Special Correspondence
SPECIAL correspondence George Will: An Exchange Joseph Sobran's essay on George Will ("George Will and the Contemporary Political Conversation," TAS, October 1983) contains any number of odd...
...and nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum of power...
...This is, to be sure, a debatable point, and it seems to be Mr...
...One can only guess at the motives that drove him to do so...
...Will has asked serious questions without providing answers, and that may be his worst offense of all: he has not provided the defenders of conservative orthodoxy with quite enough evidence to damn him...
...I regret that he has chosen to pass so lightly over my total contempt for the poor, but I suppose that we must make some allowance for limitations of space...
...SPECIAL correspondence George Will: An Exchange Joseph Sobran's essay on George Will ("George Will and the Contemporary Political Conversation," TAS, October 1983) contains any number of odd notions, but surely none quite as preposterous as that which would redeem the argumentum ad hominem by charging Aristotle with, ". . . a lot to hide: at least one illegitimate child, for instance...
...I doubt that Mr...
...If it is only building bridges for the greater glory of Dr...
...Whiggery, as one of Yeats's seven sages defined it, is A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard's eye...
...Sobran may recoil in surprise at the suggestion that he holds levelling doctrines...
...but in rejecting Dr...
...Neither the relationship between Aristotle and Herpyllis nor the time and city that hosted it would be a source of shame to the philosopher or, later, to his "illegitimate" son whose solicitude was probably responsible for posterity's having the benefit of the Nicho-machean Ethics...
...and it shows how "intellectual conservatism" is suffering from hardening of the arteries, impervious to new ideas, repeating itself, and getting downright nasty...
...I am not so sure he is entitled to that point...
...As it happens, he has managed to select one of the few specious passages in Johnson's writings...
...Will's crime of crimes, nevertheless, is to defend welfare...
...Will has described as "cranky and recriminatory...
...but I'd rather have his gifts...
...Whigs have always been uncomfortable with appeals to principle...
...But if he wants Burke so badly, then let him have Burke...
...Will's ultimate purpose is philosophical...
...One must assume that the child in question was Nichomachus, named after Aristotle's own father, and born to Aristotle and Herpyllis, the good woman who entered his house years after the death of his beloved Pythias...
...During the American Revolution, "Tories" were Loyalists...
...Will's critique of American conservatism, he rejects the attack on philosophies and systems that would reduce man to the predictable level of his worst and ignore the possible level of his best...
...In blackening my character and insulting my intelligence, Mr...
...Burke was a Whig...
...In defending the Madisonian calculus of conflicting factions, Mr...
...The plain fact is that attacks on the character of a man cannot pass as an appraisal of his theories or proposals...
...Republicans all, the Old Whigs of ancient families traditionally jealous of royal power looked back fondly on Athens and Rome...
...Sobran as a Whig-I will not say a vile Whig, though Whiggery is what it is...
...Will's hope that the conservative community will not exempt itself from participation...
...Johnson...
...Of all the conservative crankinesses that Sobran holds to in defiance of Tory Will, the most ridiculous is the myth of "limited government...
...whereas Samuel Johnson recommended that, if a man denies the existence of virtue, we should count our spoons, Sobran suggests that, if a man exhorts us to virtue, we should look to his mistress...
...Johnson's opinion, an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence upon Whiggism...
...But, in all truth, it is a simple matter to perceive Mr...
...Sobran would have the pseudo-philosophical pretexts of an impious eighteenth-century colonial rebellion strangle our political discourse and prevent it from attaining the level of genuine political philosophyAnd who were the American rebels but transplanted English Whigs...
...Naturally, the man who denies excellence proceeds to call the advocate of excellence a humbug...
...As Johnson says, In sovereignty there are no gradations...
...Alas, he ruins a perfectly good ad hominem attack by trying to construct a rational argument with a little help from Dr...
...There may be limited royalty, there may be limited consulship...
...Sobran appears to be devoted to that somewhat recent mode of aspiring scholarship that would settle for finding an apt label rather than undertaking the honest labor of testing the truth of what the labeled (and often libeled) spokesman has said...
...Thrale recalled, "severity towards the poor was, in Dr...
...As I read his book, it only aspires to build bridges for political conversation...
...Of course he has much cause to envy Dr...
...Joseph Sobran has been useful to conservatism...
...The Whigs were composed of the heretical zealots of religious persecution in New England and the would-be squires of the South who fancied themselves gentlemen even though the tillers of their estates were not tenants but slaves...
...Having said this, I should add that I remain a George Will fan six days a week...
...Enraged that this former academic should render his role as executioner superfluous, Mr...
...In his place, who wouldn't want to keep public discussion impersonal...
...themselves a faction, they have always depended for their support upon fragile coalitions of factions, whose politics, severally or in concert, would not bear examination...
...Sobran himself that he should so easily find access to print only to gratify his meanness...
