The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  The philosopher Tim Crane, writing about “religion from an atheist’s point of view,” sensibly distinguishes between attempts to find meaning in life and attempts to find the meaning of life as a whole. The former can be achieved by quotidian things and moments, from a baby’s smile to professional successes. The latter requires, or so billions of people think, religion, meaning belief in transcendence. This requires belief in some supernatural agency. Atheism is the disbelief in this. Agnosticism is the milder judgment that, as yet, not enough is known to speak with certainty about the existence of God. The philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if his atheism turned out to be mistaken and he found himself standing in front of the throne of God. Russell answered that he would say to God, “I’m terribly sorry, but you didn’t give us enough evidence.”86

  Christianity, especially, rests audaciously on confidence about evidence—on a series of assertions of historical facts, one of which is supreme. As Saint Paul said, “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” Religion involves more than a cosmology. Because religion involves the moral imperative of adjusting to its claims, there is a clear answer to the question with which this chapter began: What difference does it make if the stars “just happened” or “was made”? It makes a big difference for this reason: Not every moral code enjoining certain behavior is religious, but every religion has such a code. As Crane notes, the first of the Ten Commandments is the only one that is cosmological in that it concerns God’s existence. The other nine are about how we should behave, in worship and toward one another. This is why Durkheim was correct to say that one does not just believe in a religion, one belongs to it and lives it.87

  There is such a thing as a religious temperament. It involves the will to believe in order to assuage an ache. It rejects, it recoils from, the sense that contingency is everywhere and everything, that there is nothing beyond it. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind and within the passing flux of immediate things.”88 There is, however, a conservative sensibility that finds flux exhilarating, that is delighted rather than depressed by the idea that there is no beyond and that everything is contingent. A secular conservative sensibility, even a secular conservative aesthetic, finds beauty in the Darwinian view of the world, a beauty that is a close analogue to the conservative vision of a just society respectful of, and dependent on, spontaneous order. Darwin’s view has a lineage that traces to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, written nineteen centuries before Darwin introduced into the modern consciousness the idea that the world is propelled by creative contingencies and randomness. Historian Stephen Greenblatt presents an almost ecstatic sense of the liberation that comes from embracing this poetic—On the Nature of Things is a poem—idea:

  The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the gods or a crystalline sphere detached from our transient world. You are seeing the same material world of which you are a part and from whose elements you are made. There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited die off quickly. But nothing—from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days—lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.89

  The philosophic tradition that traces to Lucretius but flowered as the Renaissance ignited modernity is, as Greenblatt says, “incompatible with the cult of the gods and the cult of the state.” The vision of a world of atoms and void and constant motion is “a world not rendered insignificant but made more beautiful by its transience, its erotic energy, and its ceaseless change.” The turn away from supernatural beings and immaterial causes, and toward the understanding that “humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order”90—this turning away is a great emancipation from all restraints on inquiry. Inquiry, which is the engagement of an active mind with an endlessly interesting world, ranks high in the hierarchy of pleasures. There is such a hierarchy, and one purpose of philosophy is to define and defend it. Achieving the higher pleasures is a path to happiness, and enabling the pursuit of happiness is a stated purpose of the first modern nation.

  For Darwin, inquiring was happiness, but his inquiry forced him to face the fact that aspects of creation appalled him. In 1860, he confided in a letter to a friend: “I had no intention to write atheistically” but “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”91 What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759–1850): The ichneumon wasp inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, Kirby said, “gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect on which it preys!”92

  Darwin’s dismay about aspects of reality was profound. Nevertheless, at the conclusion of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote one of the most stirring sentences in English letters: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”93 Darwin, a cleric’s son, knew his King James Version of the Bible: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”94 Darwin chose to echo the evocative word “breathed.” He did not, however, choose to intimate what Scripture stipulates.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb, a scholar of both the American enlightenment that nourished the deism of many Founders and of Victorian culture, wrote: “Before-Darwin a bold spirit could be tempted to think of God as merely the custodian of the laws of nature. After-Darwin it took no great courage to think of the laws of nature as the custodians of the universe.”95 This was deism without the deity, which was not much of a change. Darwin’s life of steady intellectual heroism is a shining chapter in the human story and a rebuke to anyone who would assert that religious faith is indispensable to a life nobly lived. Darwin demonstrated that the absence of faith can be a source of virtue.

