Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds

Not many people, I imagine, still read Dr. Johnson for pleasure or instruction, though he was once the favorite reading of the educated in the English-speaking world and his complete works found in practically all private libraries. He contrived to be a moralist without moralizing; he was an incomparably greater psychologist than Freud, having no ax to grind and no sect to found; and he was humane and charitable without sentimentality. No wonder that he is not in fashion. We prefer mental contortions, self-justifications, evasions, rationalizations, and all the other methods of avoiding the truth about ourselves, to his discomfiting clarity of mind. 

He had a peculiar gift for saying things that were both startling and obvious. As he himself put it, we have more often to be reminded than informed. Although his prose style would no doubt strike many people (if they read it) as too formal”€”we prefer expletives and the demotic now”€”he says things that are strikingly apposite a quarter of a millennium after he wrote them. On practically every page of his essays, of which he wrote several hundred, scratched out with quill pen rather than merely tapped on keyboard onto a screen, you find things that are as true and pointed today as they were when he wrote them. I doubt that much of what we write will stand the same test in a further quarter millennium; but then it is the illusion of every age that it is having the last word.

In order to test my contention that there is something to be learned (or reminded of) on practically every page of Johnson, I took down my copy of The Idler, the weekly essays that he wrote between April 1758 and April 1760. Here, for example, is the opening of his essay on political credulity:

Credulity, or confidence of opinion too great from the evidence from which the opinion is derived, we find to be a general weakness imputed by every sect and party to all others, and indeed by every man to every other man.

In other words, I have reason, you have prejudice.

Johnson continues:

Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful [in the sense of occasioning wonderment] is that of political zealots; of men, who being numbered, they know not how or why, in any of the parties that divide a state, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow.

He then goes on to describe how the partisans of the Hanoverian and Stuart dynasties in the England of his own time ascribed all the ills of the country to their opponents, and all the progress to themselves.

Does this not sound familiar? Does not what Dr. Johnson goes on to say remind us of our own times?

The bigot of philosophy is seduced by authorities which he has not always opportunities to examine, is entangled in systems by which truth and falsehood are inextricably complicated, or undertakes to talk on subjects which nature did not form him able to comprehend.

A visit to any pub or bar will confirm the truth of what Dr. Johnson says. There you will find people who seem to be party to the most secret of secret state policy, though they appear to work in humble capacities in local businesses, or who are unalterably convinced of the motives of people in authority whom they have never met and about whom they know practically nothing. Needless to say, I do not exclude myself from this class of know-all: I am exactly the same.