Samuel Johnson develops and exemplifies a deep, perenial philosophuy of Conservatism, whereby unchanging and distinctive ideas concerning authority and inevitability is to be compared with ythe Liberal idea of remediation and the distinctiveness of indioviduals rather than the Conservative bent to see institutions as incomparale to one another.
You might be confused or misled as to Johnson’s conservatism if you only consult his politics because he feels sorry for the poor rather than blame them for their misery in his essay “Capital Punishment” (Rambler 114, 1751). Johnson argues that it is disproportionate to give the ultimate punishment for anything other than the ultimate crime of murder. It cheapens the act. And, practically speaking, he is in agreement with contemporary Liberals that applying capital punishment to a robbery might lead criminals to kill people so as to avoid being caught for a robbery because there is nothing left to lose, either one getting the death penalty. Johnson is therefore less committed to the idea of increasing penalties in the service of the necessary ideal of law and order as fundamental to social life in general, looting or similar crimes a threat to the very social order, a threat to the social compact, rather than an unseemly excess beyond the customary and regular societal peace that presides in most times.
A Liberal humanitarian would argue about the poor and prostitution that those evils could be eradicated or renamed. The poor could be abolished by giving them work or subsidies. Prostitution would lose its stigma if it were renamed as sex workers and provided with health care. But that is not the basis of Johnson’s view of these issues. These are vices that are inevitable. The poor will always be with us and so give them gin as a solace to their wretchedness. What allows sympathy to them is that they are no threat to the social order while real threats such as the American Revolution are castigated by Johnson. That distinction between social nuisances and social dangers goes deeply into the Conservative consciousness. Looting is a threat to social order and Conservatives want to go hard on that while killing a spouse for adultery ios a personal matter and not likely to be repeated and so no threat to social order. Liberals have it backwards. Some unrest such as looting may attend social unrest and social change and so to be excused as growing pains while personal insults through murder show deadly lust to be outside and therefore against our social order and therefore to be sanctioned by law just as the approbation of people absent of human feeling, like Meursault in Camus’ “The Stranger” is an existential assault against the very idea od a social order.
Another topic which might seem humanitarian is Johnson’s consideration of “A Prostitute’s Story” (Rambler, 170, 171, 1751), which he might be too prudish to write about as a topic given his own reluctance to go backstage to David Garrick’s theatre because he would have been excited, as he said, to the boobies he saw. But he offers two essays in the Rambler on prostitution that provide the life of a prostitute from her point of view that makes her quite sympathetic even if fallen into a very bad fallen way. Those two essays combined, in some six pages, provide a detailed life that is comparable to “The Tale of the Wife of Bath” and “Madame Bovary” but is not quite appreciated as literature because it is so short, is without dialogue, and Johnson’s style of writing is so condensed, so turgid, that it is difficult to appreciate the emotions and the drama of those two essays.
How was Johnson to make people sympathetic to a situation people regard as to be disdained and so essential as a model of immorality that immodesty in the story of Adam and Eve is treated as the sign of a fallen soul? Prostitution is the arch enemy of all morality and Johnson does not want to shelve that standard. He does so by relating a story rather than an argument and puts it as a first person narrative so as to see the protagonist’s point of view. Moreover, he uses the trope of a well born person who has to deal with reverses so as to make the protagonist plausible as being out of the ordinary as also happens in Oedipus Rex where a high born son is raised by shepherds and in Exodus where an apparently abandoned child is raised by a princess and so is both noble and tied to his people. In this case, a girl is taken from a poorer family to a wealthy one so as to improve herself and well treated but financially dependent until old enough for her benefactor to take a sexual interest in her and she, having what we would call groomed for her ripple has no choice but to acquiesce.
