 George F. Will: It is time to serve the soul By Craig M. Kibler The Presbyterian Layman Volume 34, Number 5 Posted July 6, 2001
“It’s a wonderful time to be alive in terms of medicine,” Will said. “Do you realize that it was not until 1914 that the average visit to the doctor did more good than harm? “We valued doctors at that time for what? For their bedside manners. That’s all they had. Doctors could make you comfortable and nature healed you or killed you. It was about that time that Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice, said that if you took all the medicine in the world and threw it into the ocean, it would be better for the people and worse for the fish. “To be serious, 100 years ago one in four American children died before age 14. If your child got diabetes, you watched your child go blind and die. It’s a good time to be alive. We have done much to preserve the body. All I’m saying is that it is now time for us to do as much to serve the soul.” The ABC News commentator, Newsweek contributing editor, syndicated newspaper columnist and author of Statecraft As Soulcraft and other books spoke at a June 8 program sponsored by the Presbyterian Lay Committee. Parker T. Williamson, chief executive officer of the Presbyterian Lay Committee and editor in chief of its publications, introduced Will by inviting the audience “to reflect through the words of our speaker on what it means to be a 21st century Christian in the 21st century culture.” Will didn’t waste any time identifying with the audience, telling them, “I know I come to you at a time when you have conflicts and arguments and a bit of stress, and some of you are anxious about the future. Let me begin by telling you that I come before you as a fan of the first-place Chicago Cubs. Together we stand while hope remains.” By turns professorial and humorous, Will mixed his comments on a variety of topics – the soul of the country, good citizenship, politics – with more stories about baseball. “You are asking yourselves what every serious political philosopher asks – what politics at the end of the day is about, which is the great question of how we should live. And you are concerned, as we in Washington increasingly are, because we are concerned about the condition of the culture and how that complicates the business of being a good American citizen. We are worried today, as we have been for more than two centuries, about the soul of our country. That’s frankly religious language that is woven into our history,” he said. On the pervasive growth of the modern age, Will said “none of (Karl Marx’s) predictions have come true yet. One of his predictions was that in the modern and industrial age all pre-industrial phenomena, all the forces that shaped the world before the Industrial Revolution, would disappear. Under the bright light of the white heat of science, religion itself would disappear.” “Well, we in the United States are (A) the most modern of nations and (B) the most observant, the most devout, the most religious of all modern nations. That tells you something: that there is no incompatibility at all between being a modern nation and being as faithful as we were when we were launched as the first new nation of the great modern age. “But Marx did say one thing. It was more or less true. He said that politics is necessarily an epi-phenomena. What he meant, and he was right, was that politics is sometimes like a cork on a stream – and the stream is culture. But the real fight for the good society is the fight to control culture, to shape it, and there is no force more shaping of culture, particularly in this country, than religious belief.” Later, while discussing two theories about practical politics and their effect on culture, Will said “there is a great conservative insight and there is a great liberal insight. The great conservative insight is that the culture of a society – more than the politics of a society – determines the success of that society. The great liberal insight is that the politics of a society can have a shaping influence, for good or ill, on the society.” Will painted two revealing concepts acting at the same time within today’s culture. “Since the Enlightenment,” he said, “since the 18th century when America was born, we have tended to define human well-being in terms of independence. Independence. Well, it’s never too late to ask the question, Independent from what? We have tended to say that self-sufficiency is the condition we should aspire to. But sufficient for what? Independence, self-sufficiency are recipes for a radical autonomy that postulates human beings as responsible to no power higher than their own wills or appetites.” In closing, Will brought the audience full circle by returning to the theme of the soul. “Now, what Abraham Lincoln called the silent artillery of time has destroyed many ideas in the last 2,000 years, but you are here, drawn here by an idea 2,000 years old and going strong, impervious to the silent artillery of time,” he said, adding: “You are here because you believe, as I do, that the soul of the country is in constant jeopardy, that there are aspects to modern life, aspects of the American political assumptions, aspects of the American economic system, that can – unless combatted – become perilous to the soul of the country.” |
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