The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  In 1910, forty remarkably peaceful years after the Franco-Prussian War, Norman Angell, a British economist, wrote and paid for the publication of a book that would become one of the first international best-sellers. His cost-benefit analysis in The Grand Illusion was that nations could no longer benefit from war, so there would never be another one. Wishes are potent fathers of thoughts, so Angell’s thought caught on. In 1913, the president of Stanford University said, “The great war of Europe, ever threatening…never will come…The bankers will not find the money for such a fight, the industries will not maintain it.”27 This was a version of a theory put into disappointing practice by President Jefferson, who tried to use a trade embargo to bring the dogs of war to heel. Republics, he and others hoped, would have a distinctive diplomacy based not on the sword but on the ledger book. The assumption was that when goods are free to cross borders, armies will not cross them because commercial interests will guarantee a concert of interests in tranquility. Commerce, once considered not conducive to virtue, came to be considered indispensable to modern virtue. But the ledger book proved to be no match for human atavism.

  In 1914, Rupert Brooke spoke for many when he thanked God for the outbreak of war, rejoicing in it as an awakening from “a world grown old and cold and weary.” He relished war as a cleansing, invigorating experience for young men “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.”28 However, the nations that turned wearily to the Second World War had read All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and seen the movie of it. They had read Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That, and other literary works conveying the taste of ashes from the last war. Airplanes were supposed to make war obsolete by encouraging travel and hence (non sequitur alert) understanding. Broadcasting—radio, then television, then satellite distribution of content—supposedly would make everyone agreeably cosmopolitan. An American media guru has said that because of the Internet, future children “are not going to know what nationalism is.”29

  The study of medicine begins, in a sense, with the study of death. The study of modern politics should begin with the study of Hitler. Serious interest in Hitler is related to this fact: His regime was founded at least in part in the heart as well as on the neck of a great civilized nation. The regime was run, as all large states are, by civil servants whose principal attributes were what normally are called virtues—patriotism, a sense of duty, regularity. Men who would never cheat at cards or condone adultery by a fellow civil servant condoned hitherto unimagined evils. As Thomas the Cynic says in Ignazio Silone’s The School for Dictators: “No dictator has ever had trouble finding civil servants.”30 Hitler was the founder of a secular religion, and was tireless in performing priestly functions at events like the Nuremberg rallies, with holy relics like the “Blood Flag” from the attempted Munich Putsch of 1923. His rise to power was a meeting of the man and the moment, but his perverse genius was in seeing an aching emptiness in people that his passion could fill. And if you accept the notion that freedom is just the absence of restraints, then Hitler was a radically free man, a man operating on society from outside, unrestrained by any scruples or ties of affection. He is evidence against the theory that only vast, impersonal forces, and not individuals, can shake the world.

  Hitler, who was not German, was like Stalin, who was not Russian, and Napoleon, who was not French. Hitler was a complete outsider, outside all restraints grounded in principles or affections. He had a megalomaniac’s estimate of the importance of his undertakings: When planning to invade England he said: “Eight hours of night in favorable weather would decide the fate of the universe.”31 He fused megalomania with demented superstitions. When he sent Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Moscow in August 1939 to sign the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, he sent along his personal photographer with instructions to obtain close-ups of Stalin’s earlobes because Hitler wondered whether Stalin had Jewish blood and wanted to see if his earlobes were “ingrown and Jewish, or separate and Aryan.”32

  Attempts to explain Hitler began with the idea that he was unfathomable, a lunatic “Teppichfresser” (carpet chewer). The comforting theory was that no theory can explain Hitler because he was inexplicable, a monster, a phenomenon without precedent or portent. In 1996, however, Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust argued that the explanation for the genocide was acculturation—centuries of German conditioning by the single idea of “eliminationist antisemitism.”33 Goldhagen’s cognitive determinism reduced Hitler to a mere catalyst who unleashed a sick society’s cultural latency. This drew a rejoinder from Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men (1992), a study of middle-aged German conscripts who became consenting participants in mass-murder police battalions in Poland. Browning noted that protracted socialization—centuries of conditioning—could not explain the Khmer Rouge’s murder of millions of Cambodians, or the slaughter of millions of Chinese during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As the philosopher John Doris has written, “It takes a lot of people to kill…six million…human beings, and there just aren’t enough monsters to go around. Unfortunately, it does not take a monster to do monstrous things.”34

  Corporal Hitler was decorated for bravery at the recommendation of a Jewish officer, but was never promoted because another officer said “we could discover no leadership qualities in him.”35 Until he was thirty he never gave a speech or joined a party, and when he did join one its membership was so small it could meet in a beer hall. Thirteen years later, Hitler led this party’s conquest of Europe’s most modern state. His first public office was Germany’s chancellorship. He was an anti-democratic populist. Some politicians sail with the wind. Others tack into the wind. Hitler raised the wind and blew the masses about like so much dust. Like four other leaders of the war in the European theater—Stalin, FDR, Churchill, and de Gaulle—Hitler neither knew nor cared much about economics. Which helps to explain why they were leaders: They did not believe in the reality of homo economicus—economic man, a creature moved primarily by calculations about material matters.

