Mr. Gopnik and Dr. Johnson

Dr. John's good heart came in large part from his making his life "one long escape from [himself.]"

By contrast, the hard heartedness we see more and more of every day comes in large part from people who make their lives one long escape from anything *except* themselves.

The root "ecstasy" is "ekstasis" or "standing outside oneself," a practice more likely to be bring ecstasy in the vernacular sense -- or contentment at least -- both to others and to oneself than the therapeutic search for the self and for "self-fulfillment," which is at least half-way like the Holy Roman Empire.

All of this is why, if one is dwelling on what has Philip Rieff called "the mind of the moralist," Dr. Johnson's is the mind on which to dwell, instead of Dr. Freud's.

PS: Authority, charity, anti-imperialism (foreign and domestic), and Christian faith sounds like an excellent political platform to me, as it consists of the four things we need more of rather than less -- and four things that turn out to be the same thing the closer one looks.

sigaliris: I might be wrong, and you've probably read much more Johnson than me, but the only thing I remember about his dislike of Americans was slavery. He saw the US Revolution as being, because of slavery, an act of hypocrisy AND NOTHING MORE. He also saw the English Whigs as being milder versions of Americans, with their cant about liberty but unconcern for the poor. My take on this is that the US Revolution was an act of hypocrisy BUT NOT ONLY THAT.

That's an interesting point, rombald, and you could be right. I'm not really a Johnson scholar, either, and too busy right now to go off on a fact-checking tangent. My own impression was that Johnson was outraged by revolutionaries of any stamp, as they went against the natural order of things, and I think Derek's quote supports that impression. To generalize from Johnson, I've always been a bit puzzled by American conservatism for that very reason. American conservatism has labored mightily with crafty exegesis to prove that Americans are the true supporters of traditional right order, rather than the heirs of its unrighteous usurpation. It's sort of like watching Mormons labor to show that they are the true heirs of the real Christian tradition. To be an American and a traditionalist is quite a balancing act. I'm not saying it's invalid to try--but it does remind me of another Johnson saying, that which compares a woman's preaching to a dog's walking on his hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to see it done at all."

What makes him so sympathetic is that his sense of Christian faith proceeds from his sense of himself as a sinner, not as the saved. Where others were sure of feeling superior to the people who didn’t believe, Johnson was just hoping to get to Heaven on a lucky break -- praying for mercy, but not counting on it.

In this Johnson had much in common with Francis "Hound of Heaven" Thompson -- and with not a few contemporary Catholic converts and reverts who, after getting "saved" in an evangelical-Protestant milieu, join a church that "preaches the Bible and makes you feel at home" only to find themselves drowning in the shallow end of the grace pool.

Gopnik's essay is an artful delight. Thanks for the link.

Allow me to recommend John Wain's biography of Johnson to anyone and everyone who is interested in Johnson but daunted by the huge size of Boswell's book.

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

And another quote I like:

"Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

Gopnik seems to knock out one of these fine essays once a month, or even more often than that. And his range of topics is almost breathtaking. The New Yorker can be whiny and annoying in its political coverage, but a few of their writers (Gopnik, Gladwell, Accoela) are so consistently wonderful that I finally started subscribing.

Thank you for the last quote and comment, Rod, on appreciating the humanity of folks even if the doctrines and desires they struggle with are different than your own.

I am a conservative Christian in politics and religion, but I've often strongly liked and even loved liberals and unbelievers in a personal way. I've felt strongly drawn to them and have had great good will toward them as long as I had this sense of their struggling humanity, beyond whatever they said they believed, or my disagreements with them in terms of ideology.

Re: In England, the Parliament and elected Commons are supreme, not a supreme court of pompous political clowns, who make up "constitutional law" as they go along to justify their political decisions and legitimize their tyranny over us.

Yes, Parliament is supreme-- which means that Parliament is free to play the tyrant over the British people. And so it occasionally has. The British system of governance has rather fewer checks and balances than our system does, and that makes it vulnerable to extreme swings. Recall that Britain became quite the socialist dystopia in the 60s and 70s befire Mrs Thatcher stepped in to rectify matters-- and then introduce her own set of follies.