By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, December 31, 2017
I do not much care for New Year’s Eve. I like most of the
constituents — champagne, parties, etc. — but there’s something about New
Year’s Eve parties that always seems to me a little sad. You see the same thing
on Valentine’s Day: people desperately trying to have a good time, or
desperately trying to convince themselves they’re having a good time. I have
reached the stage in life when I will walk a mile out of my way to avoid the
company of people who use “party” as a verb.
I do like resolutions.
Resolutions are like wedding vows: Making them is easy,
but keeping them is another thing. It’s hard.
It isn’t too difficult to stay on the straight and narrow for a little while,
for a few weeks or months or even years, but forever is . . . forever. I
suppose that is why they tell alcoholics to try to manage themselves “one day
at a time.” Not having a drink today is manageable by comparison to the
vastness of the rest of one’s days, and eternity gets here soon enough.
We are works in progress. Sometimes, we are works in
regress. (As the poet said, the opposite of progress is Congress.) I always
looked forward to the first day of school (and still look forward to that time
of year) because it feels like the real new year, the time of blank slates and
fresh starts and new beginnings. My summers were long and hot and boring (if
you were good at school but not very good at much of anything else, you’ll
understand) and the beginning of the school year was rich with potential, an
invitation to explore the great mystery of (adolescence is a time of great and
sometimes comical self-involvement) who I was becoming. What’s strange is that
you already know. Nobody had to tell twelve-year-old me that I was a Latin guy
and not a Spanish guy. I knew. Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non
Possunt Nefas Est.
We are works in progress. Or so we like to think. This
will be the year. This will be the year that I . . . whatever it is you’ve been
wanting from yourself but haven’t given to yourself. Starting that business,
finishing your degree, finding love, writing a book, losing that weight,
learning to fly an airplane, finally taking your love to Paris. And there is
progress. Whatever the cynics say, people do change. I have seen physical,
financial, and moral transformations that I could scarcely believe. I’ve seen a
few men go the road of the righteous, as the song says, and by God I’m sure
I’ve seen some more go their blessed way.
We are works in progress. But we aren’t blank slates. And
that is something that ought to complicate our moral thinking. A great deal of
what we call “character” is almost certainly congenital in much the same way as
our heights or the shapes of our noses. My friend Charles Murray got (and gets
still) no end of grief for considering the question of how we ought to think
socially and politically about intelligence in light of how strongly heritable
IQ is, but that question isn’t going away — not in a modern global economy that
values intelligence above almost everything else. Intelligent people tend to
think of intelligence as a virtue, but if there’s no more virtue in being
intelligent (as distinct from being educated)
than there is in being tall or having red hair, shouldn’t that inform how we
think about people who are less successful in life, and, indeed, how we think
about people who are more successful? And what if, as seems to be the case, the
same holds broadly true for such character traits as the inclination to delay
gratification or to be able to thrive by cooperating in social groups? You can
resolve to finish your associate’s degree this year, but you can’t really
resolve to add 20 IQ points. You can resolve to try to be easier to get along
with (I know something about that) but it may be the case that you simply are
what you are, that you can only go so far from a starting point that you didn’t
choose and would not have chosen.
We Americans — and especially we libertarian-leaning,
free-market types — are very deeply invested in our belief in free will. It is
difficult to have an intellectually coherent Christian theology without it. (My
Calvinist friends will forgive me, as indeed they are predestined to do.) It is
similarly difficult to maintain an intellectually coherent ethical defense of
Anglo-American liberalism without recourse to the doctrine of free will. Most
of us would object to an arrangement in which one’s place in life — economic,
social, and political — was determined mainly by one’s height. But we are well
on our way toward building a society in which one’s standing is determined
almost exclusively by intelligence, which is no more justly distributed or
redistributable. In Adam Smith and in Thomas Jefferson we encounter the idea of
a “natural aristocracy” of intelligence and energy, what we now call
“meritocracy.” But what if there isn’t as much merit in it as we imagine? What if it is just the case that people
are what they are, and that their ability to change that is much more radically
constricted than we had imagined?
Here perhaps we are called to engage those old virtues
that bring very little return in the marketplace, charity chief among them,
making room for the actual facts of human life and the actual condition of such
fallen creatures as ourselves somewhere in our political and economic theories.
There’s a little irony in there: It is, after all, capitalism and capitalism
alone that has created a society rich enough that we could well do away with
our censorious rhetoric about the “deserving” poor and worry a little bit less about
who really deserves what, there being
more than enough to go around. A system built on self-interest and
profit-seeking has produced a situation in which nobody really has to be poor,
at least not in the sense we used the word “poor” until 20 minutes ago.
A lawyer friend of mine used to raise his glass and say:
“Maybe we’ll get what we want. Maybe we won’t. Just as long as we don’t get
what we deserve!” Amen, and amen. Yes, we want our deadbeat brothers-in-law to
be better, to get a job, to get squared away, and we want better from
ourselves, too. And maybe we’ll manage it this year.
I won’t share any of my own New Year’s resolutions,
because they’re none of your goddamned business, except to say that I intend to
do what I can to honor those precious men and women who have taken on the
difficult and often thankless task of trying to be my friends by not meditating
too deeply on the resolutions I think other
people should be making, to better take people as I find them, which ought to
be easier for a reprobate such as myself but isn’t. Hamdun al-Qassar is said to
have advised his followers to think of 70 excuses for the errant friends among
them, but that’s 69 more than we need. There’s only one that’s really ever
mattered, the same one we’ve always had. They that are whole have no need of
the Physician, nor of excuses, nor of pledges to finally do better this year.
The rest of us have our resolutions and, if we’re lucky, some friends who won’t
remind us about them too often.