  There is much truth in, but something vital missing from, Modris Eksteins’ understanding of Nazism: “It was not the substance—there was no substance to the frantic neurotic tirades—that allowed the party to survive and later to grow. It was the style and the mood. It was above all the theater, the vulgar ‘art,’ the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street. It was the provocation, the excitement, the frisson that Nazism was able to provide, in the brawling, the sweating, the singing, the saluting. Nazism, whether one wore brass knuckles and carried a rubber hose or simply played along vicariously, beating up communists and Jews in one’s mind, was action. Nazism was involvement. Nazism was not a party; Nazism was an event.”36 William James, who died in 1910, would have understood. “Man lives by habits indeed,” wrote James, “but what he lives for is thrills and excitement. The only relief from habit’s tediousness is periodical excitement.”37 And the only participatory excitement more available to the masses than immersion in a mass movement on the march through city streets is marching off to war.

  Mankind’s modern political history might be the story of a grim paradox: The attempts, from Locke through the American Founding, to make politics safe might have made it dangerous. Attempts to drain politics of what made it volatile might have made it susceptible to new forms of destabilizing discontents. The homogenization of humanity by the many forces of modernity might have bred a troubling backlash of assertive particularities. Humanity retains a hankering for membership in tribes or nations or tribal nations. The desire for collective identity, meaning, and excitement is a desire to escape from the “iron cage” that Max Weber foresaw imprisoning modern people in a disenchanted world: “With the progress of science and technology, man has stopped believing in magic powers, in spirits and demons; he has lost his sense of prophecy and, above all, his sense of the sacred. Reality has become dreary, flat a
nd utilitarian, leaving a great void in the souls of men which they seek to fill by furious activity and through various devices and substitutes.”38 As nature abhors a vacuum, some souls abhor the absence of a struggle—kampf, in German—into which they can immerse themselves.

  The sociologist Robert Nisbet understood this. “Among the forces that have shaped human behavior, boredom is one of the most insistent and universal.” Wars, famines, pestilences, and economic convulsions are easier to quantify, which is an important reason why they get more attention from historians and social scientists. Aristotle defined man as a language-using creature, but Nisbet stressed a different attribute: “Man is apparently unique in his capacity of boredom.” Perhaps this is because humans’ central nervous systems evolved to enhance the survival of beings who needed to be vigilant and aggressive. If so, it is not surprising that people are susceptible to the monotony and tedium of orderly, peaceful societies and the repetitive routines of work. Nisbet notes that although America’s Civil War was ghastly in its slaughter, primitive medicine, and epidemic diseases, “there was no end to the lines of young men fleeing the deadly monotony of farm and village for enlistment under one banner or the other.” Many of the men mustered out of the German army in 1919 did not miss the mud and lice and rats of the trenches, but were nostalgic about the brotherhood and sense of a great endeavor. Given the continuing attractions of political and religious excitements, the world could benefit from what Nisbet called a “sociology of boredom.”39

  Boredom can be dispelled by intellectual intoxication, by the excitement of embracing a comprehensive, universally valid explanation of everything. The largest and most lethal eruptions of irrationality have occurred in the name of reason. The Soviet Union made mincemeat of scores of millions of lives in the name of a “scientific socialism” that purported to explain the economic motor of history’s trajectory. The National Socialists went on a rampage of military expansion and industrialized murder in the name of elaborate racial theories that purported to explain what they supposed to be the biological dynamics of history. The mountains of corpses from the Gulag and the Final Solution (this locution reeked of calm reasoning: the project addressed a problem to be solved) were monuments to the extravagant aspirations entertained by people whose smatterings of education sufficed only to make them susceptible to the radicalism of persons with one big idea. Armies in the service of these two ideas collided at Stalingrad, Kursk, and elsewhere, causing the death of National Socialism and delaying for almost half a century the death of “scientific socialism.”

