Remnant Review
Russell Kirk was one of the founders of post-World War II American conservatism.
In 1953, his book, The Conservative Mind, was published by the small conservative publishing house, Regnery. It was a summary of the thinking of major figures in American history, especially 19th-century American history, who articulated what in 1953 would have been regarded as a conservative view of American civil government.
Nothing like this had been seen before. It was a carefully researched book. He was a good writer. When you got through with it, you had the sense that he had opened a series of closed books to you. I remember reading it at the time. He made the case that the American conservative political tradition had eloquent defenders in the past. These defenders by 1953 had been generally forgotten in academia. The public had long since forgotten about all of them.
Academics still do not know about them. The public still does not know about them. That was his problem.
I first met Russell Kirk when I was a freshman at the University of California, Riverside, in 1960. I was invited to a lunch with Kirk by the dean of the college, Robert Nisbet, who was then a little-known bureaucrat. Nisbet had written an excellent conservative book that was published in the same year that Kirk's was: The Quest for Community. Oxford University press published. But for the next 13 years, he wrote no books. One other student attended the luncheon and so did the Chancellor of the University. I found myself totally unimpressed by Kirk. When I later read his book, I recognized that it was a first rate book. But in reading other materials over the years, I was never impressed by Kirk's concept of conservatism.
I got my start writing for money as a book reviewer for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Sadly, I did not save any of those reviews. That is probably not sad for the rest of the world, but it is sad for me. But one of them did get reprinted as a footnote by R. J. Rushdoony in his book, The Biblical Philosophy of History (1969). I had sent him a copy. He reprinted my article as a long footnote in Chapter VII: pages 69-70. It was a review of Kirk's book, The Intemperate Professor.
The late Whittaker Chambers once remarked that he could not imagine American boys dying for Russell Kirk's brand of conservatism. Kirk's latest book would not have changed his opinion.The theme of the book is one of Kirk's favorites: Americans do not read enough Cicero. With the decline of "humane letters" has come the decline of the American Republic. Americans, unwilling to read a serious book, have become afflicted with the worst disease of all: bad taste.
His chapters on the inconsistencies of liberals in the academic community are, as always, amusing. The important chapters, however, deal with religion and morals. They are important not for what they reveal about America, but what they reveal of Kirk.
The spiritual emptiness of modern man, he argues, can be cured only by "a genuine restoration of the higher religious understanding, of transcendent truth, of the sense of the numinous." The Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy has brought modern science back to an appreciation of the universe's mystery, so why not the churches?
This is not conservatism; it is modern secular irrationalism. Kirk correctly diagnoses the theological error in modern American religion: Pelagianism. But he is not about to return to the Augustinian answer to Pelagius. Instead of a return to Trinitarian orthodoxy, we need to accept some form of the "New Reformation" theology, the theological system made famous by Karl Barth of Switzerland.
Kirk seems blissfully unaware of the voluminous writings of Professor Cornelius Van Til of Westminster seminary. Van Til has shown clearly the incompatibility of Barth's neo-orthodoxy with the Reformation faith to which Kirk gives lip service.
Kirk's theology, as he demonstrates in this book, is a curious mixture of the Niebuhrs, Barth, Robert Fitch, Tillich, and just enough Billy Graham to placate the evangelicals. He sees in the modern ecumenical church movement the hope for the conservative future.
Whatever one's opinion about these modern theological movements, it seems safe to say that they are not in the mainstream of conservative American Christianity. In proclaiming them in the name of conservatism, Kirk demonstrates that he, like so many of the "National Review" staff, is a conservative on certain issues, but that in the area of first principles he stands on the same philosophical foundation as does the modern liberal.
American society is said to be saved by a return to classical studies and a belief in "the numinous." This mediocre little volume, in short, represents a return to gnosticism; it is faith is in an unnamed mystery, frightening, and hardly a comfort to mankind. Man is left in fear and trembling, with a paperback copy of the Iliad to protect them.
Chambers was right; this type of conservatism is not worth dying for. (Press Enterprise, January 2, 1966,, p. E-11)
He did not seem to recognize the dualism of his own thought. His thinking rested on the dualism of all modern philosophy: Kant's mechanical phenomenalism vs. Kant's mystical noumenalism. "Never the twain shall meet." Man's liberty is threatened by both. To imagine that the good society or good anything can rest on the ethically empty noumenalism of Kant is to imagine utopia.
KIRK'S TEN PRINCIPLES OF CONSERVATISM
By writing a long book on forgotten political thinkers and their forgotten principles, Kirk helped establish a grudging degree of respect for conservative thought inside a few narrow liberal-dominated academic circles. But Kirk faced an enormous problem. His definition of conservatism was basically Edmund Burke's definition, and Burke denied the legitimacy of all comprehensive systems of thought.
In 1993, four decades after the publication of The Conservative Mind, Kirk wrote a summary of ten principles of conservatism. He began the article with this admission: his brand of conservatism had no underlying system of analysis. Put theologically, it had no systematic theology. It had no system.
Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
He listed the ten principles. There is no way that anybody could build a movement, a worldview, or an ideology around these ten principles.
