MORAL EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF REAGAN
Bromwich, David
On Some Recent Proposals for a Culture Without Criticism Modern conservatives since Edmund Burke have held a difficult position, at least in part because of the distinctiveness of their...
...Burke was at once less dramatic and more cogent when he conceived of this power of resistance as inertia...
...Why do civilizations flourish...
...It's something I hope I never have to do, even if I don't feel easy about judging others...
...For a columnist even BY GARRY TRUDEAU DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau © 1986 G.B...
...CIVILIZATION AS A CONSCIOUS ENTERPRISE, or an unconscious process susceptible of conscious helps...
...and he cites, as earlier resting places of our tradition, "Enlightenment England and France, Renaissance Florence, and Periclean Athens...
...V W e may now come to a more vivid sense of the design of Will's methods by observing how they are brought to bear on a particular occasion...
...Thus, as someone who believes our common culture ought to be predominantly secular, I have a much better claim than William Bennett to be counted as a moral and intellectual descendant of the signers of the Declaration...
...As applied to moral imagination, the adjective "sound" is merely a solecism...
...The market itself has been the single most volatile and relentless force for modernization in our time...
...To say now what is for other people, "in a word, happiness...
...It may be useful here to observe close up how Will introduces his key word: "Keats said the world is 'a vale of soul-making.' I say statecraft is soulcraft...
...and in any case, he tells us that he solicited contributions from another forum and by other means: "The general public was also invited in a newspaper column by George F Will to send me their lists" of "ten books that any high school student should have read...
...and they are therefore even willing to cultivate orthodoxies they do not share, as a superstitious outwork of faith...
...and yet, it is a foregone conclusion that history will ratify many of the causes they set out by opposing...
...One may read him as enforcing a constraint dictated in part by a rational sense of limits...
...Minds, in some measure anyway, were molded because troops were called out to enforce the law...
...Briefly pausing to cheer the warm, if distant, handshake between Hooker and Hegel, the reader to whom these names are not just names may return uncertainly to congruent with...
...and to have lined up a theory of man's essential nature and of a stability that reposes outside history on the same side with conservative politics...
...Do we not know that there are many men who wait, and who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution, to let loose all the corrupt wealth of India, acquired by the oppression of that country, for the corruption of the liberties of this, and to fill the parliament with men who are now the object of its indignation...
...The theorist, in fact, to whom his thinking is most directly as well as obliquely indebted, is Rousseau...
...Like Herbert Marcuse in particular, Will has no hesitation in assigning to a vanguard in society the practices most worth fostering at a given time...
...Why cannot American writers come up with something to meet the order...
...On Some Recent Proposals for a Culture Without Criticism Modern conservatives since Edmund Burke have held a difficult position, at least in part because of the distinctiveness of their view...
...THE EXPOSURE OF ERRORS LIKE THESE iS a Slow business...
...I have looked up his 1968 Ph.D...
...It started with the invention, by Burke, of an idea called "Europe" and the invention, by nineteenth-century Russians, of a dream called "the West...
...As a purveyor of instant commentaries on David Brinkley's "This Week," Will has been helping to shift the intuitions of millions of Americans...
...What Burke calls "our national character" and what he calls "our liberties" are not indifferent to the way authority and privilege are given by the Parliament to those who serve the nation...
...A mind cannot be shapeless...
...but it had better be acquired late than not at all, for what was at stake was America's survival...
...Whatever one's personal views, the religious tradition at the heart of our culture does require, in our time, common acknowledgment, respect, attention, nurture, and defense...
...The hard-earned, half-found Anglophilia is innocuous, in Will as it is in others, though some Americans may find it rather a tease, like his thin smile and his walking stick...
...This suggests a germ of antipaternalism in his thinking, and its failure to develop betrays, at Doonesbury least, as awkward a logic as anything in Jefferson's Notes on Virginia...
...It is, however, of the essence of the didactic story Will has to tell, that it should reproduce the texture of its episodes in an undifferentiated a fashion as possible...
...The "connection" Jefferson believed he saw was not an "empirical question"—not, that is, testable or open to testing—for the reason that no society, including ours, was ever formed by postulating such connections in a mood of experiment...
...To the extent that we are and to the extent that we press our advantage, our self-interested use of tradition exemplifies the same pragmatic and modern approach that Will deplores in the Founding Fathers...
...They began (in what we may now call Will, Stage 1) with a Burkean trope: "conservatism teaches the dignity of government that grows organically from the native soil...
...It is because ideas do matter that it is wrong to defend and even to nurture ideas one believes to be deeply in error...
...Seldom before at any rate, in the work of a republican moralist, have the ancient words caveat emptor been given so euphemistic a gloss...
...Yet Bennett is the less skillful writer of the two, as well as the less agile thinker, so that he often brings to light, by stating quite unguardedly, assumptions that Will has taken care to hold in reserve...
...There is only a natural difficulty, rather . than a logical awkwardness, in trying to combine these goods...
...This seems to me to hold true in everything from Will's talk about civic virtue to his judgments of the naturalness or unnaturalness of mores which, in many postEnlightenment accounts, would hardly come under public scrutiny at all...
...All rights reserved...
...Or, "A place for the humanities, and the humanities in their place...
...John Crowe Ransom described this predicament vividly in a review of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, where he noticed "how conservatives when they return to power do not proceed heroically to undo the innovations of their enemies, as they may have threatened they would...
...with the hint that here, as in the paper chains that students make with library paste, to take up a single link is to encumber ourselves with the whole...
...The record of commercial reactors remains what it was: no one has been killed and public-health damage, if any, is unmeasured...
...Reprinted in HARPER'S MAGAZINE (August 1986) from the VILLAGE VOICE (June 1986) q mutual obligations he shares with others like himself...
...he had been rescued by a principle, the principle of freedom of speech...
...The republican author whom this sentence recalls is, of course, Plato (whom Rousseau exempted from his strictures against philosophy in general...
...But, perhaps deliberately, Bennett leaves unclear the role that this group played in preparing the text of his pamphlet...
...The truth will make them free...
...It began by having to do with the necessity of calling some questions closed...
...It may be replied that tolerance is not, and was not meant to be, a virtue at all but rather a practice, whose renewal takes the form of a daily wager...
...Burke, who believed that "art is man's nature," would have agreed with this sentence, but would also have wanted to turn it around...
...Will, at the age of twenty-six, writing in an academic context and well before what one now thinks of as the more thuggish manifestations of the 1960s, was already fully formed as the opinion-maker that he would become...
...Do this, urges Will, and you will be bound eventually to recognize that the maintenance of a society requires giving more attention to the souls of citizens than we in America had supposed...
...He tells us that his "study group"—by speak463 ing in whose name, Bennett leads us to believe that he sought their permission for every statement— were "alarmed by the tendency of some humanities professors to present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner...
...At the point where one feels sure that one has captured him as a theoretical republican, he is apt to put on a different look entirely, that of the empirical and practical-minded observer of a common life...
...Will took a very different line...
...Since Will is among the very few persons who now occupy anything like the role once filled by Walter Lippmann, Stuart Chase, James Burnham, and a host of others, one may regret that he has settled for a story as foursquare as that of tradition vs...
...Or we can try to join the company (deferentially still, it goes without saying...
...To be sure of numbering Marx among his enemies, Will has to blame him for prejudices he happens to share with Burke...
...More than any other agency of the change, the mass media have been responsible for the pace of this obliteration...
...In columns for the Washington Post, the National Review, and Newsweek, Will mounted a consistent polemic against the liberal ethic of tolerance that he took to prevail in America...
...For his ideas have been shaped to fit the larger policies of the Reagan administration...
...It is, however, the last, vaguest, and most doubtful of Bennett's elements that occupies most of his attention...
...Then (in Will, Stage 2, which corresponds to Bennett, Stage 1) came the revised view of tradition as a capacious fuel tank, or a reservoir to be tapped...
...Let tolerance be replaced or, at least, augmented by some sturdier great ideas, from "a core consensus of the Western political tradition as first defined by Aristotle, and added to . by Burke and others...
...They defend the things of the past, and are inclined to respect history...
...Now, an indisputable fact about Rousseau's ideas of virtue and nature is that they are nonempirical...
...IN THE QUESTION OF THE legality Of abortions, for instance, our language has no common phrase to suggest the constitutional rights of the unborn...
...though nobody who had read and been moved by reading Proust would recruit him in this way to the intentions of a nameless global project...
...On their analysis of political society, "The scope of the passions is to be circumscribed only by the virtue of tolerance...
...Hastings was an early imperial entrepreneur, in charge of the British East India Company's operations throughout India, before he was charged, by Burke's party in the House of Commons, with bribery, embezzlement, extortion, and murder, and impeached before the House of Lords...
...The Judeo-Christian ethic "provides the fundamental ideals that underlie our entire political and social system— ideals like respect for the individual, standards for individual behavior, and a commitment to decency and to service to others...
...is the incarnation of evil, the common enemy of mankind...
...second, "the work ethic...
...There would be the same difficulty whether we chose a religious or a secular principle of combination...
...What is noble...
...I believe there is a connection between the obsessional quality of thinking like this and the proposition, advanced by Will and now seconded by Bennett, that civility alone no longer affords a strong enough sanction for the morals of a republic...
...Bennett wants very much not to blame it on the social and economic arrangements that have made a career in a large corporation appear almost inevitable to any student who cherishes worldly ambitions for himself...
...But they did not believe, and it is a matter of record that they did not believe, religious faith played any important part in the assent that they required...
...This did not cost Will any of his syndicated outlets...
...WHAT MAKES WILL SO WEAK A SKEPTIC in an encounter like this is his notion that traditional culture, if absorbed intensely enough, can repair the corrupt mores of a republic, the way a vitamin injection revives the spirits of a depressed patient...
