Book Review: The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

• Title: The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
• Author: Russell Kirk
• Published: Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986. Pages-535.

Preamble

My Kiwanis group disbanded several years ago, however, we still get together every couple of months and have dinner together, discuss politics, social commentary, and what not.  It was at the most recent one that my friend Art recommended this book, with the usual line I get from people with a book recommendation, “Oh, you haven’t read it, you have got to read this book.”  I am guilty of this myself.  Unfortunately, this has led me to reading some really bad books.  To combat this, and to minimalize the possibility of this happening in the future I should follow up this recommendation with a few questions. Why should I read this book?  Knowing my interests and who I am, what do you think I will gain from reading this book?  Would you read it again?  Will it make me a better person?  Will it improve my relationship with God, my fellow man, and my understanding of the world around me?  Now do actually ask all those questions?  No, but I should, it would save me a lot of time.  Now you are probably thinking at this point that this book was one of those books that I wasted my time on, quite the contrary, I am really glad I read this one.  To help you understand this I will discuss the author and then deal on what I gained from this book, how I felt it makes me a better person by improving my relationship God, my fellow man, and the world around me, and yes, I plan to read this book again.

About the Author

Russell Amos Kirk (1918-1994) was born and died in Michigan, he was the older of two children, son of a locomotive engineer, and was captain of his high school debate team.[1]  His maternal grandfather, who had an extensive home library, would often take “long walks and discussions” with Kirk, which led to an early appreciation of such authors as Edmund Burke, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Robert Louis Stevenson.[2]  He earned his B.A. in history in 1940 from what is now known as Michigan State University, and his master’s degree in 1941 from Duke University in North Carolina.[3]  He was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the Chemical Warfare Service, where with little to do, he read and reflected on the writings of Marcus Aurelius.[4]  After the Army, and his return to Michigan State to teach history, Kirk spent several years, in six month increments, earning his doctorate from St. Andrews University in Edinburgh, “becoming the first American to earn the revered degree of D. Litt, from Scotland’s oldest university.”[5]  It was during this time in Scotland, with the long walks and discussions, perhaps reminiscent of those with his grandfather, that Kirk came to realize how dissatisfied he was with Michigan State’s new policy of the “lowering of academic standards in order to attract more students.”[6]  This led, in 1953,  Kirk resigning from the university, becoming an independent scholar, and moving his family to an old farmhouse in upstate Michigan, which he called “Piety Hill.”[7]  This naming of his farmhouse is so reminiscent, in my mind, to the Lakist poets of Wordsworth, Wilson, Southey, and De Quincey.  This same year he met and started correspondence with T. S. Eliot and released the book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, which was in later editions changed to The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot.[8]  He continued to write more books, publish articles, participate in debates, and generally was very active throughout the rest of his life promoting his philosophical view.  Person, in his article on Kirk, states that “Kirk was a regionalist rather than a nationalist, an advocate of fair trade rather than free trade, a proponent of agrarian and small community life rather than a cosmopolitan one, a champion of the free-market economy on a humane scale rather than no-holds-barred laissez-faire capitalism, a believer in a prudent rather than an interventionist foreign policy, and a strong conservationist, believing that humankind is responsible for the stewardship of the earth, not the pillaging of it.”[9]  In 1989 Ronald Reagan presented Kirk with the Presidential Citizens Medal.[10]  He died peacefully at home and is buried in the cemetery of his local parish church.[11]

