'The Conjunction of Dreaming and Ruling'

Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society” (1764), including: “How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.” Five years later Johnson told Boswell in conversation: “Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” We can safely nod our heads in agreement. In the eighteenth century in Great Britain, such sentiments could prove seditious and be punished accordingly. History has substantiated Johnson’s observations. Governments and their enthusiastic or coerced citizens created the abattoir that was the twentieth century and have continued the tradition into the twenty-first. A reader complains about the absence of politics at Anecdotal Evidence and I thank him for noticing. It’s not a compelling subject. Busybodies with big ideas, unafraid to impose them on others,…