What Is It That We Wish To Conserve?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

A conservative’s task in society is “to preserve a particular people, living in a particular place during a particular time.”

Jack Hunter, in a review of this writer’s new book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” thus summarizes Russell Kirk’s view of the duty of the conservative to his country.

Kirk, the traditionalist, though not so famous as some of his contemporaries at National Review, is now emerging as perhaps the greatest of that first generation of post-World War II conservatives – in the endurance of his thought. 

Richard Nixon believed that. Forty years ago, he asked this writer to contact Dr. Kirk and invite him to the White House for an afternoon of talk. No other conservative would do, said the president.

America’s Founding and Limited Government

by George W. Carey

George W. Carey

There is no dearth of studies on the political thought of the American founding era. Yet there is no consensus on what theories, values, or goals were uppermost in the minds of the founding generation. On the contrary, on a number of critical theoretical issues and concerns, there appears to be an inverse relationship between the scholarly attention devoted to this era and what we can affirm with certainty. What we have are competing “paradigms” and schools of thought, each with different approaches, perspectives, and assumptions. And while it is clear that the Framers believed in limited government as essential to prevent oppression and tyranny, these paradigms point to significant differences among them over what these limitations should be, how they should be enforced, and how they might be maintained.

We can begin our survey with a brief examination of the most prominent of the early and adversely critical accounts of the Founders and their motivations: that of the Progressives. It is best to start here, because limited government was one of their central themes: they were against it. In significant ways, as we will endeavor to show, the progressives also provide the background necessary for understanding the modern paradigms, as well as for the differences between them. Finally, by way of assessing where we are today, we turn to modern conservative thought to see in what ways, if any, our political and social evolution over the decades has “unleashed” government, posing threats to limited government that could not be anticipated by our forebears.

For Book Lovers-An Oscar Winning Cartoon about the Joy of Books

'The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,' a 14-minute cartoon about the joy of books, took the Best Animated Short Film Oscar.

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, Bradley J. Birzer (Christendom Press, 2007, 322 pp.)

Towering above the early twentieth century Catholic literary revival stands Christopher Dawson, the English historian and man of letters who identified culture as the animating principle of history. Since religion is the heart of culture, Dawson wrote, then “religion is the key to history;” therefore “[w]e cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion.” To understand Europe and the West, then, one must see Christianity at its center, a central theme of Dawson’s voluminous writings for decades.

This I Believe

by Will Durant

I find in the Universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order and law of the world.

I do not understand my God, and I find in nature and history many instances of apparent evil, disorder, cruelty and aimlessness. But I realize that I see these with a very limited vision and that they might appear quite otherwise from a cosmic point of view. How can an infinitesimal part of the universe understand the whole? We are drops of water trying to understand the sea.

The Oracle of the South

by M. E. Bradford

The Essential Calhoun: Selections from Writings, Speeches, and Letters Edited with an Introduction by Clyde Wilson.
Foreword by Russell Kirk.

The contemporary academic interpretation of John Caldwell Calhoun is like the contemporary academic response to anything and anyone thoroughly and unmistakably Southern: a politically correct caricature, both as to motives and with regard to the meaning of Calhoun’s many achievements. It is a reaction which begins in splenetics and concludes in hackneyed vituperation against Calhoun’s views on two subjects: the status of Negro slavery under the original Constitution and the rights of the states to protect themselves against usurpations not authorized by the fundamental law. It is against this previous and unseemly focus on one part of Calhoun’s doctrine (a focus which results in distortion and latter-day animosity) that Professor Clyde Wilson works in assembling this excellent collection The implicit proposition behind his selection from such an extensive variety of documents touching on so many subjects is that in such variety we should recognize the richness, complexity, and sophistication of Calhoun’s thought. Assumed also is that we will then not attempt to judge such teaching by emphasizing its most familiar components in Calhoun’s prophecies of a war between the sections, a struggle certain to occur if the North continued in its policy of threat and gasconade, and by his commitment to the rights of members of the federal compact to restrain anything short of an overwhelming national majority when their prospects for future existence required such a protection.

Republican Virtue, Imperial Temptations

by Richard Gamble

America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire, by Claes G. Ryn, Transaction Press, 2003.

Many Enlightenment ideologues hoped to see fulfilled in America all the dreams of the Age of Reason: an empire of unfettered minds, natural rights, unbounded human benevolence and progress, the first fruits of a world reborn. Impatient utopians soon despaired, however. Faced with ratification of a conservative Constitution rooted in the long Western tradition of classical and Christian civilization, they turned their imaginations to the promise of revolutionary France. Nevertheless, some Americans persisted in their secular millennial expectations for the United States. Foremost among these at the opening of the twenty-first century are those whom Claes Ryn calls “new Jacobins.” In America the Virtuous, Ryn analyzes the defining elements of their worldview. In his own words, his “study aims to identify, illustrate, and analyze a general ideological phenomenon, a powerful tendency of thought, imagination and action with its own distinctive logic and momentum.” That tendency, in Ryn’s estimation, is leading America toward profound disorder.