My Perspective

The cornerstone of Kirk’s essay is that Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was the founder of Modern Conservatism.  I have read two of Burke’s works, Speech on Conciliation with America (1775) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).  I found them both to be profound.  Kirk takes up the conservative conversation starting with Burke and expounds upon it.  He goes into depth explaining what he feels are the key points that Burke stressed and how these were continued in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America.  He waxes polemical in his defense of conservatism and delivers his litany of conservative proponents in a patristic style.  He proceeds to the many variants of conservative thought as it has progressed over the years and its battle with liberalism. He quotes from statesmen, poets, theologians, and scholars in an attempt to describe to the reader how we have travelled from Burke’s time to our own.  This flow of thought is difficult to understand at times and may even confuse the reader somewhat as to what exactly Kirk is trying to say. He covers a wide breadth of writers, several I was not familiar with, who were very influential in our English/American culture.  It is an overview of conservative thought.  Kirk ends with a verbose call to action that we as conservatives have a duty and a responsibility to be more informed of our conservative history and not only preserve it but promote it.  I think some look at history as an endless repeating cycle, but a true conservative would feel that we are rather on a course, we are flowing along towards a destination, that Providence guides us.  And even if our present society may crumble away, we need to understand our core values that have been passed down to us and use these to rebuild society, so as to continue towards our destination.

Kirk gives us his six canons of conservative thought.[12]

1. Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.  A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs.  “Every Tory is a realist,” says Keith Feiling: “he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man’s philosophy cannot plumb or fathom.”  True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.

2. Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls “Logicalism” in society. This prejudice has been called “the conservatism of enjoyment” – a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot “the proper source of an animated Conservatism.”

3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a “classless society.” With reason, conservatives often have been called “the party of order.” If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum.  Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

4. Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic leveling, they maintain, is not economic progress.

5. Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.

6. Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.[13]

Perhaps these should have been worded differently as I do not find them easy to understand.  They are abstruse and if they are meant to be rules or a way to judge what it means to be a conservative, perhaps he could have written them better.  Kirk states that some conservatives have varied from these, but in general this is what he sees as the core of conservative thought.  After reading the book and contemplating them, I feel that these six canons are vital to understanding his essay.  But Kirk is not just promoting his side, he is attacking the other side, which is radicalism.  His work is polemical in parts and to help us understand what he is fighting against he tells us “five major schools of radical thought have competed for public favor since Burke entered politics: the rationalism of the philosophes, the romantic emancipation of Rousseau and his allies, the utilitarianism of the Benthamites, the positivism of Comte’s school, and the collective materialism of Marx and other socialists.”[14]  Kirk believes that these five radical thoughts had at least four things in common.

1. The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alternation of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity toward violence and sin.

2. Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors.  Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes.

3. Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical ideal.  Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.

4. Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.[15]

These are more concise and easier to understand than Kirk’s canons of conservative thought.  I get the opinion that he had some difficulty articulating concisely what conservative thought was to him, but he knew it when he saw it, and he most definitely had a good grasp of who his enemy was.  Now that we understand the two sides, he turns to Burke as the modern originator of conservatism.  He divides Burke’s career into four distinct periods: “the restraining of royal authority; the American controversy and Revolution; the Indian debates and the trial of Hastings; the French Revolution and consequent war.”[16]  Kirk feels Burke only really succeeded in the first one.  He gives us his take on Burke’s philosophy:

“Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tells us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man and the state are creations of God’s beneficence.  This Christian orthodoxy is the kernel of Burke’s philosophy.  God’s purpose among men is revealed through the unrolling of history.  How are we to know God’s mind and will?  Through the prejudices and traditions which millennia of human experience with divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species.  And what is our purpose in this world?  Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.”[17]

As a Catholic this rings very true with me.  God has revealed himself through our history.  Man is created in the image of God.  We cannot learn who we are by just observing ourselves, we must look towards God.  “Though state and church ought never to be separate entities, true religion is not merely an expression of national spirit; it rises far superior to earthly law, being, indeed, the source of all law.”[18]

Men’s appetites are voracious and sanguinary, Burke knew; they are restrained by this collective and imperial wisdom we call prejudice, tradition, customary morality; reason alone can never chain them to duty.  Whenever the crust of prejudice and prescription is perforated at any point, flames shoot up from beneath, and terrible danger impends that the crack may widen, even to the annihilating of civilization.  If men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification; and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital.”[19]

Man is not intrinsically good.  We have our tradition and wisdom of the ages that helps to guide us, the revelations and a higher authority that sets a standard higher than us that we strive to achieve.  God has designed and revealed to us a plan that we should not just discard idly, but rather we should strive with everything we have.  We talk a lot about rights, but what rights do we really have?  “The true natural rights of men, then, are equal justice, security of labor and property, the amenities of civilized institutions, and the benefits of orderly society.”[20]

Kirk combats the ideology of our modern meaning of equality.  “Leadership by men of ability, birth, and wealth is one of the most natural, and most beneficial, aspects of civilized life.”[21]  It is right and just for those persons to lead us who have been given the gifts and talents to do so, whether this comes from natural ability, an advantage from the family and culture they were raised in, or from wealth.  To tear down these structures and put all of us on a level field is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.”

