First Thoughts on Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
With comments on "Enemies of the Permanent Things"
I recently became acquainted with the life, thought, and legacy of Russell Kirk, a
deep, skilled “writer, teacher, columnist, novelist, and storyteller,” who may with
reason be considered the father of American conservatism.1 A friend alerted me to an opportunity that enabled me to spend a few delightful days learning and writing in Mecosta, MI, Kirk’s hometown. Prior to attending this conference in Mecosta, which was devoted to “Writing and the Moral Imagination,” I picked up Enemies of the Permanent Things, one of Kirk’s many books, to acquaint myself with his thought. The title and description of the book intrigued me, for I sensed that with it Kirk was engaged in a project akin to that which I have begun with Questing. I continued reading the book while in Michigan and discussed it with several men who know it well. Upon returning home, I quickly finished it, and I can report that I believe Kirk would have approved, in the main, of what I have written so far and of the principal aims of Questing as a long term project.
Below are comments on Enemies of the Permanent Things that express my preliminary understanding of and take on Kirk’s thought. I am sure I will have occasion to read and comment on more of his works in the future.
What is the goal of conservatism? I’ve heard it said of conservatives that their main goal seems to be to slow down implementation of the policies proposed by liberals, and it has at times seemed to me that conservatives are struggling to conserve the policies and opinions of the previous generation of liberals. — Now, precisely if that is what conservatives typically do, we might be tempted to observe that that reality points up a problem for liberals at least as grave as the one it points up for conservatives: if each new generation of liberals tends to disagree with the last, then liberalism begins to look like little more than a cultural mood, a reflexive taste for the latest thing, not a principled ideology, even less a political philosophy. Yet, it is healthy for conservatives to not rest satisfied with such a rejoinder. In these days of conservative conflict and soul-searching, a judgement on conservatism by the eminent T.S. Eliot, who was a friend and mentor to Russell Kirk, ought to be pondered: "conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things." Enemies of the Permanent Things is a book by a man who has so pondered, a man who aims to articulate a vision of conservatism that evades Eliot’s indictment. Although Kirk does not explicitly take up this question in the book, I conceive of Enemies as a defense of a very particular answer to the question, "Conservative, what are you conserving?" Kirk answers, in effect, "The Western literary tradition," or, to use a key term of his, “humane letters.”
Now, Kirk would be the first to agree that just laws, stable institutions, open markets, and serious moral norms are all worthy objects of conservation. (He would emphasize the moral norms above all; indeed, to point the way toward a recovery of “normality” in literature and in politics is his most explicit aim in Enemies). Yet, even on the basis of Enemies, I think Kirk would argue that our ability to identify and (consequently) conserve each of these worthy objects is dependent on our facility for perceiving, judging, and discriminating well, and that this facility is nourished and maintained in and through nothing so much as the careful study of humane letters. Without the education provided by the good and great works of our Tradition, we really run the risk of conserving the wrong things. We may say, then, that humane letters are for Kirk the ground or foundation of healthy conservatism, such that the goal, or, rather, the chief goal, of conservatism ought to be to conserve humane learning — i.e., liberal education in the classical tradition. The alternative to such learning is what Kirk calls “the drug of ‘Ideology’” — “the belief that this world of ours may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise through the operation of positive law and positive planning.”2 Humane learning inoculates against ideology, and it tends, Kirk suggests, to promote conservatism as a cast of mind.3 (And notice that this argument does not even touch on the private, personal value that I’m sure Kirk would agree inheres in every deep literary education and that might rightly be considered, insofar as anything like a cultural awareness of it exists, a worthy object of conservation).
According to Kirk, the literary tradition worth conserving includes, of course, Western civilization's greatest works of poetry, philosophy, and theology, i.e., “the canon,” but also lesser works of the "moral imagination," e.g, the novels of the talented "fabulist" Ray Bradbury and those of the gritty prophet-against-totalitarianism George Orwell. Such works are almost invariably informed by the canon, but they perform a somewhat different function than it. They not only appeal to new generations of readers, draw them into the Tradition, and help form in them souls humane and strong. They also enliven these souls to the particular spiritual and political threats of their times. So, to the question, “Why, Dr. Kirk, is the Western literary tradition worth conserving?” he replies (again, in effect), “It teaches and reminds human beings of the enduring moral norms that we ignore at our peril." These norms are Kirk’s “permanent things," and in his presentation they overlap with the classical and Christian virtues. As he avers early on in Enemies, "there is a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude."4 If it has been the task of the authors of the canon to fully disclose and articulate these norms, it has been (and is) the task of all those possessed of a strong moral imagination to make them ever new, and of all conservatives to see to it that they endure. That is Kirk’s conservatism as I presently understand it.
