Red Pill #2: The Conservative Mind

posted by Curious George

Whittaker Chambers called it "the most important book of the 20th century." Ronald Reagan hailed its author, Russell Kirk, for helping "to renew a generation's interest in...the conservative revival in our nation." Columnist James J. Kilpatrick declared flatly: "There is no adequate way to measure the influence of Russell Kirk, whose seminal book, The Conservative Mind, remains the best and clearest exposition of the conservative philosophy."

The Wall Street Journal, in a major article on Kirk's influence, called The Conservative Mind "the most enduring of Russell Kirk's books. The impact this lengthy history of conservative ideas from Edmund Burke through T.S. Eliot had upon the tenor and direction of the infant conservative intellectual movement was profound....By articulating the rich tradition of conservative values, Mr. Kirk's book reinvigorated a dispirited conservatism adrift and barely conscious of its own existence....Kirk is assured a place of prominence in the intellectual histories for helping to define the ethical basis of conservatism."

The details and meaning of true conservatism is poorly understood today not only because of the bitterness of current political battles but also because the books that have played a key role in forming the several schools of conservatism though go largely untaught at our universities and unread by our professors. Indeed, perhaps one cause of the polarization that afflicts our political and intellectual class is the failure of our universities to teach, and in many cases to note the existence of, the conservative dimensions of American political thought. Russell Kirk and "The Conservative Mindis the "Professor of Conservative Studies" and course that we never had the opportunity to attend in college.

Who were the giants of conservative thought whom Kirk analyzed in "The Conservative Mind"? Above all, Edmund Burke, the "founder" of "the true school of conservative principle." From the incomparable Burke flowed a still vibrant, if battered, tradition: through such men as Scott, Coleridge, Disraeli, and Newman in Britain, and the Adams family, Calhoun, Hawthorne, Brownson, Babbitt, and More in America. Conservatives have been "routed" since 1789, Kirk admitted, "but they have never surrendered." Indeed, Kirk claimed to discern a number of auspicious trends; conservative ideas were now "struggling toward ascendancy in the United States...."

Kirk's text was not only a huge, 450-page distillation of the thinking of 150 years of the intellectual right; it was also a relentless assault on every left-wing panacea and error imaginable. The perfectibility of man, contempt for tradition, political and economic leveling-these were, in Kirk's view, the most prominent among post-1789 attacks on social order. Liberalism, collectivism, utilitarianism, positivism, atomistic individualism, leveling humanitarianism, pragmatism, socialism, ideology ("the science of idiocy," said John Adams)-these were some of Kirk's targets.

In the book, Kirk developed six "canons" or elements that make the conservative mind:

1. A belief in a transcendent order (which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law) "rules society as well as conscience";
   
2. An affection for or attachment to "the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence" instead of the routinizing and leveling forces of modern society;
   
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
   
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
   
5. A faith in custom, convention, prescription, consequently a "distrust of the 'sophisters, calculators, and economists' who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs";
   
6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another," and that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief." The leading role that Kirk attaches to religion marks him as a social conservative; his insistence that religion provides the indispensable ground for individual liberty marks him as a modern conservative.

Kirk's in response to "humanistic" education wrote a blistering article he published in the South Atlantic Quarterly (something of a conservative outpost) in 1945.

"We have turned from the classics to the lathe because of our fetishes of creature comforts and material aggrandizement.......We talk of education for leadership, but actually we educate for mediocrity."

Kirk denounced the four "sins" of public education: equalitarianism, technicalism, progressivism, and egotism. Fearlessly attacking everything from progressive education to campus sports-mindedness to utilitarian vocationalism to modern psychology ("that muddle of physiology and metaphysics"), Kirk warned against expecting federal aid to solve the ills of higher education.

Conservatives, facing uncertainty about George W. Bush's legacy, and the reality of their own errors and excesses, have good reason just now to read and ponder Kirk, and the other authors that will be presented as part of our "Red Pill" recommendations.