...It belonged to conservatism's half-century of opposition and rhetorical irresponsibility, which Dr...
...One cannot be sure which "conservative" tradition Mr...
...the stock-jobbers and shopkeepers of the self-made middle class, who outnumbered the Old Whigs, idolized modern Venice's empire of avarice...
...Sobran's axe with nice distinctions...
...Lewis's introduction, "New Learning and New Ignorance," in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century...
...Sobran chooses the regime of mediocrity over the regime of excellence...
...but there can be no limited government...
...As Mrs...
...But Johnson defined only Whiggism as a faction...
...This is not totalitarianism, but nature...
...Sobran's persistence may also be the rage before the dying of the light: the relevance of his position is expiring before his eyes...
...Moreover the vindictiveness of this conservative enforcer bodes ill for anyone hoping to make a serious contribution to public philosophy through conservative journalism...
...but this defender of the pyramid of social subordination, who knew it from the bottom, and who had studied envy as a moral problem, knew also that class envy is a political problem...
...As he said himself, "a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization...
...As a twentieth-century Whig, Mr...
...Will: a popular newspaper column, a Pulitzer Prize, riches, fame, and favor with the President even without slavish submission to Republican ideology...
...Will is convinced that too much of today's rhetorical (as opposed to principled) conservatism has a contemptuous view of government's obligations to the wretched...
...Jonathan Swift characterized them as "an odd mixture of mankind taking in every heterodox professor either in religion or government''-a good description also of the menagerie gathered under the Neo-Whig banner of "Fusion-ism" for which Sobran speaks: libertarians, strict constructionists, Jaffite Straussians, sleazy literary modernists, romantic individualists, democratic theists, Southern Agrarians, gold-bugs...
...Perhaps each enthusiast possesses some small portion of the truth, but the sum of the parts does not equal the whole...
...Daniel N. Robinson Professor of Psychology Georgetown University Washington, D. C. As a polemicist wielding his axe against sentimental humanitarian cant, Mr...
...George Will, a journalist who is also a philosopher, redefining conservatism and staking a claim for legitimate humanitarianism in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, has blunted Mr...
...the Tories represented the national interest...
...Will regards the New Deal as the last word on political phi-lopsophy or the Welfare State as the ultimate destination of all reasonable polities...
...Johnson considered the "notion of liberty" as cried up continually by the Whigs irrelevant to the private lives of most Englishmen, serving only to "amuse" them and to "keep off the tedium vitae...
...Then again, Mr...
...At the bottom of the pile, the Toryism of American Tories is supposed to lie suffocated while economic Mug-gletonians and the Sweet Singers of Rothbard run wild...
...Of course he knew that poverty is a relative condition...
...the religious enthusiasts desired a messianic regime of the elect...
...No question, I'd like to have his success...
...This is the idea of sovereignty, an elementary principle of political science stated years in advance of Count de Maistre by a moralist who did not wear a mask, a political philosopher who had been a parliamentary correspondent for years and who ghostwrote the law lectures of Blackstone's successor at Oxford, a shrewd observer of humanity whose works Mr...
...Will, we shall have to wait and see...
...Jamie-son is on firmer ground...
...No matter what Eliot said of the futility of following an antique drum, the names of some factions retain an eternal significance, especially when enshrined in great literary texts...
...Johnson, in his pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, pointed to the Americans' hypocrisy in opposing the British toleration of Popery in Quebec, and then asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes...
...Defending the welfare state-even on conservative premises-is one thing, and I don't mind that...
...Sobran has read with less frequency, or with less understanding, than he pretends...
...Nonetheless, there are some problems best dealt with governmentally, and these are often problems in which sheer number renders private initiatives insufficient...
...On Johnson and the theory of sovereignty, see C.S...
...There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures, extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity...
...Sobran seems to score a minor debating point by quoting Burke's Thoughts On Scarcity...
...If the Tories begin to make noises about the moral use of power, they are to be shouted down with cries of "Statism!'' If they say a word in behalf of welfare, they are to be ostracized as crypto-liberals...
...Sobran would associate himself with, but it would be surprising if there were any such tradition officially opposed to compassion...
...But Dr...
...I submit that, for better or worse, one of the formulae of Republican demagogy is to arouse the middle class's resentment of the welfare class, leading to an emotional justification for the belief that welfare should be abolished...
...Sobran has hurled his blade at the neck of Dr...
...How sad and miserable it is for conservatism and for Mr...
...Will has associated himself with the name of a faction strange to American ears, Toryism...
...A sneering dismissal of vast stretches of conservative thought is something else again...
...John Jamieson Evanston, Illinois Joseph Sobran replies: I am saddened by Professor Robinson's pathetic attempt to whitewash Aristotle...
...Whiggery envies excellence, and two centuries of it will accomplish the same as a decade of Jacobinism: the destruction of natural aristocracy...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