Sixty years later than Johnson, in a more delicate time, Jane Austen uses the same trope. A young girl is taken to a wealthy relative to live in Mansfield Park and it is not clear whether this is a usual or unusual event through which to deal with poor relations. But this is a comedy and so the story goes topsy turvy. The young girl, Fanny Price, is rewarded with a horse for her passive aggression although the other children in the family do disfavor her and so don’t ask her to play at theatricals which comes to her advantage because Sir Bertrum comes home unexpectedly and disapproves of theatricals.Fanny gets her way, her eventual revenge, by marrying one of her erstwhile brothers, who is a clergyman, and Jane Austen knows is a role of low esteem, lie Mr. Collins in “Pride and Prejudice” but Fanny is satisfied to settle down to a life higher than her origins but less than that of the Bertram family. Austen is providing a very ironic view, even a parody, of what can happen to an apparently lost girl.
That trope of Johnson’s is not at all invoked forty years earlier than Johnson in Defoe’s “Moll Flanders” where a child is put out to a charitable institution when her mother is transported from England. Commentators say that Moll Flanders, the baby who grows up to be a prostitute, is always calculating, an entrepreneur of sorts, but she is simply trying to find what kind of occupation to enter because in city life an income is dependant on finding employment while rural people can get by with penury, finding a husband to take care of, while cities require money for service. Johnson’s prostitute is like Moll Flanders in that both of them think the way out is to be transported faraway to a new place where their own histories could be erased. That is not what Johnson's Marisa only wants. Johnson reports the way the girl alters her ambitions, always hoping against hope that some unlikely good fortune will occur, that a lover will become trustworthy or she can find a different employment, but always disappointed. She is like the high class beauty in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” where the woman descends as she ages to ever less favorable consorts until in despair she indulges in suicide. Johnson does not consider that melodramatic outcome, only permanent degradation and the ever increased crassness of spirit so that the protagonist is rendered as more poignant than either tragic or a moral example, which is quite a literary achievement on his part oin his six pages of two essays. But that is not in any way lessen the conservative idea that prostitution is both a major moral sin and inevitable, part of the human condition.
There is an even deeper distinction between the Conservative approach to social problems and the Liberal approach to social problems. Conservatives treat each of these problems as distinctive enough to be considered sui generous or quite accurately as unique, which means not only different but one of a kind. Poverty, prostitution and such other social matters as pregnancy ort childraising and legality and warfare are aspects of social life that cannot be compared with one another, just existing as another one of the human inventory that is inevitable and to be managed as best it can be by looking at its own concatenation of properties rather than pursuing the Liberal approach which is to find the common denominator of so many of these problems and treating them as alike having discovered the essence of them all. So poverty and prostitution and the rest are the result of exploitation or of inferior resources and so both can be eliminated by making people free of their mind forged manacles or by providing money which is the universal solvent. Conservatives see themselves as more sophisticated than those simple minded liberals who want to use the same tool to every mangled gadget. Life is far more complicated than that, though complication is an excuse for saying that remediation is largely hopeless in the fact of the inextricable aspect of the social world being addressed. Liberals may be simple minded but giving pensions to old people does give them money enough to live on.
So to a Conservative like Johnson, poverty is not to be abolished, even if in “Hosea” the prophet says a nation will be judged on how a nation treats its poor. Similarly, punishment is inevitable rather than an indication of a malfunctioning society that has not been able to make all its members productive, prisoners and the executed to be treated as the failures of social construction who are blamed for the failures imposed on them. Prostitution, in that Conservative light, is an inevitable fact of the innate disparities between male and female desire and there is no need to engage in recriminations or to rename prostitutes as sexworkers even if in favor of providing health clinics to prostitutes because the practice will always be here with us unless we follow the liberal line and make sex available to everyone, by the affluent as well as the needy, which is to destroy the idea of sexual propriety entirely, rather than see it just evolve, because for it to evolve is for it to be diminished, Johnson, Defoe and Jane Austen would think such abandonment of virtue a bad idea because sexual morality is not just a custom; it is a feature of social life itself.
Johnson displays his deep Conservatism as well in an essay of his, “Literary Imitation” (Rambler, 121, 1751). Johnson provides a deeper basis for Conservatism. It is buoi;lt from most general and inevitable roots that others might miss but that Conservatives should regularly cite if they are articulate enough to assert what they sense about authority. Moreover, Johnson engages in the subtleties of literature to see how a normal consciousness is also constrained and to be understood through literature.