As a conservative, one realizes that we are not only responsible to ourselves but also to the past and our future.  Life itself cannot be reduced to some mathematical formula.  We are not just a collection of cells or a machine.  If this is not recognized by society and adopted as a core belief, then order itself will unravel, and chaos will ensue until once again, we reconcile society with God.  “Society is immeasurably more than a political device. … If society is treated as a simple contraption to be managed on mathematical lines… then man will be degraded into something much less than a partner in the immortal contract that unites the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, the bond between God and man.  Order in this world is contingent upon order above.”[22]

Kirk then moves to John Adams and his admonition of democracy.  “Of all the terrors of democracy, the worst is its destruction of moral habits.”[23]  Adams mentions how justice might possibly support a democracy, however, a democracy could never support justice.  Even the idea of a free press is merely a placebo and not a cure.

Is there no check upon these excesses?  Some people think that a free press “has risen, like another sun in the sky, to shed new light and joy on the political world.”  This is fatuity.  For in actuality, the press supplies an endless stimulus to popular imagination and passion; the press lives upon heat and coarse drama and incessant restlessness.  “It has inspired ignorance with presumption, so that those who cannot be governed by reason, are no longer to be awed by authority.”[24]

But, can it be argued that with all the books, magazines, internet, and information available  we must be a better more informed world?  “The world is growing more enlightened, popular opinion asserts; and there is some truth in the belief that newspapers, magazines, and circulating libraries have made mankind wiser; but with the pride that accompanies a little new learning comes the peril of popular vanity, the hazard that all old opinions may be discarded.”[25]  And there’s the rub as they say, pride.  With pride comes the fall.  All of sudden we think we know better than anyone else at any other time in history.  Nothing from the past, nothing from tradition, counts anymore because we think we know better.  Throw caution and prudence out the window because we have Wikipedia, or news on demand, or Facebook, or whatever, and now we think that we are qualified to discard all the old opinions without even a backward glance.

Aristocracy, what does that word mean to you?  Kirk presents a summary of John Adams theory of aristocracy:

1. An aristocrat, in Adams’ definition, is any person who can command two votes – his own, and another man’s. This is the rudiment of government by those who are best qualified to govern, the literal meaning of “aristocracy”.  “By aristocracy, I understand all those men who can command, influence, or procure more than an average of votes; by an aristocrat every man who can and will influence one man to vote besides himself.  Few men will deny that there is a natural aristocracy of virtues and talents in every nation and in every party, in every city and village.”

2. Aristocracy is not simply a creation of society; it is in part natural, and in part artificial; but in no state can it be eradicated. Its existence may be denied by hypocrites; but it will survive, all the same, for in any society imaginable, some men will exercise political influence over their fellows – some will be followers, others leaders, and the leaders of political society are aristocrats, call them what we will.  “Pick up the first hundred men you meet and make a republic.  Every man will have an equal vote; but when deliberations and discussions are opened, it will be found that twenty-five, by their talents, virtues being equal, will be able to carry fifty votes.  Every one of these twenty-five is an aristocrat in my sense of the word; whether he obtains one vote in addition to his own, by his birth, fortune, figure, science, learning, craft, cunning, or even his character for good fellowship, and a bon vivant.”