  Yet in the debris-strewn wake of all this, there persists a strain of invincible innocence in the American approach to the world. When Serbians took hostages from UN personnel in Bosnia and chained them to military targets as human shields, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher was puzzled: “It’s really not part of any reasonable struggle that might be going on there.”40 The United States is a commercial republic where the modes of reasoning used by business people and lawyers, like Warren Christopher, are considered normal and sufficient. Business people, however, like economists, think in terms of rational behavior models. In international relations, cost-benefit analyses are difficult, and even where they are possible they are often rendered irrelevant by animal spirits, national atavisms, and ideological frenzies. Lawyers regard a negotiated outcome as the normal form of conflict resolution, and winning is measured in adjustments at the margins of disputes. Relations between adversarial nations are rarely if ever so mild. A capitalist country, where one person’s gain usually profits another, is apt to underestimate the extent to which the game of nations can be a zero-sum game in which one nation’s gain is another’s symmetrical loss.

  It was possible to hope, and many intelligent people did hope, that as weapons became worse, the world would, of necessity, become tamer. In a sense, it has. Since history’s most destructive war ended with an atomic thunderclap, there has been no global war, no war between great powers. But war evolves and persists. Observers of the battle of Ravenna in 1512, the first battle decided by an artillery barrage, considered it mass destruction when one cannonball claimed thirty-three casualties. A year later, at Novara, also in Italy, cannon killed 700 in three minutes. When, in 1784, General Henry Shrapnel developed the first exploding artillery shell containing subprojectiles, “mass destruction” became routine. At least it was massive compared to the killing of Homeric warfare, killing with edged weapons and muscle power, before war was dominated by the chemical energy of explosives. On April 5, 1585, a Dutch ship named Hope, packed to the gunnels with explosives, was set adrift to collide with a pontoon bridge packed with Spanish troops. The Spaniards thought it was just a fire ship. It was a time bomb. It may have caused 2,000 casualties when it exploded with the loudest man-made noise up to that point. It certainly produced the largest number of casualties inflicted by a single weapon up to that time. By 1864, under General William Tecumseh Sherman, total war meant industrialism, conscription, and tactics that blurred the distinction between combatants and noncombatants by attacking the farms, factories, and transportation on which modern armies depend. By the 1940s, the fury of total war had grown exponentially because of three additional ingredients: the modern state’s uses of bureaucracy, propaganda, and especially forced-draft science.

  In 1918, Ernest Rutherford, a physicist, missed a meeting of experts advising the British government on anti-submarine warfare. When criticized, he replied: “I have been engaged in experiments which suggest that the atom can be artificially disintegrated. If this is true, it is of far greater importance than a war.”41 In an astonishing few years, while the mass of men were preoccupied with unstable currencies, societies, and politicians, a few dozen scientists demonstrated the annihilating instability of matter itself. Einstein had postulated the equivalence of matter and energy; other scientists proved this by transforming matter into energy. The scientists who built the bomb were understandably fond of Einstein’s aphorism that the world has more to fear from bad politics than from bad physics. It is, however, important to note that science usually is the subservient partner in a marriage between science and the modern state. This relationship was tidily summarized in an incident in the New Mexico desert the morning the atomic age dawned. A scientist lamented that the unexpected violence of the explosion had destroyed his measuring instruments. A general soothed him: “If the instruments couldn’t stand it, the bang must have been a pretty big one. And that, after all, is what we wanted to know.”42

  The atomic age, which began in secret in that desert at dawn July 16, 1945, announced itself twenty-one days later when the Enola Gay’s bomb bay door opened. The bomb’s fuse—incorporating the lens David Greenglass had sketched for the Rosenbergs’ spy ring—unleashed neutrons that turned twenty-two pounds of uranium into an explosion that occurred in one-tenth of a millionth of a second. The flight of the Enola Gay began, in a sense, in 1932 in Cambridge, England, in Cavendish Laboratory, when James Chadwick discovered the neutron, the key to penetrating the atom’s nucleus and unlocking energy from matter. As the Enola Gay approached Japan, the copilot was writing a letter to his parents. He wrote this sentence: “There will be a short intermission while we bomb our target.” Next, he wrote this in a wild hand: “My God.”43

  The government committee that had kept the secret of the bomb project (neither Admiral Chester Nimitz nor General Douglas MacArthur, the naval and army commanders in the Pacific theater, knew about the bomb until July) said it should be considered not just as a weapon but “in terms of a new relationship to the universe.”44 It would be extravagant to say the new technology of mass destruction has had such a transforming effect, spiritually or practically. Why should it have had? Conventional munitions on the ground at Verdun killed many more people than nuclear weapons have. The same was true at the Somme, seventeen years before the neutron was discovered.

  AMERICA’S PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY AND FOREIGN POLICY

  The first nation to possess nuclear weap
ons, and the only nation to have used them, is unique in other ways that are much more fundamentally important to its conduct in foreign policy. Technology is secondary to political philosophy. The United States, unique in the clarity of its founding moment and purposes, would inevitably be unique in its approach to international relations. Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato, which was notably popular in the American colonies—George Washington saw it many times—expresses an Enlightenment aspiration: