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The Will of Will (George)
George F. Will demonstrating irony without self-awareness.
There is no better teacher, if you approach teachers with a critical eye, than George F. Will. Follow his wanderings, question his assumptions, and cut through his erudite, but ever regretful lamentations on the American condition. Will celebrates in quiet tones, and drones on, grief-stricken, about the frenzy overtaking our world in what appears to be well-reasoned tomes (calm, dull, professorial lecture rants?).
As he grows older, they become less and less a philosophy, and more a journey in new age discovery attracted to the latest bright and shiny object (or revelation). Crows flock to tin foil. But, Will is different. He is an Edgar Allen Poe style raven, or more precisely the poem, The Raven – elegiac. When he puts pen to paper or key to screen, his words flow with excerpts taken from great thinkers and ideas laid down centuries ago, all spattered with mourn. Will was born too late, too soon, or in the wrong place … or more than likely with the wrong contemporaries. He would probably say his observations are predicated on immutable truths, but if that were true, one would expect a longer life expectancy to the conclusions he draws. His ideas have the half-life of a US Army issue MRE (about five years). And like an MRE, after a few days of this diet, it doesn’t sit well on the stomach. Filling, not fulfilling.
However, Will’s wonderment and fascination with the world around him, and himself, makes for great instruction on the importance of endurance. Or, should we now call it sustainability? His credentials and brilliant writing though compelling, lack the integrity he so desperately projects with his classical rhetoric. One almost gets the feeling Will is a bit of a scold. You know, a “do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do” lefty academic caught in what may have been a past philosophical conversion or career choice that now entraps him in a vocation, Conservative. He seems to feel contrition about this as he keeps writing and rewriting the rules of Conservatism, what it means to be a Conservative, what Conservatives should be, what Conservatives should think. Try as he may, he is crying out for acceptance and adjusting his interpretation until the rest of us see his light.
While Will shares many of William F. Buckley’s skills of lofty elocution and writing, he lacks Buckley’s tempered-steel logic. Buckley rarely flipped. Will flips every few years or so. George F. Will’s contemporary, Charles Krauthammer, was less dramatic, more circumventing, clever, and yet, more consistent. As Will ages, he is becoming captured by his medium, mainstream media. He is following the path of David Brooks, sometimes brilliant, sometimes useful – but never for long. What this all means is if you follow George Will to his logical conclusion, you may soon find yourself alone. He is resolute, until he isn’t.
Which brings us to the topic of another political observer, Marianne Williamson. Williamson is a presidential candidate after having made a good living in the guru, self-improvement industry. Paul Mirengoff took the time to capture this new Rasputin/Billy Sunday/Joel Osteen variant and her groovy zeitgeist in his post on Powerline, Statecraft as Soulcraft. Like Will, Williamson’s solutions feel good because they ignore the obvious and most critical consequences.
To make his point, Mirengoff drew a comparison with George Will’s screed, “Statecraft as Soulcraft” (published in 1984 by, … ‘Written in Sand Publishers?’). This book called for government to promote the sociology of virtue. Apparently, Conservative Will feels the state needs to supplant or supplement the individual, family, and church, or perhaps he was unaware modern public schools were already being turned into Progressive indoctrination camps for a century or more (see, John Dewey). In the book, Will criticized the Founders for failing to grasp the need for a government bureau or board of ethics. Indeed, perhaps Conservative Will was thinking about past successes in state-sponsored ethics (e.g., efficiency of Il Duce, obedience to Emperor, love of Mao, or another of their contemporaries who built his personal power upon state-sponsored ethic). Nothing like a government to discern, instruct, and compel personal ethics. Achtung!
But here is the gem in bold print that appears in Mirengoff’s piece. This captures Will’s later reversal of his book’s hypothesis, because in 1984 he apparently held a less jaundiced view of government rather than an enduring philosophy reflecting that of the Founders. Call it a belated realization (great awakening?):
Will has since changed his mind (since publishing Statecraft as Soulcraft). He told Peter Wehner, that he now has a jaundiced view of government, and hence of assigning it the role of crafting souls. In addition, he now recognizes that the freedoms enshrined by the Founders are good for the soul. Our economic system, for example, doesn’t just make us better off. It makes us better by enforcing such virtues as thrift, industriousness, and the deferral of gratification.
The idea of statecraft as soulcraft never caught on with conservatives. It is fundamentally at odds with conservatism. It’s the modern left that wants the government to hector, or coerce, us into improving our souls. Indeed, the totalitarian left has long talked about creating a “new man”, more virtuous than actual men, and about overcoming “false consciousness.”