3. The most common form of aristocracy is produced by differences in nature which positive legislation cannot alter substantially. For an aristocrat is a citizen who commands two votes or more “whether by his virtues, his talents, his learning, his loquacity, his taciturnity, his frankness, his reserve, his face, figure, eloquence, grace, air, attitude, movements, wealth, birth, art, address, intrigue, good fellowship, drunkenness, debauchery, fraud, perjury, violence, treachery, pyrrhonism, deism, or atheism; for by every one of these instruments have votes been obtained and will be obtained.  You seem to think aristocracy consists altogether in artificial titles, tinsel decorations of stars, garters, ribbons, golden eagles and golden fleeces, crosses and roses and lilies, exclusive privileges, hereditary descents, established by kings or by positive laws of society.  No such thing!”

4. Even an hereditary aristocracy is not dependent upon positive law for its existence. In democratic America, aristocracy of descent continues unchecked.  Aaron Burr obtained a hundred thousand votes on the strength of his descent from Jonathan Edwards; in Boston, the Crafts, Gores, Dawes, and Austins constitute a nobility; John Randolph of Roanoke is as much an hereditary aristocrat, by virtue of his great name, as any Montmorenci or Howard.

5. Aristocracy is not destroyed by alienation of land or confiscation of wealth. “If John Randolph should manumit one of his negroes and alienate to him his plantation, that negro would become as great an aristocrat as John Randolph.”  Since power follows property, aristocracy may be transferred, but it is not abolished.

6. Even the effort of the laws to establish equality results in reinforcing of aristocracy. “The more you educate, without a balance in the government, the more aristocratical will the people and the government be.”  For thus the state creates an elite who command the votes of their less informed fellows.

7. No people have abolished aristocracy. The Jacobins have not done so, because they have not made all men and women equally wise, elegant, and beautiful.  At best, they substitute new individuals for old; an aristocracy remains, perhaps without titles, but still possessing the same political power.

8. Adams holds no brief for aristocracy: he simply points out that it is a phenomenon of nature, not to be rationally denied. Like most things in nature, aristocracy has its virtues and its vices.  Aristocracies have been arrogant and extortionate; but on the other hand, if at times in history aristocracies had not made stands, against monarchs or mobs, “one hideous despotism, as horrid as that of Turkey, would have been the lot of every nation in Europe,”[26]

Now what do you think about aristocracy?  It is all around us.  We call it different names.  In this world of social media, we isolate ourselves into our own little echo chambers.  In these “groups” we participate in a group thought, we share a common ideology.  There is always some expert that we look to, to help us understand key issues, that person is the aristocrat.  Perhaps it is a union rep, or CNN, or Fox News, or our pastor, maybe even a parent or some other relative, or just a friend.  The basic idea is that someone else convinces others to vote for their idea.  It is the whole concept of lobby groups.  Don’t think that just because we don’t call them Duke George Soros, Count Bill Gates, Baron Union Rep, or Lord CNN, doesn’t mean they are not aristocrats in Adam’s understanding of the use of the word.

What type of leader should we have, Kirk summarizes Adam’s view as “The executive officer should be representative of the people in general, a man of august and independent character, viewing impartially the claims of the other two branches of the government.”[27]  There is a prayer we say in the Church and part of it goes, “Lord give us holy priests.”  But, we also need good parishes.  We want good leaders, well we also need to be good people.  I think George Canning speaks truth with “What men really are seeking, or ought to seek, is not the right to govern themselves, but the right to be governed well.”[28]  We should always want and seek after the good and just.

I have not read Samuel T. Coleridge’s Lay Sermons, I am only familiar with his poetry and some of his German translations.  The following was new information for me.