  So did Shakespeare. Imagine if Shakespeare could be brought back to contemplate what humanity has been taught by Einstein. Einstein could tell Shakespeare this: “When Falstaff slams a flagon of mead down on a table, the table, like the flagon—and like Falstaff, actually—is mostly space and electricity. Furthermore, matter—table, flagon, Falstaff—is a form of energy. Now, Mr. Shakespeare, what was all that about man and dust?”

  Let the man who used words better than anyone else ever has have the last word here.

  What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.96

  This was not Shakespeare’s only mention of man and dust:

  To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

  C
reeps in this petty pace from day to day

  To the last syllable of recorded time,

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more: it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.97

  Shakespeare was expressing, with almost furious candor, his basic sense of the human condition. He was, as the critic Kenneth Clark said, the first “supremely great poet to have been without a religious belief, even without the humanist’s belief in man.” Clark asked: “Who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of human life.” Nevertheless, Shakespeare wrote. He wrote with a passion that would have been not just incongruous but impossible for someone who really felt the meaninglessness of everything. Surely it would be more accurate to say that Shakespeare believed that the meaning of life does not derive from any source beyond itself. Shakespeare’s greatness is indeed related to the fact that he presented the multifaceted human condition without reference to transcendence but also without immobilizing despair. The nobility, humor, and pathos presented in his plays and poems testify to his fervent belief that somehow the way we behave matters, even if—or perhaps it matters especially because—we live beneath a blank sky. “I feel,” said Clark of Shakespeare, “that the human mind has gained a new greatness by outstaring this emptiness.”98

  Here the conservative sensibility protests: Why speak of emptiness when our world is still filled with the astonishments, including the worlds Shakespeare created and peopled? Given the beauty that art can conjure into existence, and the ethical excellence and political nobility that man, “this quintessence of dust,” can attain, what difference does it make if the sky is blank? Besides, as Huck and Jim saw there on their raft, the sky is not blank. It is flecked with stars that twinkle prettily whether they “was made” or “just happened.”

  Chapter 10

  BORNE BACK

  The Quest for a Useable Past

  In the old days, in blizzardy weather, we used to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it from shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal, family and cultural chores to do, I think we had better rig up such a line between past and present.

  Wallace Stegner1

  We who came to social consciousness in the 1950s acquired, with every breath, the sense of America’s vigor, the “glittering in the veins” and the “crush of strength” that the poet Wallace Stevens sensed one night in 1954 on the Connecticut Turnpike.2 It is truly said that ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. America has not done badly in the struggle to achieve that elusive balance of freedom and security that characterizes a society in which the strong may freely strive and the weak need not feel fear. Most Americans live lives as soft as soufflés, insulated from terrors—of nature, of disease, of criminality—that were daily accompaniments of all generations until recent ones. There are, however, dangerous currents to beat on against, currents carrying us away from what should be America’s normative and useable past.

  In the first paragraph of the first Federalist Paper, Alexander Hamilton wrote that Americans would, by their “conduct and example,” answer the question of “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”3 In the last paragraph of the eighty-fifth and final Federalist Paper Hamilton quotes the “solid and ingenious” David Hume: “To balance a large state or society whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it.” Hume meant that no single genius could do so, and that even when “the judgments of many” are united in the work, reason and reflection will not suffice: “Experience must guide their labour: Time must bring it to perfection: And the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they inevitably fall into, in their first trials and experiments.” Time and inconveniences continue to shape Americans’ governance by “reason and reflection,” and ever will.4 So there will always be laurels to be won by those who practice statecraft.