One might write the negative of the sentence in bold print above as “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
No one hated idle hands, or underemployed hands, more than Adam Smith. Adam Smith is viewed as the father of modern capitalism and trade theory or comparative advantage – the “economic system” referred to in the quote. However, Smith was more a social psychologist than economist or political theoretician. Smith wrote as much or more on religion, compassion, and morals, as he did about wealth. It should surprise no one that Smith was well-read by American leadership, who looked around and saw their lives as proof of Smith’s ideas (Wealth of Nations was published in 1776).
Smith observed how humans behave, how they respond to industrialization and urbanization, and how they might replace the things lost when life was no longer focused on the rural family and village. Smith believed when man was no longer encumbered by aristocratic or state-imposed serfdom, his nature was free to seek reward by his own labor. Rewards spurred industriousness which in turn motivated noble endeavor, frugality, self-improvement, and responsibility – and the demands of industrialization and urbanization created a need to relieve the boredom and tedium by seeking community and spirituality amongst a cohort. Thus, free markets removed the power of the ruling class, this freed men to create plenty, plenty allowed them to make the connections between their self-interest and their human sympathy for those around them. This later part was Smith’s most noble contribution.
Someone may want to tell Will, Smith’s formula of human motivation is what motivates him and presidential candidate Marianne Williamson to pitch secular ethics. And the state played no role.
Published in General
Very well thought and elucidated explanation, of sorts, for George Will the conservative scold. Why can’t we all just be nice, says George, as he is being drawn and quartered by his leftist soul mates. Thank you for this @jamesmadison. What good does it do to preach after the congregation has left the chapel? Who is listening to George Will anymore?
So kind of you to say so. Pity about George. Like David Brooks, such a talent turned apologist or whiner. Take your pick.
Very well said, @jamesmadison, but Will is still my favorite baseball writer. It seems clear that he loves the game.
Yes, I meant to give him credit for that. That is the one thing he does which is truly inspiring.
One wonders what kind of perspective Will might have had about the importance of the federal government if he had grown up on a cattle ranch, or had to scrabble out a living gutting salmon in Alaska, worked on an oil rig, or just tried to run a small business, even a bank, on the Main Street of a small town in fly-over country — before he launched into a career as a political columnist. I think after hobnobbing with world leaders in the rarified Beltway air lo, these many decades, one tends to lose sight of what really affects Americans and what the Left has been doing to tear apart basic values, communities, and institutions like the family and schools. The man needs a long, multi-year sabbatical from the swamp and should spend a few years talking to and getting to know Americans around the country.
Brian,
You may know this, but Will called for a larger government as a conservative perogative under Reagan. So his credentials as an intellect remain solid, but his credentials as a Conservative have been suspect for some time.
I would say he is like John McCain. A Conservative, sort of, kind of, when his fancies, his brilliance, his ego, and his desires on the Venn Diagram overlap with the “Conservative Circle.”
I believe it was the Founders and Framers intention that elected officials would serve just a few years in the capital to represent their constituents and then return to private life to their home districts or states to tend to their farm animals or their businesses. The nation might be better served if certain federal gov’t-parasites in the punditocracy carried out that same intention.
JM,
I think you are right on this target. Will, however erudite, may simply have lost contact with the reality of the situation. Marianne Williamson is a loon pure and simple. That she resonated with a large part of the Democratic Party faithful makes it all the more clear just how dangerous the left now is. They mistake cheap new age junk ideas for a rational policy that one might run a country with. George just doesn’t realize how dangerous this is.
Major Mashugannah (a technical term).
Regards,
Jim
Evening Brian and Madison,
Brian, I think you are spot on when you suggest that Will’s conservatism is of the cloistered kind, and having not actually worked in a world which resists your efforts to bring it under your control, Will has this blind arrogance about conservative philosophy and his understanding of the nature of man and government. His arrogance is galling, but even more so is his lack of curiosity about the average Joe, who isn’t interested in conservative philosophy but who is the heart of most communities.
There is a Will speech given at the Danforth center (I looked through all the listing but couldn’t find it) in which he noted that religion and the desire to live one’s faith as one saw fit has provided the foundation for the political freedom we have today. He wonders as nones (no religious belief) become the majority what will happen to our freedom. It is wonderful. I am stuck how someone so insightful can have so little curiosity about his fellow Americans. In VDH’s book “Fields Without Dreams” he says that he prefers and admires the men who are growers of food more than any of the academics he knows. One might imagine that to work in the world of construction, farming, factory work, one has to make allies and learn how to work in a team and get along with lots of types of folks, in doing this and working against the stubbornness of the material world, one learns about the nature of man better than through any philosophical understanding.
Yes, what you observe is without a doubt true. Read his interesting reset in his latest book (Conservative Sensibility), but for a lack of connection to the common man and a condescension at times, it makes a few good points. Then it loses it by going ga, ga, over the Declaration. This nation, the Second American Republic, was created in 1789, not 1776. Never confuse the two. The Declaration is a trap of words that are inspirational but easily conflated by the likes of Will or Williamson. In contrast, the Constitution is all business.