“Coleridge as a philosopher stands in the august line of English Christian thought: he continues the tradition to which Hooker, Milton, the Cambridge Platonists, Butler, and Burke, in their several ways, adhered.  The writings of Kant and Schlegel were inferior influences upon him; John Stuart Mill blundered in supposing that Coleridge’s metaphysical system was imported from Germany.  This is no place for an adequate discussion of his metaphysics, however: the lucid Basil Willey has written the best short account of Coleridge’s thought.  To employ John Stuart Mill’s phrases, whenever Bentham considered a received opinion, he asked, “Is it true?” while Coleridge, confronted with the same opinion, asked, “What does it mean?”  This is the legacy of Burke – never condemning prejudices because they are prejudices, but examining them as the collective verdict of the human species, and endeavoring to make clear the latent meaning in them.  Bentham believed that certitude may be secured by scientific analysis and statistical methods.  But Coleridge insisted that we never can settle the question of whether an opinion is “true” upon abstract grounds, as if it could be divorced from its context of humanity; all ancient opinions have truth in them; we should try, rather, to apprehend and explain them.  For the Understanding, lacking Faith and Intuition, never will suffice to make men wise.  Coleridge distinguishes between “Understanding” – which is “the mere reflective faculty,” dependent on the fallible senses, physical perception – and Reason, which is a higher faculty, employing our powers of intuition, the organ of the supersensuous.  Understanding is concerned with means, Reason with ends.  The Philosophical Radicals, leaving out of their calculations the whole Hyperborean realm of knowledge which is beyond the flesh, would condemn humanity to a philosophy of atheism and death, blotting out that life of spirit which makes life of the body tolerable.  This obliteration of the higher instincts of mankind was commenced by Descartes and Locke, and the Benthamites tried to carry it to its ultimate conclusion of a godless and purposeless determinism.”[29]

The “Is it true?” versus the “What does it mean?” is monumental for me.  After I read this, I stopped and thought about it; asking and really enquiring “what does it mean?” is truly a heartfelt, loving, and Christian response.  It says I value your opinion and I want to understand you.  I have already started to use this approach in my critical evaluations of what I read and in my conversations with friends.  It really has to be sincere though.  It is not a cheap parlor trick to give you better insight, you must truly wonder “what does it mean?”

Kirk goes on to explain Coleridge’s thoughts for a well governed nation.

“Coleridge hopes for a nation whose affairs will be conducted by gentlemen and scholars, upon high moral principles; it is to be a nation in which the possessors of property recognize the duties that are attached to the land, as well as their concomitant rights.  It is to be an aristocratic society, even hierarchical; but justice and wisdom will have a much larger part in it than they occupy now.  Classes will be represented carefully in its government, and the present preponderance of the landed interest will be modified.  The Nationality will receive back a part of which it has been steadily losing to the Propriety; moral and humane instruction will be restored to the mass of men; and the idea of a national church will be revived in the Church of England, which has been allowed to decline into the position of a mere sect.  This program was to become the inspiration of Disraeli and conservative reformers for a century afterward.”[30]

A nation conducted by gentlemen and scholars… it reminds me of Plato’s Republic, in where unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers, we cannot have a just government.  Where is morality today?  It is not a new question, but that does not mean it should not be asked.  Do we value justice and wisdom today?  What moral lesson do we teach, what is in our schools, on our computer screens, our smart phones?  I have to respect Coleridge on his dream for a better nation.

Equality is a word being bandied about in our schools and media every day.  It has almost became a mantra. But what doe it really represent?  I have selected three quotations, out of many references Kirk includes, to expound upon this word “equality.”  The first is Kirk talking about John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833) who was an American statesman, the second is Kirk’s take on Karl Marx (1818-1883) a German sociologist, and the third is his evaluation of William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923) an English novelist.  This covers a timeline of several generations and it tells us that this debate is not new.

Men are not born free and equal, said Randolph.  Their physical, moral, and intellectual differences are manifest, to say nothing of their difference of birth and wealth.  To presume that a mystic “equality” entitles the mass of mankind to tinker at pleasure with society, to play with it as a toy, to exercise their petty ingenuity upon it, is to reduce mankind to the only state of life in which anything resembling equality of condition actually prevails: savagery.  Jeffersonian levelling doctrines, if taken literally, mean anarchy, “the chrysalis state of despotism.”[31]

For Marx, the end of human endeavor was absolute equality of condition.  He was under no illusion as to equality in a hypothetical state of nature; equality never before had existed in society, he knew; he sneered at all concepts of natural right.  Equality would be no restoration but a creation.  Men are not equal by nature; the socialist must level them by legislation and economic device.  “In order to establish equality, we must first establish inequality” – is this not the most significant sentence in Capital?  The clever, the strong, the industrious, the virtuous, must be compelled to serve the weak and stupid and slack and vicious; nature must submit to the socialist art, so that an Idea may be vindicated.[32]

