The story is that Philip II of Macedon threatened the Spartans with a conditional sentence. The conditional was along the lines of, "If I win the war, you will be slaves." Or, "If I invade your land, I will raze your city." The Spartans responded with a single solitary laconic: "If".
I've talked to the dreamers and poets and idolators - the monarchists, the episcopists, the medievalists. The Republicans, too. All of these people could be called conservatives, but they didn't want to conserve anything so much as to restore something lost.
They talked, as we do, in enthymemes. They thereby suppressed an absurd hypothesis.
For example, a monarchist told me in no laconic terms that a monarchy is better than a republic. When he later said that the American president was a king, I disregarded the discrepancy. The discrepancy was only a symptom of his unstated hypothesis, which was: "If the US were governed by a king, then the US would be better." But not just any king; the hypothesis required a king of certain qualities to ensure its apodosis. The monarchist feigned abstractions while his argument demanded a very particular king to best a very particular republic. The problem was that his particular king did not exist.
He was arguing for nothing, then. Such a person is a liar and an anarchist. Anthony Burgess was more honest when he conceded that "since the ideal of a Catholic Jacobite imperial monarch isn't practicable," his principles were "really a kind of anarchism." And so on: the episcopist is a congregationalist in clerical costume (is it still Reformation Day?); the very name "medievalist" implies a modernity (any modernity will do); the Republican too is a cognitive dissident. These nihilists whisper absurdities yelling in my ear. If only - if.
What advantage, then, is there in using conditionals? Much in every way! And what is worse? Using a conditional to conceal a void, or writing about conditionals into a void?