...and yet, it is not immediately clear what foreign word it might be a translation of...
...A more persistent difficulty, for American conservatives particularly, arises from their uncritical acceptance of the capitalist market...
...These are, "ideology" and "subjectivity," and he calls them opposite poles...
...I mention this faith in polls as one piece of evidence—we shall come to others by and by—that Will has been touched by the spirit of modernity in spite of himself...
...The first sentence Will quotes is about the nation...
...tolerance, classical republicanism vs...
...Least of all can they be traced to Locke, Hume, or Mill, all of whom Will condemns, in keeping with a general polemic against modernity which he derives, with a minimum of acknowledgment, from the writings of Leo Strauss...
...They do not deserve him...
...and "One important feature of this adversarial culture . . . is the theme that the U.S...
...Gelb seems to have asked Wells to look into the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on the gourmet food market...
...though all, from Rather to Brokaw to Koppel, are disgraceful by the standards of American television journalism only a decade ago...
...Political life, however, unlike chess, is a serious business...
...The sentence from Lincoln which Will quoted without attribution, as part of the Mind of the West, related in its context not to the psychological process by which minds are closed, but to the social recognition by which debates on certain issues are implicitly foreclosed...
...They have likewise been trimmed for expedience, to help shore up its alliances of the moment...
...The 1960s are a nightmare from which Bennett cannot awake...
...Indeed, only in a very contingent sense can the remaining names be said to share a pattern of thought...
...and it is a nuisance...
...You can get this far without knowing anything, is the message sent to millions of viewers by the ignorant old charmer himself...
...They were a matter rather of seeing how much of what is, how great a preponderance of the sentiments we know as ours, incline us in a certain direction at a certain moment in our history...
...It remains a commonplace view now, as it was two centuries ago, that secularization cannot be had without demoralization...
...Burke's whole philosophy was a continuous lesson in how that happens, and in why we ought to care about how it happens...
...In To Reclaim a Legacy, published for general distribution by the National Endowment for the Humanities, he adopts a more diplomatic tone...
...H G eorge Will is best known these days for his work as a television commentator on politics, where he has cast himself as an intellectual apologist for the Reagan administration...
...At the present moment, for example, there is an unprecedented danger that a generation of Americans will be made permanently cynical, and overlook the things that have been and remain most admirable in our social arrangements, all because an ethic of greed, which they rightly associate with Ronald Reagan, has absorbed or else repelled them but in any case has relieved them of the obliga453 tion to think...
...The date Will picks as a point of origin takes us back to Plato...
...What deserves to be defended...
...But my reason is not that I regard them as "cultural capital" (to borrow a symptomatic phrase of Will's) or that I believe by learning their lessons I will be better able to protect my culture against reading, critical thinking, and other points of view (to return to Bennett's leading signs of decay...
...Nor have they been designed, by conviction, in keeping with its politics of principle alone...
...This part of the story begins with the unhappy invention of rights (as opposed to duties), of the autonomous self (as opposed to the responsible social being), and of the personal, symbolic, and disruptive uses of the past which received a first impetus from the success of modernism in the arts...
...But it has come to center on a different concern altogether, the naturalness of regarding citizenship as a state of mind...
...And yet, the president to whom Will applied those words was not Reagan, but Carter...
...the second, about the individuals who compose it...
...There are several possible ways of describing a consistency as thoroughpaced as this...
...To the dismay of the pamphleteers and columnists of his day, who altered their calendars the year of the revolution to begin again at zero, Burke spoke for history and nothing if not history...
...What kind of person is it who can attend to, acknowledge, respect, defend, and even nurture an entity from which he withholds his assent...
...and he appears to agree at every point with Will's stress on the need to propagate a traditional culture closed to criticism...
...By contrast, Burke, when he wrote against the French idèologues, wrote above all as the defender of experience against theory—which was, as he described it, the work of "refining speculatists," "political aeronauts," "smugglers of adulterated metaphysics...
...until the end of this week...
...Or was it rather a reflex sentiment of commercial optimism, in the service of a corporate good which the genius of public relations has lately captured in the phrase damage control...
...and third, fear...
...The truth is, all that we, as participants in a culture, need at any time, and all we can intelligibly ask for, are interested descriptions of our way of life, which set us thinking about how it might be strengthened and how it might be reformed...
...Ideas matter: Bennett and Will, like many weightier thinkers, have said this again and again, and they are right...
...Burke himself disdained any tactic that would have appeared at once to defend an existing order and to favor the instrumentalities of rapid change...
...Many readers who have followed Will's progress in a desultory way must have felt that his politics evolved in response to a certain historical moment...
...To discover the reasons for Bennett's choice, we have to move outside the field of education and culture entirely...
...But, whether individuals give personal assent to a father of all mercies or not, the extra gift of our common culture is this: the mercies—rights, freedoms, liberties—belong to us all...
...But he achieved his fame earlier and otherwise, in the years of the Watergate investigations and their aftermath...
...I will try to suggest what the words are likely to have meant to Lincoln...
...The most curious aspect of this encounter is not, however, that Will's position is closer to Jefferson's than he wants to admit...
...It is the heritage of our common culture, grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that helps to support not just religious liberty, but our free society as a whole...
...We can watch the company hold a colloquium among themselves, in a language foreign to ours, and with sounds as strange as those of any conversation from which we have been excluded...
...Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions...
...To imagine a thing morally is an individual act and a positive exertion...
...that his principles remained the same...
...but soulcraft anyway embraces all three: "The soulcraft component of statecraft has one proper aim...
...But please, while you are transmitting on their frequency, at least fill their heads with the right names to drop at cocktail parties...
...They belong, says Will, to the totalitarian party now...
...But first, it is necessary to surmise what they are likely to have meant to Will...
...Soul, for Keats, implied something very like self, and hardly separable from the body...
...It does matter what we call them...
...Or his belief that the policies of a nation ought to be shaped by a cooperative understanding of theocratic edicts and the wisdom of the folk: Burke, and probably also Pascal, drop out of the picture here...
...It showed 35 percent, or 192,000 of its 573,822 residents, mired in poverty, Zeller said...
...This makes for a coincidence, which seems to have eluded Will's reviewers, between his thinking and that of several radical speculators in the 1960s, many of them employed like him in university departments of politics...
...The latter cause in turn has become for them, in a very confused way, identical with the maintenance of religious beliefs against the onslaught of secular ideals...
...In one choice of his career, however, Will moved outside the norms of journalistic conduct...
...In his address to the American Jewish Committee, the secretary of education spoke of something even more important than our system of schools, something he called the "common culture" of Americans...
...There is no longer agreement on the value of historical facts, empirical evidence, or even rationality itself...
...Of the core tradition to which we can still choose to belong, Bennett remarks "We are part and a product of Western civilization...
...WE SHALL HAVE TO MAKE othe corrections presently, but this will do for a preliminary demonstration that secular morals have had a long history in the West, and have often thrived among the very people whom a casual historian trusts to fall into line as religious types (e.g., poets...
...There ought to be nothing mysterious about such evidence...
...Will comments: "The author of that sentiment, Keynes, was, of course, childless...
...But here again he takes a shocking, an extraordinary and, if one may say so, a historically false view...
...What is courage...
...ONCE THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS Of the crisis have been safely nullified, Bennett's story about liberals and radicals can go into full swing...
...Hear!s" later, by the reward of inattention...
...and the label ought to stick...
...It showed that those most likely to be poor are families with a female household head, regardless of race or educational level, and male and female blacks, said Zeller...
...But Will's poor judgment in his Three Mile Island columns was an occasional and adventitious matter...
...In that speech Solzhenitsyn had attacked the intellectual promiscuousness of the West, and raised doubts about the unconditional acceptance of freedom of speech in a secular society, as distinct from the conditional acceptance of it in a religious order...
...But now, here is Will's comment: "The theory was that if government compelled people to eat and work and study and play together, government would improve the inner lives of those people...
...But, at the command of an impulse opposed to that of liberal democracy, "a purpose of politics" has always been "to help persons want what they ought to want...
...It occurs at the beginning of perhaps two dozen sentences (many of them close together) in the text of Statecraft as Soulcraft...
...Difficult as it is, we have to go on trying (hardest of all where the new cultural scientists do most to make cartoons of our creeds) not to confuse tradition with imbecility, or moral soundness with moral idiocy...
...It is stamped on their minds by every improvised word he speaks, and by every stupefied answer he makes in reply to an honest question...
...As one inquires further into the character of Will's paternalism, its sharper features seem to recede and grow vague in the middle distance...
...We have had quite enough Leatherstocking Tales, thank you," Will observes tartly and primly...
...Only a few of his columns (collected in three books: The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts, The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions, and The Morning After, the last of which is forthcoming from the Free Press), and bits of his Godkin Lectures at Harvard University (published in Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does), have been cribbed from it...
...and one had thought that period was over for good...
...It remains worth saying that Marx, as the subject of active and not just scholastic discussion, was revised in the 1950s by several anti-totalitarian writers, on the ground that he sought to determine the limits of experience too narrowly...
...A specter is haunting American liberals," Will declared in his dissertation, "the specter of confident politics...
...Burke the most heart-felt pain to obey the stern voice of his duty in rending asunder a long friendship, but that he deemed this sacrifice necessary...
...Why then does he not follow the advice of the Founding Fathers, and opt for an American version of out-and-out secularism...
...Like most consistent paternalists, Will has an instinct (which looks to me like superstition) that tells him morals cannot survive without the prop of religious faith...
...At any rate his writings seemed to offer a reply—whether calculated or not—to the liberal and radical politics of the 1960s...
...Why does a man like Will venture so far that one may now reasonably charge him with practicing a double standard...
...As Jefferson and Washington believed, America's unique mission in the world was also to challenge it, by showing that a moral life could be established without metaphysical tests or sanctions...
...It was William Cobbett's love of an older way of life that in nineteenth-century England informed his attacks on the emergent mores of capitalism...
...But Will disarms the objection that such custodianship is strong medicine by advising us to think of it on the analogy of a pastor's role in his parish...
...This has always been one convincing picture—it is at any rate an old picture—of what happens in education...
...more cosmopolitan influence peddlers...
...In order to limit the grounds of argument, I prefer to concede the point, and will therefore confront Bennett's analysis on its own terms...
...But the reply of our native tradition remains what it always was...
...They take him at his word as a public educator on the neglected subject of our need for a public philosophy...
...we have to keep shifting about different features of all of them, to rearrange the composite likeness...
...What Plato knew about human nature—not suspected, but knew—included an idea of the necessity of slavery...
...This is the challenge that Bennett means to take up: he will address, he says in his 1984 pamphlet To Reclaim a Legacy, "the great task of transmitting a culture to its rightful heirs...
...A tradition, after all, far from being what a few writers "define" and others "add to," is a process that begins elusively, takes on bolder outlines as it is interpreted both by those who admire and those 451 who criticize it, and changes even as its authority grows...
...Johnson's statement concerned the limits of what was conscionable in public life...
...second, batting and fielding...
...Just as I finished the last paragraph, a fresh example came into view...
...AFTER SHARING SOME PLAUSIBLE evidence that our failures of cultural reception begin long before college, Bennett proceeds to render this demonstration pointless by urging a defense of our culture and morals by other than educational means...
...The CEO report was grimmer for Cleveland...
...He was disposed to appreciate both Solzhenitsyn's strictures on "America's flaccid consensus" and his proposal of a more rigid exclusionism in morals...
...These are serious charges, but, as I will show, they are charges for which Bennett himself has volunteered all the evidence...
...To FRAME THE ARGUMENT SO may seem to reduce it to a contest between two irreconcilable prejudices...
...An emancipated individual will be less narrowly individualistic...
...This, however, is a commonplace irony of the sort that all of us confront, simply by virtue of our existence in time...
...What for that matter is the Judeo-Christian ethic...
...Was this after all the voice of prudence...
...It is no more embarrassing than the liberal's frequent discovery that what the people need does not happen to be what they want...
...The great conservatizing experience is having children...
...for, of course, knowledge does now and then escape from our tradition, never to return again...
...The America to which I feel a strong loyalty began to exist two hundred and ten years ago...
...This could not be more wrong...
...But here is his prosecutor, Edmund Burke, a conservative, arguing that a connection exists between the abuse of wealth and power and the corruption of morals...
...At bottom, the secretary of education seems to be saying that the sentiment of religion in general is more vital to Americans than the particular tenets of a believer's faith...
...and it may be one that Americans are eager to hear several times in a generation, because they often feel on the verge of forgetting the degree of truth it contains...
...Mankind," Will writes, in the last chapter of Statecraft as Soulcraft, "has needs—call them spiritual, moral, emotional...
...This was an address given by Bennett on May 15, 1986 to the American Jewish Committee in Washington, D.C...
...This is an extraordinary error, and shocking to find in the last pages of a book of political philosophy (however condensed...
...Moral imaginations are not sound or unsound, they are alive or dead...
...Some of these questions, of course, have room for several more within them...
...But Will has in view an argument about the enforcement of morals that transcends such local skirmishes...
...Whether Jefferson is correct about the connection between the security of liberty and the prevalence of a particular conviction is an empirical question, and perhaps still an open one...
...Thus, for example, Soviet totalitarianism cannot be considered an accident of Marxism, the result of a wrong turn by Lenin or Stalin...
...That becomes the foremost (and perhaps the only) public virtue in a society composed of people endowed with equal rights grounded in their common passions...
...Writers like Will and Bennett also define their subject—the defense of tradition—in a far more specialized way than Burke ever did...
...q 469...
...Our virtues, such as they are, flourish in a place, and do not exist before in any conceivable place...
...Our constitutional and secular state, and the individualist culture that has reflected many of its complex qualities, are doubtless not the best we can envision, but they are what we have to begin with and they are worth defending today...
...But I will suggest something more in these pages...
...Having stepped forward so boldly, why does Bennett now step back so timidly...
...In seeking to give a vivid shape to their idea of education, both writers equally tend to picture the process as one of combustion: "the fuel that carries a social tradition forward is tradition," says Will...
...and Will's pleas for a "thicker" American literature are, in effect, a course in school busing for novelists...
...But he did go the length of announcing that Solzhenitsyn's views were "congruent with" those of "Augustine, Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Pascal, Thomas More, Burke, Hegel, and others...
...The very presence of habits, and a way of thinking and feeling to which people have accustomed themselves, explains, far better than immunology does, the ability to survive which their culture may exhibit even in the absence of their knowledge of its reasons for surviving...
...the virtue (excellence) of a dog is to hunt or watch...
...and that in whatever of life yet remained to him, he conceives he must live for others and not himself...
...The assurance he wants from his idea of transmission is visible at times in small traits of style, as when he writes that a constitution "presupposes efforts to predispose rising generations to the 'views' and habits and dispositions that underlie institutional arrangements...
...But they 468 take these risks for the sake of an ad hoc coalition of the mid-1980s that merges Christian fundamentalists, whose main political idea is that the Constitution needs to be scrapped, and neoconservative intellectuals, whose hatred of the left supersedes every consideration of empirical prudence...
...They have had to take the current president, and the culture that he represents, as a more than implicit exemplar of tradition...
...The mistake of such writers is that they underrate the inertia—or, to put it more eulogistically, the interest in order, and the attachment to a common routine—which may be inseparable from human life under every form of government except the most extreme tyrannies...
...It is the result of doing what Marx did when he defined man in terms of man's experience rather than his essence...
...In spite of their announced design, these metaphors imply just the practical, optative, and head-on approach to tradition as a business of technical know-how, which has characterized the more lugubrious American plans for the reclamation of culture over the past two centuries...
...It is only when one looks more closely at Will's educational methods that a vague initial sense of doubt changes to something sharper...
...Until it was replaced by something else, phlogiston held the field, it was thoroughly preserved and transmitted...
...To pursue this line of attack, however, is irresponsible from Bennett's perspective, which stops inside the school gates...
...It is not a secret that was found long ago but a gradual discovery that is still going on...
...I would think such a person not far this side of a hypocrite...
...457 more than for other writers, mannerisms are an index of character, and Will's writing from the first has been notable for two: the ventriloquized gruffness of a downright Oxford slang ("Moynihan's basic point is bang on"), which inadvertently carries the Gatsby trademark ("old sport...
...A new name probably has to be invented to suggest the savor of an ideology like Will's...
...Neoconservative writers have pointed out some of these abuses for interested reasons of their own...
...Indeed, in Bennett's best-known campaign, his public sponsorship of a "core curriculum" for higher education in the humanities, the resemblances to Will's "core consensus" of tradition are so close as to warrant quotation in detail...
...Against liberalism, Will urged a return to an older tradition of civic virtue, which required both the inculcation and the enforcement of morals...
...In Bennett's view, however, both of these practices are equally vicious, since they license the same elementary act of irreverence...
...But from neither of these statements will it follow logically that we need school busing...
...But then, and equally, one has to take stock of expressions like these: "A woman in that position is going through hell as it is...
...And we made the law, not because we had inherited an idea of excellence which it allowed us to realize more truly, but because we thought it was right...
...I can agree with, and indeed would like to live my life by, all of Bennett's "fundamental ideals...
...After Will's thoroughgoing paternalism, this defense of individualism is almost invigorating...
...VII To help decode the more abstract features of Bennett's program in To Reclaim a Legacy, I have found it useful to compare the sometimes evasive language of that document with the always forthright language of his recent speech, "In Defense of the Common Culture...
...Whereever they do occur, they teach us to move, in imagination, from ourselves to the little platoon we belong to in society, to a love of our country and of mankind...
...and I ask leave here for a digression...
...Still, most of his predecessors did the same thing...
...In what ways, however, could Solzhenitsyn be supposed to have conformed to the views of any one of these thinkers...
...it is that the continuity appears to be of a kind unalterable by events...
...Understandably, he does not reprint that column in The Pursuit of Virtue...
...Yet nowhere in all Will's writings is an example cited from ordinary usage...
...They are "preoccupied (even obsessed) with vocational goals at the expense of broadening the intellect...
...Of course, it says, we still need more personal injury lawyers...
...Thus "it is reasonable," he asserts in Statecraft as Soulcraft, "to note that we serve good governance by acting on the assumptions that underlie our moral language...
...Nor did the law work chiefly because minds had been molded...
...I mean his distrust of secularism...
...I've thoroughly checked into the situation on "radioactive" caviar, foie gras, snails, frog legs, etc...
...The fragility of our republican life, says Will, originated with an intellectual error by the Founding Fathers...
...but the ideologists I will be discussing in these pages, George F Will and William J. Bennett, have said that they aim to bring to light the platitudes we live by...
...and he subjects democracy itself to a satire that he spares the leading bureaucrats of the state...
...Here is the climactic paragraph of Will's peroration, concerning the definition of man that we Americans, on pain of extinction, are now obliged to relearn in full: When man is defined in terms of his nature, he is prey to tyrannies that frustrate his nature by making him subservient to the tyrant's will...
...That ethic, he said, had given implicit license to the disorders of the 1960s, and culminated, in Watergate, with contempt for the law at the highest levels of government...
...Jefferson held an uncompromising belief, which he wanted to strengthen, and not to test, by carrying it into action...
...In Statecraft as Soulcraft, for example, he quotes Keynes to the effect that in the long run we are all dead...
...Bennett, in short, already treated the adoption of these ends—reading, critical thinking, and an awareness of other points of view—as more or less catastrophic, and likely in themselves to induce an adversarial relationship to authority...
...They hope in this way to sponsor the revival of a strong morality and the preservation of a high culture in America...
...But then, one may well feel that one belongs to the "us" to whom they are given, without therefore supposing that they were given by the Christian God...
...To what did Proust contribute his idea...
...This demand propels them to the outmost bounds of sophistry, far from their own sources in the Enlightenment tradition they cannot help invoking...
...and from the point of view of circulation why should it...
...In the most general form of a great many issues that Will and Bennett raise, I feel a certain sympathy with their warnings...
...Thus, in his speeches for the prosecution of Warren Hastings, on which he labored at the same time that he was writing his pamphlets against the French Jacobins, one 447 will find countless passages like the following: We dread the operation of money...
...Like his fellow commentator, Sam Donaldson, Will by his very conduct habituates viewers to a treatment of public servants that often ranges from intemperateness to insolence...
...As we have seen, the fathers in Will's version are the tradition, all core, that runs unbroken from Aristotle to Augustine to Burke...
...But I have to begin by observing that the premise on which the Will-Bennett analysis of culture rests is altogether strange and new...
...Their leading question becomes, whether this man will finally succeed in educating all of us down to his level...
...but he does, oddly, reprint the self-vindication that he published a few weeks later, when the worst possible short-term disaster had been averted...
...Marcel Proust," he notes in a typical sentence, "contributed the idea (anticipated by William Wordsworth and others) that the self is a retrospective construct of memory...
...Evidently, Bennett wanted to assure this moral but not Christian gathering that the founders of America associated the good of their way of life with a religious sentiment rather than a religious doctrine...
...They have, he believes, lost sight of "life's enduring, fundamental questions: What is justice...
...He will be socialized by a knowledge of the The following is excerpted from a cable sent to Arthur Gelb, deputy managing editor of the New York Times, by Patricia Wells, a food writer in Paris...
...When Keats spoke of the world as a vale of soul-making, he meant that it was a place where, with pains, individual men and women could distinguish themselves from others of their kind...
...And the jeremiad, for it no longer has even the form of an argument, ends by asserting: " 'he who moulds public sentiments goes deeper than he who enacts statutes and pronounces decisions...
...and even give replies, in the hope of suggesting an unexpected counter-statement...
...Here I must quote at some length: All surveys show that most Americans today believe in "the father of all mercies...
...VI I n turning from George Will to William Bennett one is conscious of a change of atmosphere in several respects...
...But once we join a conversation like this, we necessarily work in a medium that includes prejudices (ours, and those of the company) and that yields perspectives (determined by our time as well as theirs...
...Rather, it is naturalistic and probably agnostic...
...For those who accept Bennett's truth about culture, he holds out the promise that "This truth will keep them free...
...And here I believe is an interesting problem for the modern conservative adepts of character-building...
...III S tatecraft as Soulcraft is a short and repetitious book...
...And yet "whatever one's personal views," Bennett insists, it requires nothing less than "common acknowledgment, respect, attention, nurture, and defense...
...Other Washington journalists have prepared the way for this sort of thing, and anticipated Will's standard reply to challenges: conflict of interest is in the eye of the beholder...
...But, "at the other extreme, the humanities are declared to have no inherent meaning because all meaning is subjective and relative to one's own perspective...
...and it finds its proper reward, however many "Hear...
...The lowest habit that the new opinionmakers are adding to the customary practices of an interview is that of interrupting the guest without apology...
...From such a future perspective the motives, as well as the judgment, of men like George Will and William Bennett, will be difficult to recover or imagine...
...modernity, virtue vs...
...It insinuates that the committee member, or reviewer, or professional moralist knows in advance along what lines of force, in what subfield or discipline, the helpful descriptions are likely to fall...
...A moralist of the public good, he has also been, fairly consistently, a defender of the welfare state in principle...
...Flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood: this is bizarre language to be used by the holder of a nondenominational office, in a secular nation whose pledge of allegiance omitted the words "under God" until the mid-1950s...
...Because there is so little information coming out of Eastern Europe on the subject, no one here seems to have a clue as to long range effects, but continue to follow the story in case something develops...
...Also, am pretty well convinced that the caviar is safe, for the spring catch was in the tins at time of the disaster...
...If we know one thing about the totalitarian governments of modernity, it is that they have sought to obliterate all consciousness of history, and that they have done so in the name of a theory of man's essential nature...
...Consider his doctrine that great souls are formed by suffering against the grain of their times: that much alone excludes Hegel...
...A prejudice (the kind that makes us favor people like ourselves over people unlike us) was declared to be legally outranked by another prejudice (the kind that makes us think a man ought not to insult another man in front of his children...
...Temporary as the alliance may be, the reaction it exhibits is part of an enduring pattern in America...
...Yet he neglected every measure to assure "the general persuasion of his sincerity...
...The assumption that guides the appeal is that language—as the most subtle and flexible means by which we tacitly, but habitually, realize an understanding of life—incorporates and even anticipates the conscious sense of our relation to our world, our neighbors, and ourselves...
...It grants that the state Jefferson and Washington founded is hard to live with now, as it was from the first...
...What all earlier thinkers on the subject have acknowledged, however, is just what Bennett cannot afford to admit: that religious liberty may, as a matter of fact and precedent, have shown itself to be at odds with "the role of religion...
...and, since it comes as near as we are likely to get to a full statement of Will's creed, it is worth examining closely...
...So, of a proposed city law in Miami in 1977, which would have repealed an earlier ordinance that had banned "discrimination in housing, jobs, or public accommodations based on `affectional or sexual preferences,' " Will remarked (in a column he chose to reprint in The Pursuit of Happiness) that the repeal was "eminently defensible" since the earlier ordinance had failed the test of any law, "to point people toward more human ways of living and to shore up what the community considers essential values...
...The heart of this new, fake "common 467 culture" is a stillborn marvel of the ideological laboratory, with no utility outside the parlors of Heritage Societies...
...A problem for any constitutional government, and a problem Will would like to evade, is that its conditions at a given time may actually help to decide the "polity's frame of mind...
...To assist him in defining that task, Bennett assembled a "study group" of teachers and administrators with long experience in higher education, among them David Riesman, Hanna H. Gray, Wayne C. Booth, and William Arrowsmith...
...For, if this act of connivance was unscrupulous even by the standards of the Reston-Safire tradition, it was beyond conceiving by the standards of a tradition Will affects to cherish more dearly...
...and my impression is that in this, as in the assumption of a competence at once above the people and their leaders, Will has been among the worst offenders...
...All these, he must be saying, are possible without assent...
...He has sometimes appeared to flout even the decorum that urges a temporary silence in the face of public embarrassment...
...On June 18, 1978, he devoted a column to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement address...
...A common sense of the past is rapidly vanishing, from the educational curriculum as it is from the culture at large...
...This is what I meant at the start by the illusion that a culture can save a society from itself...
...After all, as we saw when discussing a similar turn near the end of Will's argument, an American secular morality can be rendered sufficiently binding by the enforcement of a strong nonreligious consensus...
...Transmission, Will's term for the imitative (not inventive) continuity of a tradition, involves the pouring of a contained substance into a new container...
...For by having them, adults learn "how much this most important of social tasks is a task of transmission...
...We have seen a similar thought framed by Jefferson for pragmatic reasons, and by George Will for reasons he insisted were more than pragmatic, but of which he could not give a coherent account...
...If this is so, what Will takes to be the very core of a tradition of conduct, and therefore the foundation of the free polities of the West, is in fact as dispensable as the Gothic extravagance of flying buttresses in architecture...
...A conservative plea may now perhaps be allowed after so many words in reply to those who take the name of conservatives...
...This is not a manner in which history can afford to be written...
...The background of his phrase, now so famous as to be known even to those unacquainted with his writing, is therefore not pious as Will imagines it must have been...
...Why do they decline...
...Talk about civilization as a matter of pedagogy began in earnest with Ruskin...
...Near the end of the story, we learn that it holds a moral for American writers in particular...
...Butler wrote The Way of All Flesh a hundred years ago...
...But the striking thing is not that points of continuity may be found...
...But, in his present position, serving the people whom he serves, he is cautious not to offend those who do...
...What is scandalous is that they should ever be placed on a par with "What is justice...
...And yet, its 449 sources are evident on any page he writes...
...It is to maintain the basis of government that is itself governed by the best in a 2,500 year legacy of thought and action—social arrangements known to be right because of what is known about human nature...
...and the studding of his text with the names of learned authorities, whom Will brings forward much as an arriviste displays silverware, to dazzle, stagger, oppress, and sicken the visitor to his study, his emporium...
...We call upon you for our national character...
...Accordingly, much of William F Buckley's reputation as the spokesman for a serious movement, or of Ronald Reagan's image as a leader in tune with America in the 1980s, depends on our forgetting that these men opposed the civil rights laws of the 1960s and have long been committed to abolishing Social Security if they could...
...The greatest of all modernizers, the unexampled master and servant of images, the destroyer of the past and the somnambulist of memory: these are the terms in which he will be remembered, if a culture markedly different from his survives to remember at all...
...Great books, much more than timely ones, suggest a detached and therefore an unpredictable view of our culture...
...But he is the reverse of that...
...and, even within the academy, their influence is growing every day...
...It could also be argued—and this is the way Will himself has preferred to see it—that he has both an unusually steady and a peculiarly unfashionable temperament...