Johnson begins by pursuing a crucial distinction he often makes between truth and opinion. Some people are knowledgeable enough or certified as such to be considered experts and it makes sense for people to defer to them on their expertise. That applies to medical doctors, doctors of philosophy, and mothers who have trained themselves in cooking. Most people do not manage more than one area of expertise and all people are subject to the expertise of so many others. That is just the nature of thins and is countered by people like Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist whose book “Obedience To Authotity” claimed thatpeople were likely to be intimidated by experts to do things that were immoral, which in this case was torture people in the guise of a psychological experiment, where in fact no harm was being done and so the subjects who complied had done right though Milgram was fearful that people could be brainwashed into doing immoral activities. Everyone should make up their own minds, contrary to the fact that for most things people had to obey authority just to get through the day.
This idea that the world is organized around experts, each one with its own specialty, can be specified into the political realm. Some people are rulers while others are ruled, the assignment of roles arbitrary or foisted upon people by force or custom not preparation and elite certification. A king may grow into being a king, like Henry V in Shakespeare or a leader may not rise to the occasion, as happened with Donald Trump,and everyone is stuck with an inexperienced political leader. Moreover, it has always been a bit of Conservative wisdom that different kinds of expertise are in competition with one another and a polity is safeguarded by having multiple sources of power. Every state of the union can safeguard its prerogatives so as to keep an overbearing federal government to interrupt individual liberties, that principle grounded in the idea of multiple elites whereby Popes and Presidents and senators and mayors joust with their independent privileges. It cannot be otherwise despite foolhardy Liberals and Populists who think that people were to be regarded as equal or sufficiently able to understand politics or other expert people or even worse than that, as Progressives think, that the lower rungs of social class know and appreciate more than elitists or even worse yet, that Populists think that everyone could use common sense as a way to equalize the expert with the layman.
Then Johnson makes the astonishing leap to treat the division between knowledge and opinion not only to social structure and politics to literature on the grounds that how people manage or respond to literature, the tricks whereby they evade and engage it in so many different ways reveals the way that consciousness reveals itself and that attests to the inevitability of hierarchy in mind as well as in life. Johnson makes the still startling observation that the Roman writers were all inferior to the Greek writers, citing the Aeneid as just a joining together of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I cannot deny that, noting that only Genesis and Samuel I and Samuel II are of as high a literary category as the Greeks, and nothing equivalent is reached again until Shakespeare and the nineteenth century English novel. The whole point is that literature is always ranked even if some contemporary critics have disdain for quality and so reject the idea of a canon of works that people can test themselves against as models of grand lives and oft repeated situations, every person having many lives of vicarious experience to use for real life, and instead will treat anything they come across, particularly the politically topical, as worthy of attention.
Following that, Johnson attends to Shakespeare, and shows in “Othello” that the unravelling of the story seems to a reader both inevitable and yet to be avoided in its conclusion if Othello had not been unravelled by Iago’s malignancy, given that so many people surrounding Othello seem normal people. The play is a mystery as perhaps all tragedies are. To which Johnson adds, in a display of deep and learned insights in this single short essay, that English poetry is impoverished because it is difficult to find rhymes when it is easy in Italian and so there is less thought in English poetry than might otherwise be the case. A further insight is that older English poetry, like Spenser, is to be appreciated for its obscurity, as I would say is the case with the Latin Mass and Hebrew prayers, however much more accommodating is the present secular language. All of these issues respond to relative difficulty, as part of the way people think and feel, and so are evidence of the inevitability of hierarchy.
Following Johnson’s idea that literature informs life and consciousness, in its forms and substance, apply what can be learned from Johnson’s own Georgian rhetoric, so different from the clarity of the poets and writers like Pope and Hume in the early part of the eighteenth century and the romantic impulse at the end of the century to informality and deep emotion just barely apperceived from experience. I cite the first paragraph of that essay to show how it reveals a way of thinking as well as to note its turgid style.:
“I have been informed by a letter from one of the universities that among the young from whom the next swarm of reasoners is to learn philosophy, and the next flight of beauties to hear elegies and sonnets, there are many who, instead of endeavoring by books and meditation to form their own opinions, content themselves with the secondary knowledge which a convenient bench in a coffee house can supply; and, without any examination or distinction, adopt the criticisms and remarks which happen to drop from those who have risen, by merit or fortune to reputation and authority.”
