The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  Many educators in the humanities—not in, say, engineering: the bridges and dams would collapse—have embraced epistemological skepticism, even epistemological nihilism, believing that the past is inaccessible because it is impossible to be objective about it, or about anything else. If our understanding of the present, too, is a “cultural construct,” merely a reflection of contemporary social forces and dominances, then our understanding of the past must be even more attenuated. The postmodernists’ revolution in historiography has been to insist that the past, too, is “constructed.” Actually, the past deserves respect, not because it is a record of successes that reproaches our imperfect present, but because it is a record of attempts to do what we are trying to do: respond reasonably to the more or less intractable circumstances of the human condition.

  Unfortunately, the new historians resemble literary critics who displace authors in order to explain what the particular authors were “really” doing when they wrote, whether the authors knew it or not. The new history elevates the historian to the role—half priest, half artist—of explaining history’s meaning to those who obdurately persist in thinking that politics matter greatly. If political events are mere “epiphenomena,” then politics loses its history-shaping grandeur, and ordinary people lose the dignity that attaches to participation in the human pageant. If, as the new historians insist, social “structures” and impersonal “forces” make both individuals and history, then individuality and freedom are discounted. When historians deny that a preeminent few have had disproportionate impacts on the destinies of the many, these historians also deny people’s ability to rise above determinism and modify their lives’ trajectories. Thus does the new historians’ anti-elitism breed fatalism about the very possibility of leadership. This style of history abolishes man as a political animal who uses reason and responds to rhetoric to seek fulfillment in civic life. If you discount the importance of individuals and their utterances—their choices, and the rhetoric that justifies and elicits support for them—you discount the importance, and perhaps even the possibility, of democracy, a regime of persuasion.

  Two converging and reinforcing intellectual tendencies have had demoralizing and de-moralizing effects on the way we understand history. This matters because the way we think about the past conditions how we act—or do not act—to shape the future. The first tendency has blurred the picture of human beings as responsible, consequential actors in history. The second tendency involves painting mankind’s story without the bright primary colors of personal greatness. Some say that people should outgrow the desire for, or belief in, heroes because only an unhappy nation needs heroes. But only an unusually fortunate nation can do without them. No democracy, least of all a diverse, continental democracy, should want to do without those rare figures who capture and condense in their careers a moment, a movement, an idea. The idea of heroes makes democracies uneasy. Democracies want to disperse credit for achievement and to believe that virtue and vision well up spontaneously and broadly from the common people. Still, even unenthralled democracies should have heroes. One of today’s most unattractive aspects is the absence of sympathy, affection, and respect for the people who struggled with the problems of the recent past. And there is something awfully small about someone who cannot admit that anyone else was exceptionally large. As has been said, if no man is a hero to his valet, that is not because no men are heroes, but because all valets are valets.

  Ordinary people think that extraordinary princes and presidents, heroes and villains have been event-making individuals. But in the hands of the new history, such individuals dissolve into mere manifestations of “deeper” forces. It is perverse that such writing of history flourishes after a century so shaped by event-makers—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Reagan. But implausibility is a price the new historians gladly pay for the ideological correctness that, not coincidentally, enhances their status as decipherers of things that supposedly are beyond the ken of persons outside the clerisy. If, as the new historians insist, social “structures” and impersonal “forces” make history, then it is not surprising that students turn away from history taught without the drama of autonomous individuals moved by reason and conviction and the rhetoric that appeals to the better angels of their natures. Rhetoric is systematic eloquence that, at its best, does not induce irrationality; rather, it leavens reason, fusing passion to persuasion. And it influences how history is made.

  A nation needs, and the American nation has had, many heroes. It also has had villains, and examining the history of its villainy, in the light of the national principles that define villainy, is constructive. So there should be an unblinking focus on the nation’s failures to live up to its commitments. In this regard, and at this time, it is necessary, particularly after America’s serial disappointments with projects of nation-building abroad, to distinguish between nation-building and state-building. As Francis Fukuyama says, state-building requires the creation of institutions—agencies, militaries, bureaucracies—as tangible as the buildings that house them. Nation-building requires the creation of a national identity, which is the stuff of intangibles such as traditions, memories, and cultural patrimonies such as literature, poetry, music, and architecture. State-building is necessarily done from the commanding heights of society; nation-building is often largely a matter of ferment from a society’s loam. A sense of national identity is a prerequisite for social cohesion, and a sense of national identity becomes both more urgent and more elusive because of forces loosed by modernity—such as geographic and social mobility, attenuated familial and community attachments, diluted religious identities, occupational mobility, and different levels of education. The same is true of personal identity. As Fukuyama says, “In agrarian societies, a person’s important life choices—where to live, what to do for a living, what religion to practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by the surrounding tribe, village, or caste. Individuals consequently did not spend a lot of time sitting around asking themselves, ‘Who am I, really?’”61 Hence, in modern urbanized societies, national identities become components of personal identities, more than they did in agrarian societies.

