George F. Will is a Sophister and Calculator

John McCain, who is in what Macbeth called "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, has revived an oldie from seven elections ago with a campaign commercial asserting: "We're worse off than we were four years ago."

. . . We do, unfortunately, live, as Edmund Burke lamented, in an age of "economists and calculators" who are eager to reduce all things to the dust of numeracy, neglecting what Burke called "the decent drapery of life." In this supposedly rational and scientific age, the thirst for simple metrics seduces people into a preoccupation with things that lend themselves to quantification.

There are good reasons to quote eminent sources. The most obviously defensible reason is that an old master came up with the idea you are trying to use and said it better than you could. Another one, less in favor nowadays, is more instinctual. Pre-Scholastic monks dropped scriptural phrases into their personal correspondences because they couldn't help themselves; it was simply in the air supply. I can see myself forgiving a third kind of quote-dropper who only wants to borrow a little authority and strengthen his argument through association or help his description by allusion.

George Will included phrases from Macbeth, Burke, and T. S. Eliot in his column this morning, and it is not at all clear what he thought he was doing. Was he trying to compare McCain to Macbeth? From the rest of the column it seems that Lear would have been better suited to his purpose. I got a kick of of the allusion because "the sear" (wrongly) made me think of "Ulalume," which made me think of Humbert Humbert, which made me laugh. I can't assume that Will meant for me to follow this fanciful chain of thought, but, since he doesn't give any clue as to what association he was trying to make, I can't really assume that he didn't.

But my hackles aren't up over Shakespeare. I've been guilty of bringing Hamlet in where he didn't belong; I'm in no position to judge. But Will's appeals to Burke, like those in McCain's CPAC speech, go beyond misuse into abuse. To quote in full the passage from which both "economists and calculators" and "decent drapery" are drawn:

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold a generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, achieved defensive nations, the nurse of the manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

. . . But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Burke, in this passage committed to memory by at least a hundred young men yearly, is talking about a highly undemocratic sense of nobility and purpose. Will uses it to evoke middle-class contentment. Burke's decent drapery was worth valuing because it incited action; Will's decent drapery is helpful insofar as it pacifies. Consider the difference between Burke's thousand swords leaping from their scabbards and Will's image of a McCain voter satisfied with his lot in life, and you will have an idea of how far Will has strayed from his source.

Will's thesis is that, for someone who prefers decent draperies to sophisters and economists, the question "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" points toward McCain and staying the course. But Burke's draperies are about honor rather than happiness, action rather than passivity; to apply them today would look like "Miniver Cheevy," not "McCain-Palin." Will can write all the hymns to bourgeois contentment he wants, but, if all he wants to do is remind voters that it's the little, non-quantifiable things that matter in life, he should leave Burke out of it. Name-dropping the man like this—and Will is not the first to do it—doesn't make Burkean conservatives think you're on their team. It makes them think you don't know what you're talking about.