Evening Madison,
You have an excellent point, if we think that culture is the organic solution to man’s social needs as they appear on the ground, I don’t think it is a stretch to think that the Constitution is the solution to our needs for governmental structure. It seems to me that government at this level is more important than the ideas that one might hope would guide the government, that is engineeering our actual government is more difficult than imaging what a good government might look like.
I agree about Will and Brooks, though even back in the day when both were on the conservative side, mostly, they were pretty weak. In retrospect, it seems that they positioned themselves to be the token, tame, conservative/centrist on an essentially Left Wing panel show.
Both Will and Brooks always presented, at least to me, with a style and air that was somehow jarring. Perhaps “patrician” is the best word for it. There was a haughtiness to them, though not in an overtly hostile way. It was more as if they found themselves the ambassadors for the great unwashed Conservative masses, and while they recognized that their theoretical constitutents had better sense than the Leftys, they didn’t much like the way that we smelled, waved the flag, and drank Bud Light.
Patrician and, … condescending Ivy League.
Lincoln, with a lot of other 19th-century Americans, thought you needed to consult them both. The second sentence of the Declaration tells you what the business is about. It’s poetic only in the sense that it packs a whole lot of meaning (the guiding principles) into a few words*. Not parsing it carefully gets you Wilson, who thought the Declaration was 4th of July fol-de-rol. That makes it easier to see the Constitution as an antique eyesore the nation really needs to jack-hammer.
*OK,”pursuit of happiness” sounds airy-fairy to moderns, but it’s actually a better expression of Locke’s right to property, if you realize it means “possession and exploitation of property (including your own labor, goddamnit) as you see fit,” but just sounds better.
On the OP: what the hell, you can’t change your mind about stuff in 78 years?
Will’s take-down obituary of Billy Graham was despicable. Haven’t read anything by him since then. (And Roger Angell is a much better baseball writer… So was Jim Bouton.)
Will seems to have been co-opted by the lames he appears on shows with. In my new “I have a dream” version of reality, I have these geniuses spend a week laying cinderblock with masons and mason tenders, a week on, oh, let’s say, a dairy farm, up at oh-crap-thirty to bring the cows into the barn for milkin’ time, a week with an accountant during month financial close activities, a week at a nurses’ station at an ER in, oh, say, Baltimore, and….etc.
Why? Because none of the people opining on what’s “happening” in America actually live in it. They live in OtherLand. The Spaces Between The Atoms of Reality. Behind The Walls Where People Who Actually Work For A Living Cannot See Them.
Will’s cute. That’s great that he likes baseball. Congratulations, George, on liking a sport that’s liked and been liked by tens of millions for a century. There are more insightful baseball writers on most die-hard sports blogs than George Hairstyle Will.
Tired old men become old, and tired, and irrelevant, and becoming cantankerous is all that’s left after the realization that you no longer matter. In large part, the TV shows, the articles, probably didn’t matter that much, and Will’s stuff isn’t ever-lasting like a lot of Buckley’s stuff is – Buckley is evergreen, because he let the foundational elements guide his thoughts, versus Will’s take of using some foundational elements of philosophy, etc, and using them to prop up his notion of what should be, not what is.
That’s a good interpretation. I’ve puzzled about the guy for years. He can make good sense then blows it wildly. I figured he simply spent too much time in Washington and perhaps tried too hard to fit in.
One of the reasons I never tried to quit my day job to become an opinion writer is that I noticed from George Will’s columns that I learned something new every time. There was new information in them. In a lot of other opinion columns there is not. The world didn’t need another opinion writer who didn’t provide useful new information every time.
That was a long time ago and I don’t have Will’s columns easily available to me now, so haven’t read one in many years. Decades, even.
I knew that Will was also a TV commentator on the side, but I’ve never watched that kind of thing. Not an efficient use of time. I can read faster than I can listen.
This is a great discussion.
Not I. And not for many years. My disillusionment with Will precedes his Trump Derangement. Prefigures it, really.
So if you had a choice and could pick between the two documents, with the other being erased from memory, which one would you choose?
Respectfully, Scalia ignored the Declaration. I now realize why. Read it, trace the history of natural law and rights, and explain them to me with clarity without exceptions or elastic interpretations.
The Declaration was a fluffy, marketing tool aimed at King Louis and King Carlos of Spain to convince them the Colonies were now free and independent of the Crown. If these two regents accepted the principle that the Colonies were free and independent, and now locked in a war with another nation, and France and Spain aided the colonies by sending them essential gun powder and munitions, made war on Britain, or offered naval support, then these monarchs would not fomenting a civil war – which after the Treaty of Westphalia was verboten and a two edged sword.