  To some extent—the extent varies widely by nations’ histories—national identity is something deliberately cultivated. Ernest Renan, an early student of nationalism, said that this cultivation can require historical amnesia, or even the deliberate promotion of misunderstanding. State-building always involves unlovely things, including violence. As Fukuyama says, the United States was not built on a hitherto unpopulated continent. The state, whose identity “is based on principles of equality, individual rights, and democracy,” was built in part by the violent displacement of indigenous inhabitants.62 Nation-building, which never ends, neither requires nor should it encourage amnesia regarding the oppressiveness, lawlessness, and violence attendant on state-building. This is especially so in the United States, where the process of state-building should be judged against the severe principles that define this creedal nation’s identity. The gross departures from those principles—slavery, semi-genocide against Native Americans, imperialism—were not just grotesque behaviors, they were particularly appalling because they were apostasies. America not only knew better than to do what it did, it was simultaneously proclaiming better as it did what it did. Therefore, giving unsparing attention to America’s lapses from its principles serves to imbue those principles with fresh relevance and vitality.

  SAVORING CONTINGENCY AND A TALENT FOR PESSIMISM

  Edna St. Vincent Millay was right about what to read but wrong about what to think about it:

  Read history: so learn your place in Time;

  And go to sleep: all this was done before.63

  Actually, one reason to read history is to know how little has generally been known about what was coming next. Which is to say, reading history is a cure for historicism. Nothing is as distinctively modern, and as demoralizing, as the sense that change is autonomous. Thus nothing
is such fun as a demonstration that a solitary figure can make a difference, that history is a realm of surprise, not of necessity. Hence the exhilaration of well-taught history, which is an education in contingency.

  Suppose the car had hit the pedestrian slightly harder. What car? The one on Fifth Avenue the evening of December 13, 1931, when an English politician on a lecture tour momentarily forgot the American rules of the road and looked the wrong way when stepping into the street. Winston Churchill might have died. Then, perhaps in 1940 or 1941, a prime minister less resolute and inspiriting than Churchill might have chosen to come to terms with Germany before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Imagine the hegemony of a National Socialist Germany stretching across the Eurasian landmass from Korea to Calais. Or suppose Robert E. Lee had occupied Cemetery Hill on the first night at Gettysburg, which he might have done if Stonewall Jackson had not been accidentally killed two months earlier by friendly fire from confused Confederate soldiers at Chancellorsville. The dynamic of the first three days of July 1863, in south central Pennsylvania would have been different. Lee might have prevailed there, and this might now be two nations. Actually, there might be lots of nations in the territory that was the Confederacy, because those fractious people would have improvidently established a weak central government and the right of secession. Or suppose the northeast wind blowing across New York Harbor had not suddenly turned into a southwest wind on the night of August 29, 1776, and that a thick fog had not rolled in the next day. There might never have been an independent United States for Lee to try to dismember. Those climatic changes facilitated the evacuation whereby George Washington and 10,000 soldiers—about half the entire Continental Army—escaped capture by the British after the Battle of Long Island.

  The study of history should be an immersion in the realities of contingencies. This immersion should lead to a talent for pessimism: Things can, and frequently do, go wrong. Pessimism can be, but need not be, a consequence of nihilism. Pessimism can be conjoined with, but is not necessarily, a theory of social decline. Pessimism does not entail fatalism. On the contrary, it is a form of activism, of perpetual wariness, born of historically informed realism. Pessimism, far from promoting passivity, should be a constant spur to political engagement. And pessimism, far from being a recipe for unhappiness, is an inoculation against innumerable optimisms that expose adherents to dashed hopes, bewilderment, disillusionment, and inertia.

  When grounded in philosophy, pessimism is much more than a mere frame of mind. This has been demonstrated by the philosopher Joshua Foa Dienstag, who has traced pessimism’s long pedigree in Western political philosophy. “In the twentieth century,” he writes, “pessimism has been the philosophy that dares not speak its name,” such has been the “imperialism of optimism.” Pessimism’s “animating principle” is “that time is an unshakable burden for human beings because it leads to the ultimate destruction of all things.” He argues that the widespread refusal to take pessimism seriously as an important thread in the fabric of intellectual history “reflects the continuing grip that ideas of progress retain on contemporary consciousness.”64 This does not mean that philosophic pessimism involves a denial of the fact of progress. Pessimism as a foundation of political wariness should, however, point to certain prudential conclusions about institutions.