...What the legal result ought to be of such a discovery, no sane person will now try to specify in much detail...
...and nothing will ever cure him...
...Was he under the impression that they numbered themselves among the believers in a "father of mercies...
...That phrase works hard to conceal the wide difference between an analogical affinity which may be shared by discrete things, and a total identity in the aspects of things as interpreted by a strong-minded observer...
...The phrase, more human, is remarkable in itself, and the more so in that it appears to have been thrown in carelessly: a mere Christian moralist would have balked at this, as betraying a pride that may be a greater menace than the liberal's confidence...
...Bennett will say as much when he feels sure of a familiar and appreciative audience...
...and third, "the Judeo-Christian ethic...
...Leave aside the question whether Lenin and Stalin are the legitimate successors of Marx—as barren a question anyway as whether George Will is the legitimate successor of Burke...
...The aim of the words was to recollect, for an entire nation, certain standards of conduct that its citizens held inviolable...
...That culture on his analysis has three distinguishable elements: first, "the democratic ethic...
...Burke is convinced that the principles which he has endeavoured to maintain are necessary to the welfare and dignity of his country, and that these principles can be enforced only by the general persuasion of his sincerity...
...I mean the service into which they press religious doctrines as the necessary bulwark of an otherwise secular culture...
...The strangest twist of Bennett's reasoning comes at the end of his speech...
...Our common culture serves as a kind of immunological system, destroying the values and attitudes promulgated by our adversaries before they can infect our body politic...
...A critic, then, of liberalism, democracy, and the forms of solidarity that have made the welfare state attractive to its less eccentric advocates...
...The virtue (excellence) of a knife is to cut...
...As to why we need a revival of the humanities at all—let alone a revival so carefully enclosed and supervised—Bennett gives a familiar justification for his appeal...
...Does the same hold true in our own time...
...Such appeals to ordinary language, in the work of other thinkers, are supported by examples of overheard or imagined speech, the muttered notations of a person weighing a difficulty, or trying to persuade someone else, or actually responding at a moment in a dialogue...
...He is disturbed by the narrowness with which students today regard their future vocations (an attitude that can hardly be called either passionate or ideological...
...And he added that "the kind of open mind the liberal favors is a political menace...
...The Wall Street Journal recently carried a long article on Will, which mentioned his frequent and sympathetic meetings with Nancy Reagan, and reported that the Wills have the Reagans to dinner about once a year "just to relax...
...In the moral language of Americans today, there is something repulsive, and something to be avoided, in the act of abortion...
...It is only a little harder to say, "The integration of blacks and whites is a necessary step to that achievement...
...Will himself would renounce that part of "the soulcraft component...
...These are platitudes...
...dissertation, Beyond the Reach of 448 Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society...
...How can religious convictions, or their absence, be a matter of indifference if the liberty of the nation—and hence the safety of his pocketbook and even his limbs—depends on a particular conviction...
...In a 1978 column (which he chose to reprint in The Pursuit of Virtue), he was even capable of summing up the case against government funding for abortions with a remark that though the vast majority of operations "are performed by persons licensed to practice medicine, they serve not the pursuit of health, but rather the woman's desire for convenience, absence of distress—in a word, happiness...
...Involved, as he is here, in a difficult tactical maneuver, he travels lightly and talks in code, and we shall have to interpret him as we can...
...In the instance of the civil rights laws, the American government did just that...
...In Statecraft as Soulcraft, he commends President Johnson's statement that the Civil Rights Bill was enacted because "a man has a right not to be insulted in front of his children...
...It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg...
...They are not in the Founding Fathers (from whom he does not pretend to have learned much), nor in Abraham Lincoln (for whom he sometimes has a good word), nor even in Burke or Cicero...
...Parents," he says, continuing the exegesis of Keynes's quip, "do not think that way...
...I HAVE STARTED WITH BURKE because I want to detach modern American conservatives from their claim to a precursor as morally impressive as he is...
...If the nuclear disaster had occurred before Christmas time, when about 80 percent of the foie gras is imported and consumed, it would have been another story...
...Without pretending to the full aesthetic mastery of a Kissinger, one may feel that this aphorism suggests a nuance of the moral life which Will has never properly described...
...Spengler, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Dawson, all took a crack at it...
...Certainly, Bennett's stylistic affinities are with Will, too, more than with any of the eminent persons whom he summoned to his study group...
...learning...
...RECALL THAT IN WILL'S idea of political education, the docility of a good citizen is such that he may be compared to a vessel that needs only to be filled...
...We must go slowly here, for there do seem to be further signs that Bennett's sense of his occasion was somewhat ill-defined...
...It is for this reason that the good of a society's decision to foster tolerance can be seen by its members, few of whom would claim across-the-board tolerance as a personal disposition, but almost all of whom consent to it because they are taught to generalize from what tolerance they do possess and from the benefits they derive from the tolerance of others...
...He is, it seems to me, a paternalist, in the sense of the word defined by George Kateb: a holder of the view "that the state is expected to remain indifferent to no sort of behavior, no matter how private, but must endorse what it does not penalize, and become the moral parent and preceptor of otherwise wayward, weak, self-indulgent, or stubbornly transgressive creatures...
...a believer in the necessity of "soulcraft," and yet a very limited believer, according to the lowchurch style of the age, in the necessity of a revived Christian orthodoxy to augment the powers of the state: we have only begun to describe Will's politics, but what are we describing...
...Trudeau...
...Last summer," he recalls, "in a speech to the Knights of Columbus, I argued that 'Our values as a free people and the central values of the Judeo-Christian tradition are flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood.' For this," he laments, "I was called an Ayatollah...
...Now this is presumption...
...By contrast, the topos of "we need" always has an effect of bullying...
...Bennett went on to characterize the adversarial culture in a manner that more prudent conservatives have tended to avoid ever since the antiSemitic campaigns of Europe in the 1930s...
...So far, this is a familiar sermon...
...IN WILL'S THEORY OF CULTURE, our ideas, if rightly presented and candidly received, will exhibit a behavior as regular as that of a genetic code transmitted under ideal laboratory conditions...
...it must be moulded...
...We know, I say, and feel the force of money...
...Maybe we are back with the original paternalist, the author of The Republic...
...These make a curious pair of antitheses, as Bennett himself appears to recognize later on, when he writes that teachers "cannot be dispassionate about the works they teach...
...Yet it is striking that Will, as much as Jefferson, appears indifferent to the content of the faith he believes to be necessary...
...What is base...
...It's no good having the government muck around in people's lives...
...Will pictures educators building a state of mind which in turn produces good laws...
...and "the moral imagination of most Americans is," in his opinion, "sound...
...Jean Cocteau said . . .", "As Emerson says . . .": never mind what Cocteau has to do with Emerson, it is a commonplace occurrence for the reader to be led by Will, with distinguished and ill-sorted companions like these, through a pathless wilderness of sententiae, to emerge suddenly into a clearing somewhere near 800 words, at the prospect of a decided opinion on the advisability of sex education in Ferndale, California...
...456 Because the only practical instance of such a morality in his time came from religious belief, Jefferson wrote the sentence about God's wrath which Will finds awkward for his position...
...In response to learning cast in this mold, which is usually found in books with titles like Perennial Problems: Their Cause and Cure, it is fair to ask whether its narration follows the conven455 tions of grammar...
...Burke would gladly have seen Fox if he could, but he sent a message through his wife, to inform Mr...
...By contrast, it flourishes in the common culture of "most Americans...
...Is it, nevertheless, a manner in which a popular education in the history of morals can afford to conduct itself, in the format of twiceweekly seminars on the opinion page...
...It says that we had better act as if we believed religion's claims, even if that forces us to do some fancy bookkeeping...
...And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor...
...He thinks we have overestimated the value of tolerance, and so allowed it to drive out other, indispensable, moral goods...
...They are in fact anything but perennial questions...
...It was popularized by Kipling and reached its height in the years between the two great wars of this century...
...A close scanning of the previous page will yield a general answer (modern life, the subjective impulse, the decline of the West...
...Up to now I have been treating him in much the same way...
...and, if so, what adaptations we shall have to make...
...If we take this last remark as somehow consistent with the descriptions cited above, we arrive at a distinct but perplexing sense of Bennett's proposals...
...Further, let us, in imagination, place ourselves in that company...
...Again, like Marcuse, he does not shrink from the sacrifice of competing and apparently harmless practices...
...As for the American polity, it is less well fortified than Will believes it ought to be as the home base of all resistance...
...For, to the Declaration as a whole, the founders did believe that we must assent in order to enjoy the benefits of American society...
...Only ponderous constructions like these suffice to give Will the sanction he demands...
...This has not been the policy of conservatives at other times and in other places...
...But the same theme is resumed less temperately in his American Jewish Committee speech...
...This was not yet the case with Will when he wrote of a well-known leader, "He has relied so much on merchandising novelties that he has devalued the theatrical dimension of politics...
...and not about issues only, but about the comparative status of elected or appointed officials and the journalists through whom their positions are mediated...
...and we now call upon your Lordships for justice in this cause of money...
...If one were to try to parse this complex of intentions, the result would perhaps be something like, "Stimulate them with the humanities, but not too much...
...When we try to make sense of the ideas that form such a perspective, we may generalize about them by speaking of "ideology...
...Such a tradition was, he conceded, foreign to the history of American individualism...
...friendship...
...Here, then, are statistics that appear unambiguously to bear out the claims of a moral argument: the questions (we are asked to believe) were devised to register the precise distinctions between health and convenience, convenience and absence of distress, absence of distress and "in a word, happiness...
