  Good character and the social settings that influence it are crucial to equality of opportunity and are not beyond the influence of public policy in a free society. James Q. Wilson’s definition of good character includes two qualities. One is empathy, meaning regard for the needs, rights, and feelings of others. The second is self-control, meaning the ability to act with reference to the more distant consequences of current behavior. Character is shaped by public forces—by general opinion, neighborhood expectations, artistic conventions, elite understandings, “in short, by the ethos of the times.”70 Public policy primarily reflects that ethos, but can shape it a bit, and perhaps even, as Wilson’s colleague Moynihan said, “save it from itself.”

  Chapter 7

  THE AIMS OF EDUCATION

  Talents for Praising and for Pessimism

  However, it is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where he is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing toward the Rockies for a change.

  Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet1

  We are a young nation,” George Washington wrote when the nation was seven years old, in 1783, “and have a character to establish.”2 The nation is now nearly 250 years old and it needs to re-establish its character and to take care that the first words of the Constitution’s Preamble—“We the People”—actually denote something real.

  The Declaration of Independence began briskly but also problematically: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to…” In what sense were the residents of the thirteen colonies “one people”? They were of many faiths. They spoke several languages: Benjamin Franklin, sensitive to Pennsylvania peculiarities, suggested that Congress publish laws in German, and in the 1850s Abraham Lincoln would invest in several German-language newspapers to further the reach of his campaign. The residents of what suddenly, on July 4, 1776, had ceased being colonies, had powerful local attachments: Even eighty-five years later, Robert E. Lee, a career officer in the US Army, would resign from it rather than draw his sword against “my country,” Virginia.3

  In the second Federalist Paper, John Jay described Americans as “one united people, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”4 That was more or less true. Never mind that, in an era when religious differences were taken very seriously indeed, Catholics, Quakers, and various Protestant sects would have vigorously disputed the idea that they all professed the same religion. In the aftermath of independence, New York’s 1777 constitution banned Catholics from holding public office, and Massachusetts Catholics were not allowed to hold public office unless they renounced papal authority. Maryland Catholics had full civil rights, but Jews did not, and Delaware required an oath swearing belief in the doctrine of the Trinity.

  Nevertheless, Jay had a point: Americans, having largely descended from Northern European stock and having been fused in the furnace of “a long and bloody war,” were a more or less united people.5 But as Edward C. Banfield wrote two centuries later, “the harsh fact is that American society—any society—is not a band of brothers but a set of competitors.”6 And as Jay’s collaborator in The Federalist, James Madison, noted with asperity in Federalist 37, people are not altogether nice competitors, being human and therefore full of “discordant opinions,” “mutual jealousies,” and other “infirmities and depravities.” And “if, in a few scattered instances a brighter aspect is presented, they serve only as exceptions to admonish us of the general truth; and by their lustre to darken the gloom of the adverse prospect to which they are contrasted.”7 So what is to be done to make competitors, if not into brothers and sisters, at least into congenial fellow citizens? Tocqueville’s sojourn in turbulent, regionally divided Jacksonian America convinced him that “in order that society should exist…it is required that all the minds of the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas.”8 Seven decades later, at the peak of pre–World War I immigration, Theodore Roosevelt worried that the nation might be becoming “a polyglot boarding house,” a transitory association of strangers.9 Or something akin to Theseus’ ship.

  In the Greek legend, the sailor Theseus sailed his wooden ship for years, replacing planks one at a time as wear and tear required, until none of the original planks remained. At that point, was it still the same ship? Human beings do not feel that their identity is attenuated or otherwise problematic just because, as the years pass, the cells in their bodies are gradually replaced by others. But what about a nation’s identity? This was a question of existential urgency in March 1861, expressed in the rolling cadences of the last paragraph of Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”10 At that moment of desperation, with seven states having already voted to secede, national memory was a vital instrument of governance.

  But the memory of a nation needs attending to; it does not nurture and transmit itself. It must be transmitted; it must be taught. Fifty years ago, Ronald Knox, Catholic chaplain at Oxford, noted that in this century, for perhaps the first time in human history, this is true: “You do not believe what your grandfathers believed, and have no reason to hope that your grandsons will believe what you do.”11 No community can passively accep
t that proposition unless it is reconciled to passing away, or—much the same—being transformed beyond recognition in every generation.

  Democracy requires a demos. Government of, by, and for the people requires a people, understood as a collectivity defined by more than mere proximity. It must be defined by a moral ecology, a shared identity that is built—consciously made—by education and civic liturgies that nourish shared memories. Ralph Waldo Emerson complained in 1836 that “our age is retrospective.” It “builds the sepulchres of the fathers,” thereby limiting itself: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”12 Here is why: An original relation would require us to deny the fact that we are situated creatures, that we are rooted in the moral setting in which we have been placed as citizens. Today’s America is insufficiently retrospective. Emerson lamented that college education often was a ship “made of rotten timber, of rotten, honeycombed, traditional timber without so much as an inch of new plank in the hull.”13 But education should be more laden with traditional intellectual timber than brimming with new ideas. After all, most new knowledge is false.

  As Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson wrote often and well about the university as society’s “seat of vital memory,” an “organ of recollection” for the transmission of the best traditions. He regarded education as a conserving enterprise, a way of making young people artificially “old” by steeping them in seasoned ideas. “We seek to set them securely forward at the point at which the mind of the race has definitely arrived, and save them the trouble of attempting the journey over again,” Wilson said. “We are in danger of losing our identity and becoming infantile in every generation.… We stand dismayed to find ourselves growing no older, always as young as the information of our most numerous voters.… The past is discredited among them, because they played no part in choosing it.”14 Hence American society needs to take seriously the unending political task of recapturing the past through the cultivation of memories. Nations are naturally forgetful, and democracy makes them more so. Democracy’s insistent message is that all arrangements rest on opinion, so democracies are disposed to focus on the fluidity of the present. The capital of the American democracy, Washington, is a city of frequent comings and goings and many short leases, and is so busy trying to design the future it has little energy left over for learning about, or from, its past.