The Declaration’s introduction was written to convince reluctant colonists to accept the reasons for the separation as their inviolable entitlement due to the grievous deprivation of freedom by the Crown and thus worth enduring hardship and death (most Colonists were neutral to negative). But the real focus was and remains, getting France and Spain to pin down the British navy and military in a costly war while relying on a small, inferior American force to harass them into fatigue and submission. Do that and win, and win over the recalcitrant.
By the way, the Constitution allows us to change its scope, rules and interpretation – and did so after 78 years on several occasions, most notably the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment. The Declaration, on the other hand, was a one-off, special purpose document that was written for a different purpose and can be easily manipulated, especially when read out of context or worse, by simply excerpting “life, liberty and the pursuit of
good feelingshappiness.”So true! As I wrote of Will (and Brooks), “sometimes brilliant, sometimes useful, but never for long.”
Yep, we are forming a consensus around your interpretation. He is too removed – which is probably what he wants to be. I noticed at times that Krauthammer was drifting that way too. But he was less adamant, intransigent, and pretense. Krauthammer sought reason, persuasion and wisdom. Will drifts between scold and inspiration, but often in an overly officious, sure way.
My knowledge of Will is somewhat limited. I have seen him interviewed on several podcasts and read a few opinion pieces by him. I am currently reading his Conservative Sensibility. It is a brilliant work, deeply thought out and yet remarkably easy to read and understand. I suspect that those who would like to simply take particular views by the man and use that to discount his total portfolio are showing a puritanical urge more appropriate to the left than the right. I do not always agree with George Will in his political judgments and opinions, but, on the whole, he is unquestionably a conservative and a brilliant thinker in the conservative mode. He is always worth listening to, whether you agree with him or not.
“Trump incapable of sequential thought”….I am a pretty good sequential thinker myself, enough so that I found Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ to be a frustrating read despite my strong professional interest in the topic. But I am also enough of an inductive and intuitive thinker to have some comprehension of Trump’s thought process and its power.
A lot of conventionally-approved sequential thinkers failed to detect the linkages among the opiate-addiction epidemic, the hollowing out of much American manufacturing, and China’s behavior regarding trade and intellectual property. Trump saw these linkages clearly.
How does George Will know what Donald Trump is thinking, anyway?
Or is he, once again, merely criticizing stuff Trump says?
I don’t think he’s “unquestionably” anything, especially considering his writings, columns, and statements in the past several years. The reason I stopped reading him (and most of the celebrated, meaning approved, conservatives), is that the ideas they were speaking to were not conservative.
I say all that without having read this latest book, though. But he’s already off the list.
I agree with you, but do not know if anyone commenting on this post has done that. I do believe that when it comes to President Trump, those puritanical urges to which you refer are in full bloom and exhibited in the extreme by George Will.
There is no question that Will and a few others have gone off the deep end when it comes to Trump, and I say that as someone who didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary for that matter. However, Trump was elected and he has done a fairly decent job, if you ignore the idiotic tweets. Trump definitely lacks gravitas and some of the other qualities that most conservatives would like to see in a president of our party. However, there really is no one on the other side who is a whit better in terms possessing gravitas or, for that matter, a sign of rational thinking. Given the field, it might be fine to say, to hell with all of them! But what Will and Kristol and Boot have done in terms of giving aid and comfort to the enemy isn’t acceptable. I bought and am reading his book because I wanted to, perhaps, better understand the reasons why he had made these choices.
Interestingly, given the originator of this post, Will begins his book by comparing James Madison and Woodrow Wilson as the two exemplars of the major political trends we are currently seeing in our politics. He is most certainly a believer in the policies and ideas of Madison. He is also a man of, I believe, impeccable integrity. Trump, obviously, isn’t. It is, perhaps, easier to understand Will keeping that quality in mind. You can disagree with him, but I don’t believe that you can say that he lacks honesty in his views. That is a statement that I do not believe I can say about almost any member of the Democrat House or Senate, most especially those running in the current primary.
Will’s problem is that he is a conservative, and most Americans are not really conservative. For decades republicans have been crowing the virtues of conservatism, but that’s part of why they have lost a lot of elections.
Will forgets that the first and most important part of what Americans value is not conservatism and keeping to the old ways. First and most important is freedom from government, and freedom from tyranny of our neighbors as well as our government.
The Tea Party was about reducing federal spending in the hope that it would increase freedom. The conservatives aligned with the progressives to kill that movement any way they could.
Now we are left with a president that doesn’t much care about reducing spending so much, but wants to protect us from progressives. Thanks to the conservatives, who refuse to fight, that’s the best we can hope for now.
So, to heck with George Will and his conservatism. I never liked conservatism much anyway. I want freedom, not conservatism. The world changes, we need to change with it. But we always need to change by keeping our freedoms. George Will would be happy to surrender our freedoms so long as baseball returns to some exalted status. He would happily see our guns confiscated, for example, so long as he gets to track the minutiae of baseball statistics forever.