When it is scientifically considered – so runs Mallock’s argument in all his political works – the doctrine of equality will be exposed as a fallacy; for equality is the death of progress.  Throughout history, progress of every sort, cultural and economic, has been produced by the desire of men for inequality.  Without the possibility of inequality, a people continue on the dreary level of bare subsistence, like Irish peasants; granted inequality, the small minority of men of ability turn barbarism into civilization.  Equality benefits no one.  It frustrates men of talent; and it reduces the poor to a poverty still more abject.  In a densely-populated civilized state, it means near-starvation for the poor.  For inequality produces the wealth of civilized communities: it provides the motive which induces men of superior abilities to exert themselves for the general benefit.  About one-sixteenth of the British population, in this age, is responsible for producing two-thirds of the national income.[33]

Has anything changed?  Do we have a better argument for or against equality now than we did in any of these previous generations?  Who should decide?  The democratic answer is that the public should decide.  The public should be presented with the facts and then they can vote for change as needed so that we can become a better people and state.  Is this true?  Let us look at a couple of quotes.  The first is from John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) an American statesman.

“What is called public opinion, instead of being the united opinion of the whole community, is usually, nothing more than the opinion or voice of the strongest interest, or combination of interests; and, not infrequently, of a small, but energetic and active portion of the whole.  Public opinion, in relation to government and its policy, is as much divided and diversified, as are the interests of the community; and the press, instead of being the organ of the whole, is usually but the organ of these various and diversified interests respectively; or, rather, of the parties growing out of them.  It is used by them as the means of controlling public opinion, and of so molding it, as to promote their peculiar interests, and to aid in carrying on the warfare of the party.  But as the organ and instrument of parties, in government of the numerical majority, it is as incompetent as suffrage itself, to counteract the tendency to oppression and abuse of power; – and can, no more than that, supersede the necessity of the concurrent majority.”[34]

How much of today’s “public opinion” is just a mimicry of mass media and lobbyists?  How much time, money, and research has gone into surveys and statistical analysis to manipulate the people and public opinion to support causes and concerns of special interests over the overall moral and sometimes even physical health of our country?  Some would claim this is done for the good of the many.  A very Utilitarian approach which also has its roots in the belief that we are progressing into some new and better form of humanity.  Kirk gives us a couple of quotes and a summary from Henry James Sumner Maine (1822-1888) a British historian who gives us another look at democracy and its supposed claim to fame.

Modern popular government was born with a lie in its mouth: the assumption of a State of Nature, taught by Rousseau.  “Democracy is commonly described as having an inherent superiority over every other form of government.  It is supposed to advance with an irresistible and preordained movement.  It is thought to be full of the promise of blessings to mankind: yet if it fails to bring with it these blessings, or even proves to be prolific of the heaviest calamities, it is not held to deserve condemnation.  These are the familiar marks of a theory which claims to be independent of experience and observation on the plea that it bears the credentials of a golden age, non-historical and unverifiable.”  But how the performance of democracy contrasts with its pretensions!  The sober student of history will note the fact “that since the century during which the Roman Emperors were at the mercy of the Praetorian soldiery, there has been no such insecurity of government as the world has seen since rulers became delegates of the community.”  Maine cites the failure of democracy in Germany, Italy, Spain, Latin America; its awful turbulence in France; its stimulation of the fell spirit of Nationalism.  What else was to be expected?  In practice, universal suffrage tends to be the natural basis of a tyranny; at best, government by wire-pullers.[35]

Maine died in 1888.  This is what he saw in his lifetime.  Have things really improved?  Has it fulfilled its “promise of blessings?”  Perhaps the key to understanding the problem is the tendency of a democracy to erode the moral fiber, destroy family values, and discard religion and tradition.  The American poet James Russel Lowell (1819-1891) states his concern about democracy:

