Speaking of Russell Kirk, last week I recieved the long awaited The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays. Recently published by the always excellent Intercollegiate Studies Insitute and edited by George Panichas, longtime editor of Modern Age (an intellectual journal founded by Kirk).
Having had a week to look it over, I want to encourage you all to pick up a copy. This fat book (640 pages!) is stuffed with the very best of Kirk’s thought. It is certainly to be recommended as the best one volume overview of Kirk’s defense of the “permanent things”.
While I might have wished for the inclusion of one of his famous ghost stories, I was pleased with the inclusion of his essay A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale. Tolle Legge!
Kirk’s is a first class writer. He is both clear and has a superb educational background. I have quoted his definition of a conservative below. From his comments below observing that conservatives can support any form of government, it is clear that conservativism is not Christian. It is only in a cultural tradition is based on Christianity that Christians and conservatives can make a common cause.
From Essential Russell Kirk: selected essays edited by George A. Panichas. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007.
Page 7 These are they basic beliefs of conservatism. Conservatism is not a political system and not ideology. It is a way of looking at the social order, the general principles held by conservatives may be described. However the application varies from country to country. One can be a conservative under a monarchy, despotic, aristocratic, or democratic régime’s, and a considerable range of economic systems.
p. 7 “First, conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society. The divine tactic, however dimly descried, isn’t working human society. Such convictions be take the form of belief in “natural law” or may assume some other expression; but with few exceptions conservatives recognize the need for enduring moral authority. This conviction contrast strongly with the liberals’ utilitarian view of the state (most consistently expressed by Bentham’s disciples), and with the radicals’ detestation of theological postulates.
“Second, conservatives uphold the principle of social continuity. They prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe are the artificial products of a long and painful social experience, results of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of the spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. Continuity, the lifeblood, although society must not be interrupted. Burke’s reminder of the social necessity for prudent change is in the minds of the conservatives. But necessary change, they argue ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never “unfixing old interests at once.” Revolution slices through the arteries of culture, a cure or that kills.”
p. 8 “Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. “The wisdom of our ancestors” is one of the more important praises in the writings of Burke; presumably Burke derived it from Richard Hooker. Conservatives sense that modern men and women are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see further than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very frequently emphasize the importance of “prescription”–that is, of things established by a immemorial usage, so “that the mind of men runneth not to the contrary.” There exists rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity–including rights in 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 that 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 habits customs, and conventions of remote origin which are woven into the fabric of our social beings; the innovator, in Santayana’s phrase, never knows how near to the tap root of the tree he is acting.”
“Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is the chief among virtues. Any public majors outs be judged by its probable long-range consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative holds, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be effective. The conservative declares that he asked only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are perilous as sudden and slashing surgery. The march of providence is slow; it is the devil who always varies.”
“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 deadly 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 in the Last Judgment and equality a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society longs for honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences among people are destroyed, presently some tyrant or hosts of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality. Similarly, conservatives uphold the institution of private property as productive of human variety: without private property, liberty reduced and culture is impoverished.”
p. 8 “Six, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectibility. Human nature suffers a really irremediably from certain faults, the conservative know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order can ever be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent-or expire of boredom. To aim for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we can reasonably expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering continued to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional in moral safeguards of a nation are forgotten, then the anarchic impulses in man break lose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
“If one requires a single sentence-why, let it be said that for the conservative, politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal.”
Jack Delivuk
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