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Logic, Anyone?
 I’ve
made a career of writing about politics,
but I’ve never had political ambitions myself. It just never crossed my
mind to go into politics (unless you count the short time that I was a
candidate for vice president). Just the opposite. I wanted politics to leave my
family and me alone.  Communism, the ultimate form of politics, horrified me.
My hero was Bill
Buckley, who went into politics only to mock it when he ran his hilarious
campaign for mayor of New York in 1965. I imitated him and dreamed of
writing for his magazine, National Review. That dream came
true only seven years later, in 1972. I was terribly green, but Bill and his
team were extremely kind and encouraging. They nursed me along until I was
able to make an independent career, before I finally left the magazine in
1993. It was an unpleasant departure, but I still have happy dreams of
working there.
Jeffrey Hart, my old
friend and senior colleague at National Review, has written a
splendid history of the magazine, The Making of the American
Conservative Mind. I can eagerly recommend it to everyone, but I
wonder if anyone can enjoy it as much as I do. It brings back so many dear
memories I can hardly read it without weeping. For me Jeff’s portrait
of old James Burnham, our gentle wizard, is by itself well worth the price of
the book. No novelist could have brought Jim so vividly back to life.
I can find only one
striking omission: the hilarity Jeff himself brought to the office. Bill Buckley
was justly famous for his wit, but Jeff’s humor was a quick, explosive,
diaphragm-spraining, laugh-till-you-choke kind of thing. After wiping the tears
away I’d wonder how he did it. His jokes were sudden as lightning and,
though highly literate, not necessarily inhibited by good taste. He could have
gotten us all arrested.
Of my own writing, Jeff
once observed, “Your real subject is bad faith.” That was
typically perceptive of him. My instinct, trained by reading Bill Buckley, G.K.
Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis, has always been to hold people to what they say,
to examine the implications of their words, and to ask if they can really mean
it. In short, to demand consistency.
Some people find this a
highly offensive habit, like spitting tobacco juice on their floor. I’ve
never understood this reaction. As far as I’m concerned, if you say
something, you should be prepared to stand by it. If you say you believe in
racial or sexual equality, don’t turn around and tell me you want the
government to favor one race or sex over another. Choose any premise you
like, but stick to it; or don’t act persecuted if you’re caught in
double-talk.
![[Breaker quote for Logic, Anyone?: The sin of consistency]](2006breakers/061218.gif) Unfortunately,
human nature being what it is, people
can get furious when you catch them in inconsistency, which is often a sign
of their own hypocrisy — “bad faith” indeed. So they often
accuse you of “hate” — racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, or
(the latest cant-term) homophobia. I started out nailing liberal hypocrisy, but
more recently I’ve given conservatives the same treatment. I have
about four friends left.
In the mid 1980s, long
before neoconservatives became a household word, I saw, and wrote, that
this crowd was trying to steer the United States into war with the Arabs.
Here, alas, Jeff, who otherwise writes very generously of me, gets it wrong
when he says that I’d been “bitten by the anti-Semitic
bug.” In fact, I’d become disillusioned with Zionism, no longer
believed that the state of Israel was our “reliable ally” (the
Pollard spy case took care of that one), and was worried about my two
teenage sons: there was talk of reinstating the draft, and I didn’t
want them dying in the desert.
Sure enough, some of
the neocons were soon accusing me of anti-Semitism and even the kind of
talk that “led to the Holocaust.” They’ve turned out to
be implacable enemies, unappeased even after getting (in spite of my heroic
efforts) two wars in the Middle East. More recently they’ve called me
“anti-American”! I must have affronted their deep patriotism.
Well, you can’t
please everyone. But if you demand consistency, you can come pretty close
to offending everyone. I sometimes have my doubts that Socrates would
have lasted very long in today’s atmosphere. But at least my boys are
still alive.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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