...But it was the regulation of conduct, more than the content of the regulative beliefs, that mainly concerned Jefferson, as his sentence about one God or twenty gods makes clear...
...As one who believes in the value of historical facts, and who knows that the facts say nothing without a perspective, I will try to explain more clearly than Bennett what is at issue here...
...The trouble is that he writes the kind of history in which ideas themselves have an agency, as if they operated independently of those who make or change them...
...Our linguistic habits are, in short, full of the conviction that abortion is wrong...
...APART FROM A FAMILY TREE OF THE FATHERS, paternalism needs to tell a story about the pertinence of their wisdom to the present generation...
...It follows that our moral obligations to each other may not require the aid of natural law theories, any more than the making of fire required the aid of the phlogiston theory...
...We began to see colleges listing their objectives as teaching such skills as reading, critical thinking and awareness of other points of view...
...Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate...
...To restate the fact in more familiar terms: he himself has been partly responsible for a recent innovation in American politics which seems to have changed republican mores for the worse...
...All the way to their assumption of power, they argued for the retrenchment or repeal of a variety of measures that began as innovations, but which the suffrage of American opinion has preferred to keep as traditions...
...I have found these words a calming and at times an almost sedative influence on my moods, but in lapses of attention I sometimes meditate a plausible extension of the ritual formula...
...Proper transmission, then, with proper reception, is to rescue from utter decadence a pedagogy which, at present, offers students a choice between two unpleasant extremes...
...However becalmed the life may be on campuses today, however many radicals of an earlier decade 464 give up the hortus siccus of dissent for the hortus conclusus of Wall Street, Bennett will not rest content until he is cured of his memories...
...The America to which Bennett wants to divert my loyalty has been cooked up in the past few years, on curious occasions like that of the secretary of education's speech, with its appeal to a Father of All Mercies under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee...
...We need, says Will, a literature of cheerful sociability...
...The federal government defines the poverty level as $5,360-a-year income for a single person, $7,240 for a family of two, $9,120 for a family of three and $11,000 for a family of four...
...The word seems to call attention to itself...
...And in the moral language of the same Americans, there is something repulsive, and something to be avoided, in empowering the government as an interested guardian to assure the full duration of an unwanted pregnancy and the birth of an unwanted child...
...If so, to be a faithful Jeffersonian will mean advocating religion as a fact of private life...
...Teaching is to be passionate in some way, but tending to no conclusion, and least of all an ideological one...
...At the same time, his sense of the texture of social life itself is rather abstract: certainly no more resourceful than the average person's, outside the class and milieu to which he or she belongs...
...Will's defense, when questioned about his coaching of Reagan, was that he was wholly sincere in estimating Reagan the better man in the debate: whatever his own commitments, this was also his honest opinion...
...Why do they decline...
...When pressed for details, Bennett replies that the ethic has to do with "moral imagination...
...There is, as all teachers know, an educational use of ideology and a repressive use of it...
...We call upon you for our liberties...
...For it is always in the power of a government to help certain virtues to prevail, by encouraging some prejudices at the expense of others...
...If asked to specify a particular version, Will, at any time from 1968 to 1986, has often retreated to broad allusions to the need "every community [has] for an 'economy of intolerance.' " This means that the citizens of a republic ought to be interested in legislating morality: as a case in point, Will has sometimes cited the civilrights legislation of the Johnson administration...
...That they are not to be violated but by his wrath...
...And this is where religion enters the scene: to complete the work of culture, by assembling the fragments and restoring the substance of our experience...
...Thus Will's bad modernists, like his good traditionalists, are always "contributing" to a project that comes before them, in this resembling the late-coming inheritors of a copyright...
...The year being 1986, our common culture was under assault by an adversarial culture...
...There on television was George Will defending the president's nomination to the federal bench of the barely literate Birch Society enthusiast and law school graduate Daniel Manion...
...Whose then is the failure of nerve...
...The phrase occurs once in the King James Bible, at Second Corinthians 1:3...
...As to which came first, the law or the state of mind, the answer is probably in this case the law...
...the mark of the latter is that it is concerned only with framing a rebuke to the past...
...But sometimes their figures of speech offer an alternative view of the process as one of siphoning: the aim of reading great books is "to tap the conscious memory of civilization," replies Bennett...
...As a critic of liberal individualism, however, Will belongs to a special class...
...But it is a phrase most commonly heard at the end of committee reports or academic reviews...
...If I have interpreted the argument rightly, it not only supplies some of the missing details of his educational policy, it also suggests that a strong motive of the policy from the start has been a reaction against the radical politics of the 1960s...
...IT WOULD SEEM TO FOLLOW FROM Bennett's analysis that we ought to demand, for the sake of our culture, a broader and deeper education in the humanities, however that may be brought about...
...These are eloquent words, though it would be difficult to say in what their eloquence consists: perhaps it is that they echo a sentiment which many people have always felt more deeply than they knew...
...So one must add that our habits are likewise full of reservations about compelling a mother to bear a child against her will...
...Of the county's 1.46 million residents, 250,000, or more than 17 percent, are at or below the poverty level defined by the federal government, according to George C. Zeller, the CEO planning research analyst who did the study...
...but acquiesce in them, almost without a word of explanation, as if another chapter of history had been written irrevocably...
...In the body count of their mimic wars between the ancients and moderns, they have started and finished wrong for a visible reason...
...Why do civilizations flourish...
...He compared its agents to a kind of virus: "Most Americans, of course, reject the perverted culture of our adversaries...
...Yet it is beginning to appear that in the years of Ronald Reagan's ascendancy, Will may have become, behind our backs and as it 460 were behind his own, a different moral quantity from what he set out to be...
...The belief was that in a free society, liberties could only be secure in the presence of a deeply shared common morality...
...Accordingly, he does not speak of teachers as "expounding" or "interpreting" their subjects...
...It was written in 1986, by a sentient being, a reader of the newspapers, the secretary of education of the United States...
...it is not to be accomplished by sharing a condition, like a state of health...
...Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude that he is in some sense a social democrat, or even a communitarian...
...But it is the last two of Bennett's "enduring, fundamental questions" that give the game away...
...In his account there have been two separate phases of our decline...
...What did they make of this at the American Jewish Committee...
...The growth of the menace was partly owing to the liberal's reliance on familiar and misleading slogans: the conceit, for example, of a political tabula rasa, in the form of an "open society" or "marketplace of ideas," with which the liberal deluded himself that moral debates in society would tend to their own resolution...
...But why...
...To Will, 459 however, this characteristic alone would serve to recommend any thinker...
...A society," he now continues, "that has no closed questions cannot count on remaining an open society...
...Yet he does this by quoting, as an example of "enjoyment" without "assent," the famous words of the Declaration of Independence, which do mention a Creator and "the protection of divine providence...
...It is true that the rights, freedoms, and liberties to which Bennett alludes may count as mercies on a broad construction of that word...
...This brings us to another curious detail of the same remark, the self-conscious insistence of its pre's: the constitution "presupposes efforts to predispose rising generations...
...The study, called the Poverty Indicators, was the third done in the past two years...
...But I am uncertain in what sense any of them is Judeo-Christian...
...The word soulcraft is apt to grate on an ear accustomed to English words...
...It is not quite at home in the language...
...The latter is not entirely separable from its frame of body...
...Hence (what may seem surprising in so severe a moralist) his exorbitant admiration for Henry Kissinger, the most successful antidemocratic statesman of our time—the style of whose memoirs Will compared to the style of Monet, and praised for covering "a large canvas with small strokes that have a remarkable cumulative effect...
...Indeed, he sometimes makes the jump in the space of a few lines, where it is impossible to miss what is happening...
...And we, the beneficiaries of his thinking, are free to sustain his belief as we choose, in keeping with the best plan we can devise for the coexistence of the two goods mentioned in these sentences: the survival of our liberties, and the survival of our morals...
...Nevertheless, respect for the individual, standards of individual behavior, and commitment to decency are as much RomanRepublican as they are Judeo-Christian virtues...
...As an agitator for a public philosophy, however, Will's innovation has been to borrow the authority, without the humility, of the older moralists whom he seeks to emulate...
...These last words would imply for the student a kind of thinking that Bennett wants to supplant by reception...
...Even the staunchest of Will's loyalists, as they look at the theatrical appreciations of The Morning After, may be puzzled to reconcile the milder words with the grosser offenses of the past three years...
...more real estate developers...
...It is with culture as with society...
...He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.' " Though these last sentences appear in quotation marks, they are incorporated in Will's argument almost as if they were his, and it is left to a reader of his endnotes to discover that they come from Lincoln's first debate with Douglas...
...The sort of questions that the conduct of Hastings prompted Burke to ask, they understand in advance that we will not expect them to ask about an Edwin Meese or a Michael Deaver...
...Finally let us take note of the respect we feel for, but also the distance we feel from, a revered presence we will never wholly come to know...
...He uses polls as he likes, to suit his need of the moment, and 450 without regard to the decadence of plebiscites...
...Bennett is no help...
...Many popular writers like Will, but many academic scholars too, are afraid that morality will be smashed to atoms if natural law ceases to be credited...
...He encumbers himself with embarrassments like these from a motive that remains steady throughout all his writings...
...It is (to conscript Will's favorite example against his favorite way of talking) an easy thing to say "We need a society free of racial bigotry...
...Now, religious freedom is not quite the same thing as religious faith, however much the unifying phrase "role of religion" may try to make them so...
...Now, Bennett's narrowly inspirational sense of the word derives from theirs, but at two removes...
...For they have been asked, at different times, with implications so widely disparate that one may feel the questions were really changing, even if the words stayed the same...
...more copy writers for public relations firms...
...Whoever thought of calling him that was a wit...