Johnson, as a good writer, is adroit in providing concrete instances so as to make his abstractions into stories, as when he follows a student to a coffeehouse so as to find it easier to imbibe of opinion rather than engage in the hard work of mastering ideas.More than that, he is concise in putting a lot of information into each sentence, where he specifies that there are two types of students, those who do philosophy and those who will study literature, lest a reader think Johnson was mentioning one or the other and assuring, nevertheless, that they are still two separate things. Most distinctive of Johnson’s prose is that it balances its sentences in a way that today we would say is to form a “on the one hand and then the other” sentence, Johnson using phrases to qualify one another and so make exceptions to the main premise of the sentence, concluding by balancing off the initial claim with a different one and so completing a thought, which means that phrases are apposite one another, and that is what happens in the thinking process: contrasts as compensating thoughts so as to achieve judiciousness and at least the app[earence of wisdom. Coffee house students get on the cheap from those who have earned their opinions. The contrast is paradoxical but that is the heart of thinking: to qualify and do it again and again.
There is a Liberal alternative to Johnson’s Conservative view that literature is an hierarchy of moral and situational and aesthetic exemplars which readers and viewers try to emulate to make them better or more understanding people. The Liberal view does not contradict the Conservative view but prizes a different aspect of literature, which is prized for paying close attention to the distinctiveness of the object of attention so as to notice in it in a text or painting what had not been noticed, Every art object has depths and nuances and peculiarities that make it essentially itself, Not only are novelists different from one another but each of their novels, if they are any good, manage to convey or establish a distinctive world view and so Austen’s “Emma”, whose heroine is unhinged to morality however tied to family has different concerns and options than does Anne Elliot in “Persuasion”, who is practical minded and so independent despite her reliance on her family and their advice. Emma is about freedom of choice while Anne is about making do. Very different if you look closely, each work of art is noticed for its incomparable quality rather than as in sociology, which is a discipline which asks for generalities whereby different things are like one another rather than distinctive if you are keen enough to notice.
That sense of distinctiveness applies in general to the Liberal idea that every person is to be regarded as distinctive and encouraged and admired for distinctive traits. Every person is precious for their individuality even if their own particular consciousness is shared with many otters in being conventional without having striven very much to be conventional, just felt comfortable being so, because every consciousness is is subjective and therefore untransparent but still a creature of self-consciousness as well as consciousness.And so the Liberality of literature is not just that it takes each person as they are but expands its horizon so that epics were about great figures: heroes and gods and essential forces, but inclusive in the novel of people otherwise unrecorded, people within their lives that were worthy of having their stories top;ld even if anonymous to history.
A good example of the Liberal rather than the sociological approach that is also not Conservative was offered in that appropriately entitled collection called “The Liberal Imagination” by the literary critic Lionel Trilling in 1950. One of his essays was about the then current and controversial Kinsey Report on Human Sexuality which claimed to survey the relative percentages of sexual behaviors and so could say ten percent of males had some homosexual encounter, a claim disputed by other social scientists on the grounds that Kinsey had not engaged in scientific sampling but just added up the people he found willing to submit to his survey. Trilling took a different tack, trying to access what was the gist of the Kinsey enterprise and that he had reduced sex to behavior rather than that of feelings and so rid sex of its own special field of endeavor, cheapening it rather than finding a clever way to approach the subject by avoiding its inherent qualities. The point of treating something about a work of literature, even for a purportedly scientific study, is not to miss the point but to get what it truly entails. Whether about a Browning poem or a scientific report. They are all pages with words and so grist for the mill of literary criticism just as sociologists would claim that there are sociologies of science and sexuality and politics by showing how the particular is a specification of the general, so that some nations are authoritarian and some studies are inherently flawed by their methods.