A Conservative Mind, and Devoted Spirit

Russell Kirk, who was actually from our very own Mecosta, Michigan, has left behind an intellectual and literary achievement as huge as it is difficult to categorize. He was not exactly a political theorist, nor really a philosopher, certainly not a historian; and yet his work speaks profound truths about politics, philosophy, and history. An ardent enemy of Communism, he was barely more enthusiastic about the commercial civilization of America. With very strong ideologies and abstraction in politics, he determinedly refused to pay any attention to the circumstances and context in which the thinkers he studied had lived. He loved old cathedral towns and country fields, ancient mansions and Gothic universities; he hated cars, television, and shopping malls. For all his patriotism, one has to wonder how comfortable he ever really felt in late-twentieth-century America.

From Mecosta, for four decades, Kirk fired his observations upon the world: two more major scholarly works, Eliot and His Age and The Roots of American Order, books, essays, ghost stories, lectures, columns for magazines and newspapers. From Mecosta too he cast a sharp and often disapproving eye upon the conservative movement that had sprung up in the years since the publication of The Conservative Mind. He disliked libertarians, and apologists for big business, and neoconservatives. He did not mind making enemies: he separated himself from his old friends at National Review after 1980, and in a 1988 critique of neoconservatism he let loose the startling observation that "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives"--that capital letter again! --"Mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States"(Kirk). By the end of his life, he had circled back to his Taftite origins, and joined the opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.

Kirk's voice echoed less powerfully in those later years than in the 1950s and 1960s. In part, of course, he was the victim of his own success: with conservatives in a position to exercise national political power after 1978, a political thinker who declined to preoccupy himself with the details of public policy --which he left to the "enlightened expediency" of statesmen--inevitably lost audiences to technical experts (Frum). His style consisted of out-of-fashion vested suits, while immersed in his old books, smoking dark, thick cigars that looked and tasted like torpedoes. He looked oddly out of place among the sleek Republicans of Reagan-era Washington.

And these stylistic oddities hinted at an even bigger and deeper gulf between Kirk and his Reagent audience. From the beginning, Kirk had denied key tenets of the American faith. He had openly defended class hierarchies; he doubted the value of technological progress; and, while disliking the growth of the central government, he cared very little for the danger to prosperity and economic growth posed by bigger government. In fact, Kirk regarded "growth," in most cases, as a misnomer for "decay."

"During the late 'fifties and the early 'sixties, I watched in Long Island the devastation of what had been a charming countryside, as dismaying as what was being done to our cities. To make room for a spreading population was necessary: but to do it hideously and stupidly was not ineluctable"(Kirk).

Many thinkers have revealed their ideas to the public, but Kirk uniquely dared to reveal an aesthetic critique of American life. "This is my case: there ought to be inequality of condition in the world. For without inequality, there is no class; without class, no manners and no beauty; and then a people sink into public and private ugliness." Ugliness was for him no light accusation. "With Santayana," he said, "I believe that beauty is the index to civilization" (Frum). By this index, contemporary America scored low. We now live, he bitterly complained in The Conservative Mind, in "a world smudged by industrialism, standardized by the masses, consolidated by government"(Kirk).

Kirk throughout his life insisted upon the six "canons" of conservative thought he first identified in The Conservative Mind: Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience. ... Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life. ... Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. ... Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected. ... Faith in prescription. ... Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse. ... Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. ...Kirk expressed his major ideas in highly general terms, and so it is hard to know exactly what these six canons imply especially the final two. When pressed for specifics, Kirk's political advice tended to take the form of negative injunctions (Frum).

Then again, uncertainty about the implications of his ideas in practice may not matter very much: for Kirk was, at bottom, much more concerned with morals and education than with politics, as politics is usually understood. He reserved his energies for other themes, themes sometimes absurdly small, but at other times profound and urgent, as in his remarkable essay "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man."

"We have to begin," Kirk describes himself telling a group of clergymen, "with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." "Oh no," they replied, "not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don't you?" Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love, as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. . . . Gauleiters and commissars? Why, their fellowship and charity was not proof against a dean or a divisional head. ...Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and its politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century, still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that