...IN THE SUMMER OF 1797, Burke was On his deathbed, and Charles James Fox, with whom he had broken ranks over the French Revolution, made inquiries in order to pay his last respects...
...and positively dull when compared with the nervous inquisitiveness of a rival columnist like Russell Baker...
...American individualism...
...and in proportion as we admired him, we were obliged to continue upholding that principle...
...The French have blocked the import of foie gras, frog legs, and snails from Eastern Europe...
...Now, this naturally fascinates him, from a censorial point of view: so much so that the subject of his argument seems to change without his noticing it...
...Throughout their polemics, therefore, they are obliged to be reticent about, or else cryptically to disguise, the political concerns that preoccupy them both...
...The division of the subject itself betrays a remarkable imprecision, like that of the baseball coach who split the game into three parts: first, playing...
...I believe the answer is that he himself, these many mornings after, across the boundary from the Carter to the Reagan administration, has become part of the "merchandise" in the "theatrical dimension" he began by criticizing...
...Such a student naturally wonders what a few books of history, or literature, or philosophy can do for his earnings...
...likewise the virtue of a human being is to be more human: a phrase, as we have already seen, which Will felt confident of his power to interpret and which, taken literally, meant the state of being heterosexual and not childless...
...but this, it may be added, is already a smaller demand than Will and many of his party now make...
...Indeed, the language of the Social Contract, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and the Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater, makes every adjustment it can to place this fact beyond doubt...
...Whereas now, for students who know about it at all, it holds interest only as a dead idea...
...But the role of an intellectual may sometimes be to challenge the common view of things...
...Burke and Lincoln pictured no educators in this sense, but a citizenry coming to self-knowledge, person by person, and seeing where the laws do and do not 454 answer to a state of mind they hold in common Decisions of this sort (it is part of Burke's and Lincoln's purpose to suggest) often take place in public, and not always at what has been designated a scene of instruction...
...Matters like these are less certain with Will...
...Perhaps they are if one adds, "in heavily reformed versions of both religions...
...Today the Commons of Great Britain prosecute the delinquents of India: tomorrow the delinquents of India may be the Commons of Great Britain...
...Will announces at the start that he is concerned with the "slowmotion barbarization from within of the few polities which are all that stand between today's worst regimes and the fulfillment of their barbaric ends...
...These were our precursors in coming to live by the ideas of justice, liberty, equality, and government with the consent of the governed, ideas which are "the glue that binds together our pluralistic nation...
...It is an institution that cannot affect to speak sincerely for public virtue, or the common good, or any of the more local values that conservatives evoke to shore up against the tidal weight of modernity...
...But the logic of his position is awkward, as is the logic of modern politics generally...
...Bennett wants to say: the modern liberal's or radical's...
...IV The confusion of "closed questions" with a regulated inner "state of mind" has marked Will's thinking all the way from his dissertation to his most recent columns...
...In a comment in Dissent, I remarked that there were great writers whom we could not use all of, and on the evidence of this diatribe Solzhenitsyn was one of them: he himself had not been rescued by his great force of spirit alone...
...What should be loved...
...It is a massive concatenation of notes, written in a lively middle-journalistic style, and, in its leading doctrines, indistinguishable from the mature writings of George Will...
...It can be "lifeless or tendentious, mechanical or ideological...
...YET BENNETT AND WILL, instead of ever suggesting a vindication of culture along these lines, have preferred to teach the great ideas as a master clue to the defense of the West...
...But Bennett needed to misconstrue the English language, and pay irrelevant compliments to the audience who stood him as proxies for most Americans, because his business on this occasion was not to educate but to raise morale...
...Even six years ago, when he arranged a party to introduce the new president to Washington, it could be said that Will was simply making the most of his contacts, and thus following a pattern which had never damaged the reputations of columnists like James Reston and William Safire...
...It is an extraordinary proposal and, therefore, its reasons have to go a long way back...
...One may regret this chiefly on the ground that we all hope to derive instruction from evidence that is indeed drawn from our linguistic usage...
...a past accomplishment that has now become fragile, and the destruction of which may be hastened by the neglect of its inheritors: civilization in this sense is a concept special to the historical thought of the last two hundred and fifty years...
...This picture of Will, I now have to report, was not quite accurate...
...Campus radicals," he says there, "nowadays tend to see the university as a kind of fortress at war with society, an arsenal whose principal task is to raise 'revolutionary consciousness,' frustrate the government, discredit authority and promote a radical transformation of society...
...All this is plausible, and a man like Will, whose favorite word is pedigree, would scarcely want to claim that it is original with him...
...At the university where I teach, there is a member of the faculty who greets a debate on almost any question by intoning a version of the following litany: "A university is an institution that exists for the creation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge, and for these tasks alone...
...A cultural faculty to supervise education in good morals, pursue a steady surveillance of personal conduct, and, where necessary, censure and punish delinquent morals...
...to say what is, for all of us, "more human": these accidents of phrasing point to a smugness more settled than mere complacency...
...Will aimed to replace these untenable notions with some version of a consciously articulated public philosophy...
...It is characteristic of Will that he should hasten past moments of reflection like this...
...Of course, Will writes in a nobler strain: "The abandonment of soulcraft was an abandonment of a pursuit of excellence...
...If one pushed this experiment further, one would very likely arrive at a complicated verdict...
...The key word is nowadays...
...Yet at this point Bennett seems to stop short: "I must emphasize," he warns, "that our aim is not to argue for more majors in the humanities, but to state as emphatically as we can that the humanities should have a place in the education of all...
...and that the problem is daily exhibited at the highest levels of presidential government...
...But what has distinguished Will's career thus far is the pertinacity with which he has survived exposures of a much swifter sort...
...But much more commonly in the balance of his writings, his own economy of intolerance has sided with such campaigns as those that would outlaw pornography, obstruct abortions, and qualify the legal application of constitutional rights to homosexuals...
...What comes is totalitarianism, which aims to reconstitute man to reduce him to raw material for history's processes and purposes...
...One may as well start by correcting a secondary but by no means trivial error...
...For example: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal...
...and readers faithful to a given opinion-maker will pardon his faults until they come to seem qualitative and essential...
...Just as the morals that bind us to each other gradually congeal into religious doctrine, so the little allegories that describe the process of cohesion itself appear to harden...
...Parents and schools are primary instruments of transmitting...
...What, then, does Will himself mean by soulcraft...
...And maybe, after all, the native overtones are merely incidental...
...The latest decline of standards, Bennett thinks, has been visible above all in the humanities, which are now often taught "in ways that discourage further study...
...A corollary lesson ought to be that the "core consensus" of the West is not singular but plural, with not a single tradition but several shifting ones...
...Citizenship is a state of mind...
...This, Will tells us, is just what was never provided by "the liberal-democratic political impulse that was born with Machiavelli and Hobbes...
...Or did he mean to suggest that these mercies included a protective tolerance of Jews in spite of their unbelief...
...This could not have been meant to suggest Will's assent to the politics of agrarian messianism that underlay Solzhenitsyn's criticisms, as a program well suited to modern America...
...But are we as free as this to alter bits of the cultural legacy...
...These sentences make a confused web of assertions to which I can only begin to do justice...
...but those arrangements also underlie our habits and dispositions...
...Fox that it has cost Mr...
...How then—by what feat of political aeronautics and smuggled metaphysics—can a modern conservative propose to write off history and experience together...
...VIII I have to conclude with what may seem an awkward confession...
...He published, for example, in March 1979, in the week before Three Mile Island, a resonant endorsement of the whole nuclear industry, a bill of health so comprehensive as to leave its critics on a par with believers in miasma, witchcraft, and other precivilized phantasms of pollution anxiety...
...It is that Jefferson's statements may themselves be read as harmonizing with a secularism which he only anticipated in part...
...Bagehot said of Macaulay that he had "an inexperiencing nature," and I think it would be plain to many of Will's readers in what sense these words apply to him...
...The mark of the former is that it assumes something may be learned from the past...
...Hegel and Carlyle fortified it with dramatic accounts of a hero who alone embodied the distinctive good and evil of a race...
...They allow us to join the company in a conversation...
...Rather, subjectivity came first and prepared the way: it is, in effect, the liberal parent of a radical child...
...A COMMON FEATURE OF THE PASSAGES quoted above is that they concentrate their blame on tolerance...
...We need a literature of cheerful sociability...
...As Burke wrote in another place, of an advantageous private connection which he believed himself obliged to refuse: "The operation of honour (as separated from conscience, which is not as between man and man but as between man and God) is to suppose the world acquainted with the transaction, and then to consider in what light the wise and virtuous would regard it...
...Somehow, Bennett has concluded that the move from listening to joining is also a move from impartiality to bias...
...This last word sound does much the same work in Bennett's analysis that the cover-virtue excellence did in Will's...
...Plainly Will does think in lists of names, but lists of names do not think...
...Of the latter Jefferson supposes only that they must share a strong belief in a common morality, a belief which religion alone in the eighteenth century seemed to support in the lives of most people...
...It would be shallow to suppose that Bennett sympathizes with this point of view...
...This was what happened to the phlogiston theory concerning the elementary matter once supposed to have caused fire...
...That it has no intention of doing so makes it a hollow, pretentious, after-dinner nuisance...
...The anti-Enlightenment argument against America has always begun here...
...The same is true of the theory of natural law: roughly speaking, the belief that our moral obligations to our neighbors and to other persons are true, and not only right and binding, because they were engraved on our hearts by God...
...But there are signs that is has been taken seriously in the Reagan administration...
...FOR THE MARKET IS JUST WHERE THE SPIRIT of reckless innovation begins...
...For many reasons, there is no big story here...