What fills me with doubts and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone.  Is it or is it not a result of Democracy?  Is ours a “government of the people by the people for the people,” or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?  Democracy is, after all, nothing more than an experiment like another, and I know only one way of judging it – by its results.  Democracy in its self is no more sacred than monarchy.  It is man who is sacred; it is his duties and opportunities, not his rights, that nowadays need reinforcement.  It is honour, justice, culture, that make liberty invaluable, else worse than worthless if it mean only freedom to be base and brutal…And as long as I live I will be no writer of birthday odes to King Demos any more than I would be to King Log, nor should I think our cant any more sacred than any other.  Let us all work together (and the task will need us all) to make Democracy possible.  It certainly is no invention to go of itself any more than the perpetual motion.[36]

Judging by the results democracy has not gotten any better.  It will not work unless we all join together and make it work.  The problem, as I see it, is a complacency to just sit back in the sidelines and think that as long as it doesn’t really affect me right now, it is okay.  I am reminded of these lines from Revelation 3:14-17:

To the angel of the church in Laodicea, write this: “‘The Amen, the faithful and true witness, the source of God’s creation, says this: “I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,’ and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

It is this tendency to not get involved, of not caring, of being so busy with our own lives and little circle that we let our country go to waste.  A democracy is not a “perpetual motion” machine that will just work and go on running smoothly once it has been started.  It is like any relationship, it needs attention, time, love and care, sometimes hard choices have to be made, but they have to be considered in light of the whole not just what any one person thinks is their best interest.

George Malcolm Young (1882-1959) was an English historian and Kirk quotes him on the problem of Liberalism.

Those canons were grounded on the premise that at any time there would be a number – and an always increasing number – of men and women interested in the ordering of public affairs, and able to make their interest felt; felt, not spasmodically at election time, but continuously; by reading, by discussion, by thinking things out for themselves and talking them over with their neighbors.  But this premise rested in turn on the assumption that the operations of government would always be within the comprehension of the sober citizen using diligence in his affairs, and that he would be interested because, if only as a contributor to public opinion, he felt that he could do something about them.  What that Liberalism did not anticipate – could not anticipate – was that the increasing complexity, the mere range, of government would carry it beyond his comprehension: and that the volume of knowledge possessed by government puts its action beyond the control of public opinion as that Liberalism conceived it: knowledge is power, and, as I have suggested, both the physical and psychological power of a modern government, wielded perhaps by a compact, resolute minority conscious of its purpose, might go far beyond the power of any despotism yet conceived.[37]

How true it is that the ability to comprehend the operations of our government is so difficult to understand.  Today, with so many advanced technologies, the ability to watch videos of world events, encyclopedic resources at our fingertips and carried in our pocket, we are swamped in information.  How does one tell truth from fiction?  What authority do we turn to in order to help us in our desire to take an active part in at least knowing what is at stake and hopefully putting in our vote to make a difference for good?  It is daunting to say the least.  It can lead to despair and the attitude of resignation.  We hear the propaganda that mankind is great, and we are moving faster and faster toward some progressive utopia.  That is a Liberal mentality.  “For conservative thinkers believe that man is corrupt, that his appetites need restraint, and that the forces of custom, authority, law, and government, as well as moral discipline, are required to keep sin in check.”[38]  That is where conservative thinking will help us.  It is the anchor, the lifeline back to sanity.  Kirk quotes Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) an American writer, as he cautions us in our excessive liberalism.

“Our great danger lies in the radical tendency which has become so wide, deep, and active in the American people.”  Ceasing to regard anything as sacred or venerable, spurning what is old, injuring what is fixed, setting adrift all religious, domestic, and social institutions, we borrow nothing from the past and ignore the data of experience.  We even try to deny that language has exact meaning.  The majority of the American people may not approve this radical tendency, but they are silent before ambitious enthusiasts and competing politicians.  We shall not escape from this deluge of change and perilous experiment until we recognize the principle of authority: God’s authority.  This cannot be apprehended without the Church.  As Protestantism and its fumbling offshoots decay before our eyes, upon the mound of dissent must rise the fortress of orthodox belief, without which human sin and foible know no limits, without which order, and justice perish.[39]

What is one to do?  John Henry Newman (1801-1890) a Catholic Cardinal and theologian gives us a tool called Illative Sense and a guide to using it.  Kirk elaborates on Newman’s tool to judge our opinions so that we can hopefully align them closer to the truth.