  A utopian tendency, or at least a penchant for perfectionism, was present at the creation of Western political philosophy. In his Republic, Plato held out the hope that the more perfectly future generations are educated, the more perfect life would be. America’s Founders aimed not for perfection but for the humble attribute of happiness. It is well to distinguish, as the Founders did, between freedom and liberty. A hawk is free, as is a salmon, in that they may go and do as they are inclined. Liberty, however, is reserved to human beings, who are thinking creatures who can choose how they shall be inclined. Reasoning about the proper use of freedom is liberty in practice. Regarding individual behavior, the Founders were moral realists in the sense that they thought moral truths to be objective realities. They believed that such truths could be apprehended by ordinary minds that are neither clouded by superstition nor addled by passion, and that the surest route to happiness was to live in conformity with these truths. If, Locke asked, the mind is a “white paper void of all characters, without any ideas,” how then is it “furnished”? “To this I answer, in a word, from experience.”15 From Locke’s question and his epistemology came America’s one-word answer: Education.

  In a 1790 essay “On the Education of Youth in America,” Noah Webster said, “As soon as [a child] opens his lips…he should lisp the praise of liberty.”16 Forty-eight years later, Lincoln, in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, said, “Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap.”17 Nothing is more American than the belief that the Republic’s safety depends on beginning early with education’s potent mission. In its short life after the Revolution, the Continental Congress was, because of limitations imposed by the Articles of Confederation, largely condemned to futility. But it had one great accomplishment, the Northwest Ordinance, which included a federal subsidy for primary and secondary education. The subsidy was the requirement that a portion of each township be reserved for the maintenance of public schools. Horace Mann was an impressionable innocent abroad when he became, as many later progressives would be, smitten by things German. Prussia’s approach to primary and secondary education intensified his very American confidence in education’s improving powers: “Men are cast-iron; but children are wax.”18 Presumably, then, adults will be durable (“cast-iron”) versions of whatever the education system made of them when they were young and malleable.

  THE VIRTUE OF SOCIAL INERTIA

  Politics, properly understood, is a vast field of study and reflection: It concerns how we ought to live in our social, collective capacities. Therefore it is always true that everything of importance, from literature to recreation, is in some sense pertinent to politics. It is, however, a non sequitur to conclude that politics is, always and everywhere, of paramount importance, and hence everything, including education, should be refracted through the prism of politics. The point of politics is the promotion of human flourishing. The excitement of political philosophy, from Plato to the present, and the excitement of politics in every age, is in the clash of different convictions about what flourishing is and how best to achieve it. The American polity is grounded in the belief that freedom is the foundational value, and that freedom consists of protected spheres for free choosing by individuals. The problem, however, is this: Individuals can choose to satisfy their appetites, but their appetites can constrain their freedom to choose. If freedom is, among other things, freedom from the bondage of appetites and passions—from what Yuval Levin calls “inner anarchy”—then the American project depends on pre- or extra-political arrangements for disciplined living.19 Therefore, although the right to freedom exists prior to government, it depends for its enjoyment on institutions of civil society and government. Hence statecraft is, inescapably, soulcraft, because education is, too.

  The fundamental function of liberal education still should be the transmission of the basic truths of the arts and sciences in order to enable students to become critical and independent thinkers. If, however, you believe, as many progressives do, that history’s trajectory is knowable, and that it is known by an identifiable clerisy, then you are also apt to believe that the means of facilitating history’s unfolding are known or knowable. If so, the purpose of higher education is to produce students who can take their place in history’s vanguard, enabling it to reach its foreordained destination more quickly and smoothly than it otherwise would. Hence John Dewey, the foremost theorist of progressive education, said that “every teacher” should be considered “a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.” The devil is in Dewey’s adjectives, “proper” and “right.” If you postulate that teachers are custodians of correct politics, it is then natural to define education as Dewey did, as “a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness.”20 Once the cultivation of one proper and right consciousness is declared the government’s task, and to be administered through public education, a particular uniformity of thought becomes prescriptive.

  Primary and secondary education should, however, have the more mundane and useful aim of equipping everyone with the literacy, numeracy, and civic and historical information needed for remunerative work and responsible citizenship. And K through twelve education should prepare some—perhaps a majority, perhaps not—for higher education, which should have among its many objectives three that are paramount. It should teach students how to praise, by teaching them the standards by which we decide that a few things are, and most things are not, especially praiseworthy. It should give students a lively
sense of historical contingencies. And it should help students develop a talent for pessimism.

  A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is and ought to be strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past. The American Republic is a woven figure that should be disinclined to unravel the threads that connect it to its antecedents. There was a time when education—including and especially what is too complacently called higher education—was considered primarily an exercise in transmission. Its essential purpose was to pass from the past to the future the creative residue of the centuries—what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”21 The modern revolution in higher education has been its embrace of a contrary mission of liberation. This is the mission of emancipating young people from ideas and norms formed in, and by, an imperfect past. This is to be accomplished, in part, by inoculating students with historicism, which is the principle that every principle is the product of a historical context and is no more durable or valuable than the context was or is.

  One result of this inoculation is a constantly renewed cohort of young people for whom tolerance is the sovereign virtue because all other things that are considered virtues are products of contingent conditions and therefore lack solid philosophic foundations. But this tolerance tends to become a fierce intolerance of attempts to assert that there are such foundations. The result is an educated class inarticulate about, because unconvinced of, the foundational premises of the limited government essential for an open society.