...The dubiousness of his procedure apart, I find as an American that the lofty tone in which it is carried off has become hard even to describe...
...Prescriptions of a similar pattern are, of course, mandatory in the work of a government critic, whether the republican mores he aims to correct are socialist or capitalist, and whether the state he serves is pluralistic or totalitarian...
...Events," Will reported, "have not contradicted most of what was said here about nuclear safety...
...The preMontaigne style of enlisting, for one's own provisional cause, the sayings of any number of sages, is a more dubious practice, because it strikes a slightly dishonest bargain with the unlettered reader's piety about tradition...
...Already in To Reclaim a Legacy, Bennett had noted that "intellectual authority" in the 1960s "came to be replaced by intellectual relativism as a guiding principle of the curriculum...
...Their good derives from their peculiar power to make us think, and the right use of that power is to reform, and not to console, the culture and society in which we are at home...
...It "isn't," he says, "something manufactured by the upper stratum of society in the elegant salons of 465 Washington, New York, or Cambridge...
...and ask them questions, with the aim of learning something...
...Students today Poverty has increased 40 percent in Cuyahoga County since 1980, with no signs of leveling off, according to a new study by the Council for Economic Opportunities in Greater Cleveland...
...I want to say, "The creation, transmission, preservation—and destruction of knowledge...
...Prejudice," wrote Burke, "renders a man's virtue his habit...
...They can make other points of view so vivid that even our shared life seems foreign to us for a while...
...But the description is, as we shall see, slightly disingenuous...
...Yet in the same essay (Notes on Virginia) he wrote: "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God...
...In one respect, however, both their motives and their judgment are intelligible even now...
...Yet, as the clause about the numbers of majors suggests, in doing so he aimed for a conclusion altogether congenial with the spirit of humanistic consumerism...
...But I cannot help observing that it looks like an effort to split the difference between the old virtues— prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice—and a native utilitarianism that reserves its highest position for the spirit of self-advancing enterprise...
...By a careful consideration of the leading conservative doctrines of moral education in the age of Reagan, I will show that Will, whom I take to be a significant case, and Bennett, whom I take to be a significant echo, have proposed habits of thought to shelter the culture of the past from the influence of the social and economic arrangements of the present...
...BENNETT IN THIS SPEECH argues that to preserve our way of life we shall have to inculcate religious belief by the agency of government itself...
...Given this conception of their role, it is noteworthy that they have professed innocence, and tried to assure the innocence of their public, concerning one main fact about our culture—its relationship to the social and economic arrangements of modern capitalism...
...It's almost like killing a person...
...One result is the displacement of old books by new ones, and if I had to choose I would side with the old...
...As a main cause of the crisis in the humanities, Bennett adduces the negligence of teachers themselves...
...This looks at first glance identical with, but proves on reflection to be much hardier than, his almost conventional distrust of individualism...
...It does, however, include expressions like these: "It isn't right, somehow...
...What it ought to cost him is some part of the reputation he holds for personal probity and public virtue...
...The two issues are brought together revealingly in a passage of Statecraft as Soulcraft: Writing in favor of religious toleration, Jefferson said something quoted and admired today: ". . it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God...
...But whose fault is this...
...The late twentieth century," writes Will, "needs what the midnineteenth century had, a Matthew Arnold to 461 insist that everything connected with culture, from literature through science, depends upon a network of received authority...
...And yet, to portray this relation as constant and reciprocal would require a complete revision of Will's understanding of a healthy republican education...
...On the other hand, if a coherent public morality can be sustained free of religious sanction, then one may as a good Jeffersonian advocate secular private beliefs, in addition to a secular public philosophy, and still suppose that one is helping to resist every imaginable form of social chaos...
...A completely and permanently open mind will be an empty mind—if it is a mind at all...
...Those who both know and assent to what they believe may prefer the older saying as the better one...
...It is understandable that a revival of the cold war would prompt a revival 462 of just such questions as these...
...Again, one does not have to assent to the religious beliefs that are at the heart of our common culture to enjoy its benefits...
...He has a more exalted idea of the state than of the community...
...He coached Ronald Reagan for his debate against Jimmy Carter, then went on the record with praise for Reagan as the superior debater, without ever declaring that to do so made him a double weight in the scale, the first time as a participant and the second time as a reporter...
...When they watch this president on television and see him gift-wrap lies (Our Founding Fathers the Terrorists), dissolve facts (the very existence of Americans who cannot find work), smile and forge ahead, they can hardly still rely on presuppositions and predispositions for guidance...
...Our habits and dispositions do underlie institutional arrangements...
...no, none of these, but)—"Excellence...
...To return to such matters often and insistently would be beyond bounds for a party loyalist...
...But their most inventive touch is to have lined up historical consciousness and an interest in human experience on the same side with totalitarian politics...
...Well, but what then...
...I do not rise to attack excellence...
...Others have argued that American society itself does not encourage further study of the humanities...
...for he saw that such acts of closure were not a matter of setting "ought" before "is...
...It is perhaps the same constitutional delicacy, combined, as it is, with theoretical assurance, that makes Will suspect our daily lives have no solidity, that they are capable at any moment of dissolving into something insubstantial and possibly anarchic...
...Thus, Lincoln was a careful reader of Burke, just where Will is an impatient disciple...
...Sometimes," he continues, "the humanities are used as if they were the handmaiden of ideology, subordinated to particular prejudices and valued or rejected on the basis of their relation to a certain social stance...
...For the situation is difficult, not because there is moral conviction on one side and tolerant immoralism on the other, but because our moral convictions make opposite claims at a great depth on both sides...
...As Will peers into the mind in the vessel, he sees that it not only exhibits behavior but possesses an inner state...
...Still, this does not dispose of Will's larger point...
...This is not just a matter of wily sarcasm—though, if one tries the experiment of imagining the same 452 retort in a column by Buckley, one may decide that it includes an element of that...
...The slightest of pretexts will often serve for Will to give a paternalist emphasis to his usual idea of tradition...
...Will has come to ask himself less and less whether such men would justify his conduct...
...It is the steady pursuit of good conduct, under the eye of such persuasion, where no division is recognized between public knowledge and private reassurances, that chiefly serves to distinguish the ethic of virtue which Will admires from the ethic of self-interest which in theory he despises...
...There remains an important sense in which public mores and personal impulses are mutually influential...
...Let us start by accepting Bennett's premise that "the highest purpose of reading is to be in the company of great souls...
...Indeed, it is perhaps merely an instinct, or an instinct informed by a reading of history, that finally decides one's choice of one principle or the other...
...In him, the empirical-sounding appeal to "our moral language" turns out to be an exordium to a performance that never occurs...
...On the contrary, they gave much thought to religious freedom, but left no provision for "the role of religion" in the forms of loyalty that they inculcated...
...466 he informed his listeners, "may grow up ignorant of the role of religion, of religious freedom and religious faith in American life...
...For Bennett does not believe that ideology and subjectivity are the twin perils of a single epoch...
...And that is a spirit full of concessions...
...and from each according to his ability, to each—but let us stop a moment at the phrase "we need...
...I will give reasons for concluding that their program is impracticable in its details, that it is founded on a shallow idea of tradition, and that it appeals to a superstitious belief in the dependence of a moral consensus on a shared religious faith...
...But the mention of Keats is awkward for a different reason...
...Still, it is noteworthy that Bennett's list of precursors—Athens, Florence, Enlightenment England and France—adds up to a largely secular tradition...
...Keen as his instincts are, on the track of any liberal cant-term, he falls here into the cant of the age by exhorting us to heed well the true worth of (unworldly riches...
...Will's argument proceeds 458 as if we could recover by cultural means the very things we lost in the processes of social development or decay...
...Nor is the disparity solely a matter of intellectual and argumentative strength...
...And there already is a first complication...
...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...
...The evidence is not only in that great document, but in the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and in other works by the authors of all of these, especially Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton...
...How then does he account for the melancholy fact of its decline, conspicuous in the stunting of so many later, smaller branches...
...But now, in a still more striking, if also more puzzling idiom, we have (Bennett, Stage 2) tradition as a sort of glue...
...It is rather that books which have been tested by a lot of people for a long time seem to me precisely those that teach the most about reading and are likeliest of all others to foster critical thinking...
...Perhaps the fairest conclusion is simply that, like many political commentators, he waited for his moment, and with Ronald Reagan's election his moment came...
...When Bennett agreed to speak to the American Jewish Committee, what exactly had he been told about his audience...
...Into a very short stretch of argument Bennett has here managed to compress two non sequiturs...
...But worse comes when man is defined not in terms of his nature but in terms of his history...
...Like most consistent individualists, I have an instinct (which looks to Will like the blindness of enlightenment) that tells me morals can in fact survive without such a prop...
...We call upon you for the preservation of our manners, of our virtues...
...If, instead of instructing a citizen in political life, one wanted to teach him how to play a game—say, chess—one would have to break the mold occasionally, since otherwise one would be condemning one's pupil to replay the same moves forever...
...I am sure such men would not justify my conduct...
...To begin with, it does not identify the "we" who need...
...it said not a word about what went on in the minds of citizens...
...A civilization, says Bennett, is transmitted by its teachers—"transmit" being a favorite word with him, as it is with Will...
...Here one may be conscious of a gratifying symmetry...
...But they still keep a soft place for Will, and exempt him from every stricture they correctly apply to the rest...
...It is, that a culture can save a society from itself...
...Bennett's position as the current secretary of education might have situated him to become an even more efficient publicist than Will...
...The Woolf-Moore-Marcuse Critique of Pure Tolerance appeared in time to receive an entry in Will's doctoral bibliography, and its ghost has had a flickering afterlife in his later writings as well...
Vol. 33 • September 1986 • No. 4