"First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent."
For all of his erudition, Kirk never got to the point on point #1. He never defined this moral order. He never showed how we can discover this moral order. He never showed how this moral order supposedly has persevered down through the ages. I waited for five decades to get a straight answer from him on this point. He never gave it.
No one can build a religion, an ideology, or even a personal system of ethics based on vague propositions. When it came to morality, Kirk never got beyond vague propositions. Neither did the movement that his book helped to found.
"Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire."
He never defined custom either. We know that there are good customs and bad customs. He never described the principles by which an individual or a social order can identify which are the good customs and which are the bad customs. There was no ethical system governing his thinking. Yet he expected people to commit to his ideas. Why would anybody do this? He never got around to saying what these ideas were.
"Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary."
This is the same problem. There is no ethical content for the undefined prescription. Where is the framework by which we evaluate truth and falsehood? He never provided this. His philosophy was specifically designed by him to deny that any such permanent principles can be articulated in such a way.
There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality. The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.
The human species is not wise. The Christian position is that man is innately depraved. You cannot trust him.
"Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues."
Plato was a communist. He believed that it is legitimate for governments to tell big lies. He believed that society should be based on big lies. It was as if Kirk had never read Karl Popper's masterpiece, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), volume 1 of which is devoted to a detailed refutation of Plato's politics.
"Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality."
Egalitarianism is indeed a curse, but he never tried to prove this. He merely asserted this. He did not believe that such broad principles could be proven logically. They can only be proven (somehow) through tradition. I ask: why should people commit to policies that are customary or traditional? How does this change society for the better? How does this offer hope for the future? Kirk had no principle of the comprehensive reformation of the social order. He said that conservatives never could or should devise such principles. So, by the very nature of his philosophy, it is not going to gain the dedicated support of young people and idealists. His was a self-defeating philosophy of life.
"Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: 'the ceremony of innocence is drowned.' The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell."
I ask: how do we improve society? Yes, perfectionism will never be attained in history. But, as an ideal, it is exactly what Jesus said we should pursue. "Be ye perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 6:48). This gets to the point. Perfection cannot be attained in history, but it is always to be our goal.
"Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked. Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired."
This is good. Libertarians agree. Catholics agree. Bible-believing Protestants agree. Keynesians agree. Progressives say they agree. Communists and socialists disagree.
The question is: How do we decide as a nation what these limits are? What principles identify them? Kirk opposed all such principles.
"Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily.”
This was the outlook of the commentator on American life and culture, Alexis de Tocqueville. There was nothing new here. Tocqueville was not a conservative. He was a liberal. He spent one year in the United States, and he wrote two of the most famous volumes on his brief visit: Democracy in America (1835, 1840).
When we see a phrase like "genuine community" or "authentic community," we know that the writer has a hidden agenda. The word "community" does not tell us whether a community is good or bad. We need to know what constitutes good and bad.
"Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions."
Libertarians also believe this. But the question is this: how does society obtain this? Without any discussion of the nature of social sanctions -- "prudent restraints" -- and the authoritative source of these sanctions, this declaration is a wish, not a program. Libertarians, committed to economic logic, offer a theory of economic sanctions: profit and loss. They have a system. But Kirk did not believe in systems.
He needed to define prudence. He never did. He needed to identify the authoritative sources of prudence. He never did.
He wrote: “A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.” He needed to define the proper balance of this tension. He never did.
“Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world.”
He told us to cling to mystical prudence, with a capital P. But why not mystical Progress, too? Why isn’t improvement basic to prudence? Christianity insists that they are linked ethically. Read Deuteronomy 28:1-14.
When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects. The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression. The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that gives us stability and continuity; without that Permanence, the fountains of the great deep are broken up, society slipping into anarchy.
Coleridge lived in the late 18th century and early 19th century. He was one of the founders of a poetic movement known as Romanticism. There is nothing Christian about it. The man was an opium addict. Why Kirk would site Coleridge as an authority on anything except how to waste your life through drug addiction was a mystery to me all along. Coleridge was a loser. He offered nothing to anybody about how to live his life or how to build a decent society. He failed at everything he ever attempted.
I had little use for Kirk from the day I first read The Conservative Mind. I thought it was empty then, and I think it is empty now. It is a good historical study. He neglected to deal with the central fact of the Southern conservatives he praised: they were all defenders of slavery. They built their entire political philosophy as a defense of slavery. In 1953, that was unacceptable to anybody who was not a member of the Sons of the Confederacy. So, Kirk prudently avoided the topic.
CONCLUSION
Kirk is forgotten today. He was a voluminous writer. He wrote very well. He wrote many books and hundreds of articles. But he had little influence on political thought. He was William F. Buckley's house intellectual for National Review for decades. But magazine articles have a half-life of about a week. Then they are forgotten. They are timely, and therefore they are soon obsolete.
A good book on Kirk is Russell Kirk: American Conservative (2015), by Bradley Birzer. It was published by the University of Kentucky Press. Especially insightful are these chapters: "A Christian Humanism (ch. 4) and "A Republic of Letters in the Modern Age" (ch. 5).
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