  The “sudden ubiquity of mechanical clocks in the fourteenth century” presaged a modern consciousness of linear time and an emancipation from a sense of imprisonment in cyclical history. Thus the idea of linearity, combined with the simultaneous quickening of intellectuals’ appreciation of the cumulative nature of scientific inquiry, prepared humanity to embrace the idea of progress. Because modern philosophies of pessimism are, Dienstag says, critiques of the idea of progress, “pessimism, like progress, is a modern idea.” A depiction of the human condition that severs a linear understanding of history from the idea of progress is, as Dienstag says, “discomfiting” to human beings. They, unlike other animals, have a sense of time, and hence an awareness of death. No one lasts, and it is implausible that any social arrangements will last. The human capacity to reason gives us the power to manipulate aspects of the world, and this power has achieved wonderful ameliorative effects. But human beings, always in the grip of unfulfilled desires and destined for death, must come to terms with limitations. Optimists, disposed to expect continuous improvement, are set up for disappointment. As Dienstag says, “The Pessimist expects nothing.” Free from what one pessimist has called the “idolatry of tomorrow,” a pessimist has an “openness to the music of chance” which can give the pessimist a kind of “equanimity.” And a pessimist experiences “the vitalization of life that comes through the embrace of uncertainty.”65 Whirl is king? Excellent.

  Nietzsche thought that the pessimistic atheist, no longer seeking a “justification” of the world’s ills, “now takes delight in a world disorder without God, a world of chance.” For Nietzsche, as construed by Dienstag, “pessimism promotes an unblinkered examination of the world, and of the self, without built-in moral assumptions. From this perspective, it is actually optimism, relying on such assumptions, that inhibits truly free inquiry.” Such pessimism, says Dienstag, “looks toward the future, not with the expectation that better things are foreordained, but with a hope founded only on taking joy in the constant process of transformation and destruction that mark out the human condition.” We are fated to live in a condition of radical insecurity but also radical possibility. So, “pessimism envisions a democracy of moments” for individuals who can neither escape time nor be imprisoned by it.66 Pessimism is an immunization from the passivity bred by the sense that we are objects of events. Pessimism clarifies where satisfactions can be found in the real zone of sovereignty that individuals have.

  Such pessimism informs the conservative sensibility by eschewing “both progress and circularity as guiding temporal frames.” Pessimism “simply does not view philosophy as a technique for sweeping darkness from the universe and replacing it with light. Its goal, instead, is to teach us how to live with what we cannot eradicate, the limitations of death and time with which the universe saddles us.” Dienstag closes with Albert Camus’ judgment in The Myth of Sisyphus: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Happy because he attained the dignity of attempting. As Camus says in his essay, “The important thing…is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”67 The ailments of the human condition are chronic, so they must be constantly countered by prophylactic political and cultural institutions and measures. Otherwise, social regression is not just possible but probable.

  There has been stupendous progress, moral as well as material, in our time. It has been noted that until about 1900, most people lived half their lives with toothaches, but few people born after 1960 know what a toothache is. In some ways, moral progress has been as striking: Try explaining segregated buses to someone born after 1970. One reason politics has lost some of the sizzle of olden days is that many injustices have not merely been corrected, they have been relegated to the realm of unintelligible bygones. But beware belief in a ratchet of history that clicks only in the direction of improvement.

  Western political philosophy began with Plato’s search for ways to prevent history from being a story of cycles, with virtue decaying into tyranny. One admirable aspect of modernity is a preoccupation with history as linear, as a narrative infused with the drama of possibilities. History, properly taught, infuses people with a prerequisite for democratic life—an insouciant disrespect for bogus inevitabilities. Tomorrow the present will be history, the study of which is one long warning: Nothing is inevitable but change, and the permutations of possible disagreeable outcomes are infinite. So, prudence calls for auxiliary precautions, the beginning of which should be the restoration of education as a process of learning to praise, and to excavate from history knowledge of the praiseworthy, and of the cautionary, in the human story.

  Marx drew an unsentimental picture of our species enmeshed in history’s dialecti
c. Darwin drew an unsentimental picture of the childhood of our species. Freud drew an unsentimental picture of childhood. Each influenced thinking about the nature and meaning of politics and the political vocation. Some people worry that genetics will, too. They argue that individual autonomy is an illusion that will be steadily dispelled by the deciphering of supposedly controlling genetic codes, understood as the chemical engine of existence. If such scientific materialism reduces the self to chemistry, what then becomes of the aspiration of liberal societies—self-government by consent. If humanity is irreducibly embedded in the necessities of nature, then who, exactly, is doing the consenting? And what is the value, the moral imperative, of consent?

  The foundational premise of modernity, and of liberal democratic societies, is that individuals are self-constituting creatures who manufacture themselves in the ongoing process of making free choices, assembling their purposes from a vast cafeteria of possibilities. One of the greatest novels written in the most modern nation is about a person as a work of art. It is the cautionary story of Jay Gatsby’s self-creation. This nation’s answer to determinists of all stripes has always been that education can enable self-constituting individuals to freely choose the praiseworthy. It is a favorite jest of philosophers: “Of course I believe in free will—what choice do I have?” The more educated a person is about fine things and noble behavior, the more a person is equipped for the pleasures of intelligent praising, the more he or she is equipped for intelligent pessimism, a prerequisite for the defense of liberty.