If, then, we do not form our lives, or even our sciences, upon a logic of words or a museum of specimens, what actually is the source of our first principles, of our governing motives?  What precisely is this Illative Sense of Newman?  In The Grammar of Assent, he defines it briefly thus: “It is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions.  This power of judging and concluding, when in its perfection, I call the Illative Sense.”  Here we have a use of “sense” parallel to “good sense,” “common sense,” “a sense of beauty;” it is a uniform faculty which, however, may be employed in different measures, may be attached to particular subject matters, which employs a method of reasoning above logic (resembling modern mathematical calculus in its principle), and is the ultimate test of truth and error in our inferences.  It varies in its force and purity from one individual to another, and true intellectual improvement consists in the strengthening and perfecting of the Illative Sense.  As the phrase implies, the Illative Sense is constituted by impressions that are borne in upon us, from a source deeper than our conscious and formal reason.  It is the combined product of intuition, instinct, imagination, and long and intricate experience.  Yet the Illative Sense is not infallible in any man: assumptions which are an act of the Illative Sense may be founded upon mistaken elements of thought, and thus lead to error.  We must correct our own particular Illative Sense by reference to Authority; for Authority, which is a sort of filtered collective Illative Sense, provides the purgation of individual error.  As Newman wrote in his essay on John Keble (1846), “Conscience is an authority; the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is Antiquity; such are the words of the wise, such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories, such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.”

In the physical sciences, it is true, the common test of probability is physical fact, submitted to the physical senses and tested by them.  But history, ethics, and similar studies must be undertaken and tested by the Illative Sense and by Authority.  “In such sciences, we cannot rest upon mere facts, because we have not got them.  We must do our best by what is given us, and look about for aid from any quarter; and in such circumstance the opinions of others, the tradition of ages, the prescriptions of authority, antecedent auguries, analogies, parallel cases, these and the like, not indeed taken at random, but, like the evidence from the senses, sifted and scrutinized, obviously become of great importance.”[40]

Kirk provided an overview of conservative thought from the British and American perspective.  There is much I did not cover, but the points I did cover are ones that stood out for me.  I have a much better understanding of the importance of conservatism in our society.   I learned of several authors that I had not heard of before: Orestes Brownson, George M. Young,  Henry Maine, to name a few.  Kirk provided a perspective on writers that I have read with something that is generally missing from the mainstream books that I have previously read, and that is a conservative view.  Anytime I learn more about the world around me and history, it tends to bring me closer to God.  By analyzing the past, and inquiring as to the causes and effects that occurred in history and brought us to our present period, I will be able to pursue my quest to know myself, my fellowman, and my God.  Perhaps in a few years I will read this book again and reevaluate my tenets.

[1] James E. Person, “Kirk, Russell Amos.” The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. Encyclopedia.com. Accessed April 10, 2018 http://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kirk-russell-amos

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot Seventh Revised Edition.  Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986.  8-9

[13] Ibid., 8-9

[14] Ibid., 9

[15] Ibid., 9-10

[16] Ibid., 16

[17] Ibid., 29

[18] Ibid., 35

[19] Ibid., 44

[20] Ibid., 56

[21] Ibid., 63

[22] Ibid., 68-9

[23] Ibid., 84

[24] Ibid., 84

[25] Ibid., 92

[26] Ibid., 95-7

[27] Ibid., 107

[28] Ibid., 131

[29] Ibid., 134-5

[30] Ibid., 142-3

[31] Ibid., 160-1

[32] Ibid., 264

[33] Ibid., 403

[34] Ibid., 180-1

[35] Ibid., 323-4

[36] Ibid., 344

[37] Ibid., 377

[38] Ibid., 243

[39] Ibid., 248-9

[40] Ibid., 285-6