The Oddest Evening of my Life

My previous post mentioned the late Frank Meyer, to whom I owe my first encounter with one of my favorite poems. This one is about how I got to know him and his family. It is one of my favorite stories and, since I do not plan to ever write an autobiography, I might as well tell it here.

I was a Harvard undergraduate, a sophomore. Frank Meyer was a prominent conservative intellectual, senior editor of National Review. His son John, who was looking at colleges, visited Harvard. Frank and John had dinner with Ed Banfield, a Harvard professor and a friend of my parents; I was invited.

My memory of the evening is episodic; it was about sixty years ago and I am not sure I have the episodes in order, but it went something like this:

Me, or possibly one of the Meyers:

“Have you ever read a very odd book by someone named Tolkien?”

This was less than a decade after The Lord of the Rings was published in England, before the first US publication, about forty years before the film version. I was an early fan; after reading the first volume I had had to wait for the second to be published.

So were they. After about half an hour of lively conversation:

“Have you ever read any of Kipling’s poetry?”

They had. I had. Another half hour.

“Ever tried playing Avalon Hill war games, Tactics II or Gettysburg?”

That discussion might have included commiseration over the problem of playing Gettysburg with the optional continuous rules. A tenth of an inch deviation in exactly where a piece was placed determined whether your artillery just could or just couldn’t shell his infantry.

My parents were spending the year traveling around the world studying monetary systems so I spent spring vacation with the Meyers in Woodstock. It was an interesting household. There were two boys, John and Gene, both home schooled. That was in the early nineteen sixties when home schooling was not yet a familiar concept, making what they were doing dubiously legal; Frank thought they could have been forced to send the boys to school if anyone had noticed what they were doing and objected.

John and Gene normally went to bed about two in the morning, Frank and Elsie an hour or two later. Frank’s current problem was that he had run out of wall space for bookcases and needed more. Kindles had not been invented yet, unfortunately.

I was fond of Stratego, a game where you only discover what one of your opponent’s pieces is when you attack it or it attacks you, after which it is turned back around and you have to rely on memory. John was, at the time, the under twenty-one chess champion of the U.S., Gene the under fourteen champion; once a piece had been revealed to one of them there was little point to turning it back. I observed a similar phenomenon many years later listening to my sister and her husband discussing a bridge game they had played recently, card by card; he is a bridge player at a comparable level of expertise.

Despite their lack of conventional credentials, both John and Gene attended Yale; I expect it would be harder for home schooled applicants today. John ended up as an attorney. Gene has been Executive Director, president and/or CEO of the Federalist Society for the past forty years.

Fusionism

Conservatism in the 1960’s, as represented by William F. Buckley’s National Review and Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, was an alliance between traditionalist conservatives and libertarians, united by their opposition to communism abroad and New Deal liberalism at home, often divided by differing views on drug laws, immigration, the draft and a variety of other issues. Frank Meyer is mostly remembered today for his support of fusionism, the idea that traditional conservatives and libertarians were natural, rather than opportunistic, allies.

One half of his argument was that freedom is a necessary condition for virtue; in order to choose good one must have the option of choosing evil, hence the moral conservative must be a political libertarian. The other half that:

the only possible basis of respect for the integrity of the individual person and for the overriding value of his freedom is belief in an organic moral order. Without such a belief, no doctrine of political and economic liberty can stand. (Frank Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism.”)

Hence the prudent libertarian ought to be a conservative.

His conclusion:

Although the classical liberal forgot—and the contemporary libertarian conservative sometimes tends to forget—that in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue, he did understand that in the political realm freedom is the primary end (Frank Meyer, op. cit.).

Fusionism is what Frank Meyer is mostly remembered for. “Lepanto” is what I most remember him for. Also a household that, despite the fact that they were Christians and I an atheist, felt like my kind of people.

My views are closer to his now than they were then, despite the fact that I was at the time a limited government libertarian, am now an anarchist, am still an atheist. When I came to Harvard I viewed moral beliefs as tastes, the belief that it is better not to torture people rather like the belief that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla.  I lost an argument on the question with Isaiah Berlin, who was visiting at Harvard one year, and by the time I had reconstructed my position I was a moral realist.

G.K.Chesterton is famous now mostly as a Catholic apologist and the author of early mysteries but he was also a brilliant speaker, essayist and poet.  He was both a conservative and a libertarian, so a suitable link to another writer who was both.