So, I am saying Kirk gives in the one book of his I have read strong answers to questions conservatives sometimes struggle to answer. His answers connect conservatism to permanence, to eternal things. They also distinguish it from ideological projects of social transformation without making of it a disposition reflexively opposed to change.5 I suggest that, even today, taking a Kirkian view of conservatism makes it possible to cut through a lot of nonsense in political debate, to get on with what matters, what will last. While we should not focus on one task or issue to the exclusion of all others, I say, on the basis of my reading of Kirk, let us give pride of place in our efforts to the education of the youth, to the restoration of discipline, rigor, and love of the humanities in our schools! What other worthy projects can succeed if this one fails? —
Given all this, all that is good about Enemies of the Permanent Things, I regret to say I found disappointing several of the later chapters, which deal with the thought of the ancient Greeks. Kirk follows (almost slavishly, it seems to me) the historical and theological scholarship of Eric Voegelin, and he authorizes a myriad of sweeping generalizations and unearned judgements about Greek thinkers. Such judgements do not encourage readers to encounter classical authors for themselves, and they are liable to be misleading or simply wrong.
Here is a representative example of the kind of analysis I found disappointing. In a paragraph meant to state definitively the upshot of Plato's philosophical project, Kirk makes this bizarre, unwarranted, possibly polemical declaration: "Socrates and Plato set to work restoring and elaborating the problems of order. Physis, nature, was not their light, but nomos, divine law."6 I think this judgement is demonstrably false, but it is actually more distressing to me that, in its context, the claim is not earned. Kirk does not engage in any close analysis of Plato's writings. He relies on a passage from Voegelin, one which, whatever its merits, does not, as far as I can tell, warrant the conclusion Kirk draws from it. That that conclusion is false may be understood by considering passages like the following two from Plato's Republic.
Of the extremely novel laws that will govern men and women in his just “city in speech,” Socrates at one point argues to his interlocutors, "Then we weren't giving laws that are impossible or like prayers, since the law we were setting down is according to nature. Rather, the way things are nowadays proves to be, as it seems, against nature."7
Later, of the imagined guardian-rulers of the same city, Socrates says, "I suppose that in filling out their work they would look away frequently in both directions, toward the just, fair, and moderate by nature and everything of the sort, and, again, toward what is in human beings . . ."8
In both cases, nature is presented as a standard over and against law. Divine authority is not invoked. (Moreover, the first passage indicates that, insofar as he treats laws as changeable, subject to error, Plato’s Socrates does not seem to believe law as such, nomos, is of divine provenance).
If you are inclined to defend Kirk on this point by arguing that there is a great deal more to say about Plato's view of law, nature, and the divine, know that I agree. That, in a way, is my point: given what I take to be the point of Enemies, Kirk should have either indicated the importance of the tension between law and nature in Plato and encouraged his readers to investigate it on their own or remained silent on the subject. I don’t see that any part of Kirk’s argument depends on a deep understanding of Plato, and what he says about him seems to me to discourage his readers from trying to obtain one.
To conclude, then: even if Kirk fails in Enemies to give an adequate account of Plato and classical Greek thought in general, he does give a compelling vision of the conservative mission in modernity. I found most of the book well worth pondering . . .
W ~ 4 ~ S ~ 5 ~ H ~ 8
For this quotation and more on Kirk’s life and influence, see this short essay.
Kirk, Russell. Enemies of the Permanent Things, with an introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Cluny Media, 2016, 159-60.
In a review of a book titled Literature in Revolution, Kirk wrote, “Karl Marx had next to no interest in humane letters, except so far as the writer might be employed as a propagandist in the class struggle.”
Kirk, Enemies, 7.
At several points in Enemies, Kirk argues that a healthy society will change over time even as it preserves important elements of continuity. Similarly, he says that conservatives should be altogether open to prudent reforms and innovations.
Ibid, 307.
Plato, Republic, 456c, emphasis added.
Ibid, 501b, emphasis added.