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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
I appreciate the analysis by @eugenekriegsmann. To my simple mind, George Will is an Ivory Tower conservative. He is formal in his nature and book taught in his view point. Donald Trump is a pragmatic conservative. He didn’t study political philosophy by reading books. Trump’s conservatism is experiential. He lived and worked with leftists all his life. His close daily contact with their thinking and manipulations helped him to develop into a man of deep experience in life forces. He has learned what works and what doesn’t and he fights with a great amount of confidence and aggression because he has learned his view through everyday experience.
Except that Donald Trump very clearly explained that he is a republican and not a conservative. And he’s correct. He’s a nationalist as ideology goes, and I’ve not seen anything conservative about him at all.
Sky,
I like most of what you’re saying. I could add one comment. One thing that conservatism is not is intellectual nostalgia. It’s perfectly alright to mention that certain aspects of former times were morally superior to what goes no now. However, to just lament some aspect of culture from the past that you liked and can’t get now is nothing but intellectual nostalgia.
Intellectual nostalgia is useless in two ways. First, it is a bygone cultural artifact that isn’t coming back so bringing it up is a moot point. Second, it distracts from actually facing what is going on right now and developing a counter to the contrived intellectual aggressions from the left. Bemoaning the past and licking our wounds is something we all do from the time to time but making that the centerpiece of your contribution is bizarre if not absurd.
Regards,
Jim
I very much agree with this, as I wrote, “sometimes brilliant, sometimes useful, but never for long.” I believe Conservative Sensibility is Will’s effort to distinguish what a Conservative is and serve as a philosophical foundation which is enduring that contrasts with Trump. The problem is that when it comes to Trump, Will (like Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and dozens of others) got so far over his skis that he refused to acknowledge or take seriously the good things Trump has done. They simply never understood that Trump is not conservative, but he is not liberal either (and this applies to the GOP). Trump is a blend of retail politics that is often practiced by the left and right. They get elected and make decisions by intuition and a desire to be correct, and not by dogma.
Will wants purity for Trump, but not always for Will. Will can wax endlessly on dogma, meaning, etc. He becomes all tied up in the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and a host of other soft ephemerals that are just that. He tends to bend the Constitution, a wee bit. But the fact is this, his portfolio if full of many heretical, contrarian and down right wrong thoughts about being a Conservative – but they are uniquely Will. He quit the Republican Party and is now a Conservative – his own brand.
Afternoon Madison,
We have mentioned that Will probably has never had dirt underneath his nails and might not know any folks who do. In listening to Will and reading Will, it becomes hard to understand how he could be so bright and yet so dense. Culture is the organically produced software that takes the problems inherent in man and creates structures to minimize selfishness and frictions, marriage and marriage relationships create a network of obligations, religion helps explain purpose and identity and diagrams proper behaviors, rights of passage structure learning and responsibility. The brilliance of our government is that it has a similar structure in that it is based on the understanding that men are flawed, selfish, greedy, corrupt, prone to mobs and factions, and is built to play off these flaws against each other to if not produce good results at least to limit bad results. Will has philosophical understandings, but men do not live by these understandings nor are they controlled by what Will understands. Will does not seem to know how we got here nor how Trump is answer to what is corrupt, particularly the corrupt media and corrupt system of higher ed. Our media for ages has held our country and most of its citizens in contempt. Where has Will been during this concerted slander? Will is not alone, many of our conservative thinkers are either with him or sympathetic to him, they cringe at Trump’s language, and think he must be a fool. If you have ever worked in a factory, construction, in a foundry or in the army, the language is not a problem and Trump’s humor is easily seen. @bossmongo has written a very popular post on butt-sniffling http://ricochet.com/658809/badges-tabs-and-doodads/ I doubt Will would be entirely comfortable with folks this rough. And if one does not see how Trump manipulates the media into talking about what he chooses, then one is looking away from the events of the day.
Two very good observations!
This here sums up most of why I can’t read his essays. The ability to feel the zeitgeist and address it on its own terms is essential to meaningful political commentary.
Almost entirely bereft of humor while staking an imperious hill from which to condescend, Will’s best offering are abstractions connected to ivory tower theory more than immediate exigencies.
For Will, conservatism is something you write about, not do. He’s an intellectual, not a doer like Trump. He probably agrees that Trump is implementing conservative ideas, but for him it’s more important that Trump isn’t using the right words while he’s doing it.
The only importance such people have is that they give bipartisan cover to the leftist media lynch mob. George Will’s role vis-à-vis the liberal media might be compared to Harry Truman’s role as the only honest man* in the Boss Pendergast machine in K.C.
*According to his biographers, at any rate, though I have my doubts.
Truman was anything but an honest man.
This is something I hadn’t thought of, and while it appears to have value it turns out that Leftists will now burn down the whole village if a little girl said there was a monster there … they don’t care if there’s a gatekeeper discussing the semantical possibilities of the term “monster”.
Of course it wasn’t like that when Will originally got slapped on the back (notice how well recognized people tend to seek to keep the look they had when they first realized they were popular, it’s like when your grandma told you that if you keep making that face it’ll stay that way). Back then the Left was more often reliably reasonable when considering reasonable rhetoric.
To be honest, I wouldn’t want an honest President anyway (see: Jiminy Carter). The appearance of honesty is necessary to win elections but honesty fails miserably when dealing with real opposition.