The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts
Will, George F.
BOOK REVIEW The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts George F.Will / Harper & Row / $10.95 Edward S. Shapiro George F. Will is perhaps America's most thoughtful and important...
...Richard Nixon, Robert Dole, Spiro Agnew, and Jimmy Carter have inhabited a Washington once reserved for Washington, Madison, Adams, and Jefferson...
...The twentieth century, he avows, "is not a gentlemen's century...
...He is concerned not with who is currently wielding power in Washington, but rather with the principles (or lack of principles) motivating the powerful...
...he also was skeptical of democratic politicians who appealed to the populace's appetites...
...originated and developed...
...One must have a heart of stone," Will laments, "to feel no pang of regret about the vanishing of Jefferson's Republic...
...As Meg Greenfield, the deputy editor of the Washington Post's editorial page, noted, "He's got an interesting Tory mind...
...Edward S. Shapiro is director of the American studies program at Seton Hall University...
...At the very least, he has helped to rescue conservatism from those who believe that conservatism is more a matter of profits than principles...
...Only time will tell whether Will is to become another Lippmann...
...Laws that deny the ballot to anti-democratic movements educate the citizenry in the community's public philosophy...
...The son of Frederick L. Will, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois for nearly four decades, George Will was born in 1941 and educated at Trinity College (Connecticut), Oxford, and Princeton, where he received a Ph.D...
...Without principles "nations, like individuals, are guided by vagrant impulses and imperious appetites...
...Lippmann also spoke of a public interest and criticized the Benthamite belief that the public interest was merely the sum total of the private interests of individuals...
...Will has also committed the cardinal sin of writing in the Washington Post...
...uch words do not sit well with other self-proclaimed conservatives who Will contends are spokesmen for "a radically anti-political ideology, decayed Jefferson-ianism characterized by a frivolous hostility toward the state, and lacking the traditional conservative appreciation of the dignity of the political vocation and the grandeur of its responsibilities...
...This questioning of the liberal case for tolerance has been a staple of postwar conservatism, and the subject of major works by William F. Buckley, Jr., Richard Weaver, and Willmoore Kendall, among others...
...Liberals, on the other hand, attack Will because of his commitment to the proposition that politics must concern itself with values and public, virtue...
...These take a severe toll against small towns, small enterprises, family farms, local governments, craftsmanship, environmental values, a sense of community and other aspects of humane living...
...His own principles, he argues, constitute "a coherent conservative philosophy...
...Will s belief that a government must be concerned with the values of its citizens is the central theme of this collection of 138 columns published over the last several years...
...The key to Will's thinking is provided by his doctoral dissertation, "Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society...
...Liberals, by contrast, seek justice and individual freedom (although often at the expense of creating a leviathan-like state...
...Criticizing Will as an elitist, Dworkin believes the true task of government to be justice and not virtue, "Civilization is possible without justice," he writes, "but it then becomes, like slaves at Monticello, only a profound embarrassment, and a disgrace...
...He is also the luminary of "Martin Agronsky and Company" a weekly TV round table of comment and controversy by leading Washington journalists...
...in political science in 1964...
...Will claimed that every open society must have a public philosophy, which proclaims its commitment to fundamental moral and political precepts, as well as an "economy of intolerance," which rejects the legitimacy of some beliefs...
...BOOK REVIEW The Pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts George F.Will / Harper & Row / $10.95 Edward S. Shapiro George F. Will is perhaps America's most thoughtful and important conservative columnist...
...For Will, the standard by which politics should be judged is the extent to which it fosters virtue and what he calls "conduct in its moral aspect" or "manners...
...and he also feared that "the democracies are ceasing to receive the traditions of civility in which the good society...
...Nor does he take the easy way out by attributing urban violence and riots to economic and social maladjustments...
...This economy of intolerance reflects the community's underlying value system...
...Will also refuses to bow down before the altar of the young, instead describing the campus politics of the 1960s as a result of "prolonged adolescence...
...Thus, intolerance of political organizations preaching racism, Communism, or fascism demonstrates a society's commitment to equality and democracy...
...No coherent conservatism can be based solely on commercialism, but this conservatism has been consistently ardent only about economic growth, and hence about economies of scale, and social mobility...
...Just as Henry Adams was uncomfortable in the era of the dynamo, so George Will is ill at ease in the age of Madison Avenue and Hugh Hefner...
...Conservatism that does not extend beyond reverence for enterprise," Will states, "is unphilosoph-ic, has little to do with government/and conserves little...
...Will believes civility is under siege in a society in which condoms can be huckstered over television, in which the sole remaining growth industry in the country's largest city is pornography, in which a sizeable portion of the population believes that the community should be morally indifferent to homosexuality, and in which abortion (Will calls it " discretionary killing") is openly practiced and widely praised...
...Will's conservatism is in the classic tradition of 19th- and 20th-century European conservatism, which has been more concerned with preserving ethical and religious values than with conserving the wealth of the affluent...
...But for a century the dominant conservatism has uncritically worshiped the most transforming force, the dynamism of the American economy...
...In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Ronald Dworkin suggests that Will is wrong to expect a people which, by Will's own admission, is materialistic, avaricious, and influenced by institutions inculcating " instant gratification of immoderate appetites," to elect philosopher-kings who will then establish a framework for encouraging virtue...
...While Will emphasizes duties and responsibilities, liberals stress rights and privileges...
...Bella Abzug and Larry Flynt both stalk the land polluting the atmosphere...
...Will argued that the ultimate rationale for an open society is the encouragement it gives to the intellectual and moral growth of its citizens...
...For this we should be grateful...
...The United States, Will writes, "has within its urban population many people who lack the economic abilities and character traits necessary for life in a free and lawful society...
...Politics, Will writes in the introduction, "should be about the cultivation and conservation of character...
...Thus Allan Ryskind and Kevin Phillips have virtually read Will out of the conservative movement because he hasn't remained faithful to the party line of anti-statism, evangelical anti-Communism and militarism, contempt for the poor, and freedom for businessmen to destroy the landscape in the name of private enterprise...
...In it he criticized the contemporary liberal arguments for political tolerance, contending that they stemmed from a mistaken skepticism regarding the ability to arrive at substantive knowledge about what is politically desirable and undesirable...
...True conservatism, on the other, hand, distrusts and tries to modify the social forces that work against the conservation of traditional values...
...Will's belief that politics is something more than who gets what, when, and where, his argument that a mature society governs rather than is governed by its appetites, his use of the words "public philosophy" and "civility," and his concern for the debasement of contemporary politics resulting from a mass electorate being influenced by the mass media remind one of Walter Lippmann, and especially of Lippmann's conservative classic, Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955...
...His semi-weekly column for the Washington Post, begun in 1973 and now appearing in approximately 300 newspapers, and his biweekly contributions to Newsweek won for him the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary...
...He taught at Michigan State and the University of Toronto in the 1960s, and then served as an assistant to Senator Gordon Allott of Colorado and as the Washington editor of National Review...
Vol. 12 • March 1979 • No. 3