  Speaking in 1825 at the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument, Daniel Webster said: “We can win no laurels in a war for independence. Earlier and worthier hands have gathered them all. Nor are there places for us by the side of Solon, and Alfred, and other founders of states. Our fathers have filled them. But there remains to us the great duty of defense and preservation.”5 Thirty-five years later, this duty would prove to be at least as testing as the challenges of establishing America’s independence and founding its government. Indeed, just thirteen years after Webster spoke, the man who would preside over the preservation of the union in its gravest crisis spoke to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. He expressed a kind of regret that the great “race of ancestors” had created a “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” and that the task of Abraham Lincoln’s generation was only “to transmit these.” Even in 1838, however, he discerned how the task of transmission might require Herculean exertions from heroic leadership because “the silent artillery of time” is constantly doing its destructive work.6 So steps must be constantly taken to spike that artillery by repairing the edifice the Founders bequeathed to us.

  The truly conservative sensibility is always alert to the fact that time is, as Cervantes said, the “devourer and destroyer of all things.”7 J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who directed the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, studied Sanskrit so he could read the Bhagavad Gita. When at 5:29 and 45 seconds on the morning of July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, he witnessed the first atomic explosion, he remembered a line from the Hindu classic: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”8 But this line does not appear in most English translations of the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word Oppenheimer translated as “death” is usually translated as “time.” For example, the Penguin Classics edition renders the line as: “I am all-powerful Time, which destroys all things.”9 Time, unlike a nuclear explosion, does damage slowly. But it can do it thoroughly. Thus for Lincoln the fragility of America’s political arrangement was a constant preoccupation. Referring to slavery, he warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”10 And at Gettysburg he interpreted the Civil War as a test of whether a nation dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal” can “long endure.” But, then, worries about the dangers of social decay and the perishable nature of all institutions are as old as Plato’s Republic, which means they are as old as Western political philosophy. It is very American to worry about whether the kind of government created by the Founders might “perish from the Earth.”11 It also is prudent.

  This is a chastening axiom: All rising is by a winding staircase. But the axiom is perhaps insufficiently chastening: One can descend a winding staircase. The Whig theory of history, according to Irving Kristol, who was skeptical of it but scrupulous in defining it, is that history “is the record of the struggle between Freedom and Authority, Reason and Prejudice, Left and Right, with the victory of the former assured by the growing preponderance among mankind of rational opinions and rational conduct.”12 So the Whig theory is not only content about the past and cheerful about the future, it is flattering to the present. Kristol’s friend, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was no Whig. “The lively sense that liberals have of the possibility of progress,” Moynihan said, “is matched by a conservative sense of the possibility of decline. Both concerns need attending.”13 It is, however, the possibility of decline that most needs attention because people flinch from it as powerfully as they are drawn to promises of progress.

  Many thoughtful Americans worry that the Republic peaked a
little early, and has been trundling downhill since Bunker Hill. One Founder fixed upon posterity a preemptively disapproving squint. George Washington said: “The foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy age of ignorance and superstition, but an epocha when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.… At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a nation, and if their citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.”14 Seventy years later, in 1852, a gloomy Ralph Waldo Emerson was haunted by the portrait of Washington hanging in his dining room: “I cannot keep my eyes off of it…the heavy, leaden eyes turn on you, as the eyes of an ox in a pasture. And the mouth has a gravity and depth of quiet, as if this man had absorbed all the serenity of America, and left none for his restless, rickety, hysterical countrymen.”15 Leaving aside the question of whether Washington’s grave and quiet mouth expressed character or the tortures of wooden false teeth, we know what Emerson meant. This book is, among other things, a summons to pessimism. What is needed now, and what it is especially incumbent on conservatives to provide, is intelligent pessimism that is more than a mere mood. It should be a mentality grounded in a philosophic tradition that has a distinguished pedigree, and that is validated by abundant historical evidence for this proposition: Nothing lasts.