Conservatism and Creative Energy Belong Together

"The intelligent conservative does not mistake formlessness for emancipation, as the Existentialist does; nor does he confound system with achievement, as the Marxist does.  The conservative knows that in religion, truly understood, the creative spirit finds a support of immense value.  At the very moment when religion sets about its task of sustaining the soul of civilization, religion also undertakes the work of nurturing the creative spirit.  In religion, as in education, the test of truth is the power of those permanent principles which give motive to creative thought and creative act.  Conservatism and creative energy belong together; they never can exist apart.  Perhaps an understanding of this truth is the most pressing need of our bewildered age."--Lynn Harold Hough, 1957

Did 'The Great Society' Ruin Society?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.”

Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month — for we are not to speak of the poor without unctuous empathy.

Yet, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation reports in “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor,” Mitt was more right about America’s magnanimity than those who bewail her alleged indifference.

The Conservative Adventure

by Brad Birzer

Please forgive the following rambles. I'm in Louisville, ready to work with the mighty Gary Gregg again today. Last night, I had the great privilege of speaking with a number of his excellent McConnell Fellows for nearly two hours about Eliot's Ash Wednesday and another ninety minutes on Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring.

I came back to the hotel--the very haunted and stately Seelbach--full of energy and a humbled desire to change the world. The following is, for better or worse, what I've come up with. As you'll see at the end, there's no real conclusion (be forewarned!) just a bit of bloviated excitement.

*****

When English historian and man of letters, Christopher Dawson, became editor of the venerable Catholic journal, the Dublin Review, in 1940, he wrote: Roman Catholics “have an historical mission to maintain and strengthen the unity of Western culture which had its roots in Christendom against the destructive forces which are attempting its total subversion.”

Russell Kirk on The Sage as Novelist: Miguel de Unamuno

by Russell Kirk

NOVELA/NIVOLA

Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Princeton: Princeton University Press, Reprint 1987

THREE EXEMPLARY NOVELS
Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Angel Flores
New York: Grove Press, Reprint 1987

FICCIONES: FOUR STORIES AND A PLAY
Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Princeton: Princeton University press, Reprint 1987

Half a century has elapsed since the death of Don Miguel de Unamuno and still his works are much read and written about. Three volumes of his stories and novellas have been reissued recently in English translation--able translation, by the way. Hundreds of best-selling novelists have risen, and vanished forever from bookshops, during those five decades. Yet Unamuno is everywhere cited and quoted; all of his more important fiction, criticism, and commentary is available in English and other languages; and his fiction's originality has been admired by successive generations of readers and critics. Why this enduring power?

Obama Contra Ecclesia

by John Barnes

As the federal government draws ever nearer to the precipice of insolvency, the ability of the powers-that-be to purchase political support in an election year becomes increasingly difficult. Instead, our rulers look to the "freebies" -- policy moves that, while far-reaching, cost the public treasury little (at least directly or immediately). This is just as true at the state level as it is the federal. In my home state of Washington, past overspending and a sour economy have left ruling Democrats a state budget situation no one envies. Too many pigs and not enough teats, as Lincoln would say. Instead of energizing their base by expanding entitlement spending or pouring more money into the failing K-12 system, Democrats made redefining marriage their primary legislative goal for 2012.

Homage to Ash Wednesday

by Darrin Moore

Want to catch a glimpse of the face of God?  --Or at least feel what it's like to know Him?  Take stroll and climb the stairway to Heaven with T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk on Ash Wednesday, even though it's now Thursday.

Being Downriver Darrin and the distiller of the great books that I've had the good fortune to have had wash ashore into my little island library, I must excerpt wildly from a volume I've recently read which keeps leaping off the shelf back into my hands, Eliot and His Age by Russell Kirk.  Now you may know that the Kirk and Eliot were friends, and that Kirk's ancestral home burned down on Ash Wednesday in the seventies when Russell was away giving a lecture on Eliot's poem Ash-Wednesday, but if you're looking for something really spooky, supernatural and paranormal, you must pay the price, pick up this book and take the ride. Kirk (who was also a convinced believer in ghosts) writes:

Why You Must Accept Your Duties...NOW

by Mike Church 

MANDEVILLE, LA - EXCLUSIVE AUDIO - Listen to this clip from the February 20th Post Show Show and get prepared to go ACTIVE. Mike explains how George Mason, despite the gout, knew it was his duty to assist with writing the Constitution, among other events, and even though he was averse to leaving Gunston Hall, his country was more important. Is your country (whatever that may mean to you) worth more than Tuesday Bowling nights?

The Achievement of Irving Babbitt

by Milton Hindus

To define Irving Babbitt’s central view of life, from which radiate all his other views—of letters, of education, of society—I commence by quoting not his own words, but those of a different writer—one whom he would not have approved.

For in reading Bertrand Russell’s recent autobiographical volume Portraits from Memory, I encountered a passage—not without surprise—that seemed to me extraordinarily close to the views of Babbitt as I understood them, and which might serve as an epigraph to a study of Babbitt’s work. This passage occurs in a short sketch that Russell wrote of his friend Joseph Conrad. In Babbitt’s own terms, I had previously thought of both Russell and Conrad as philosophical “naturalists”—one a spiritual descendant of Bacon, the other as closely connected with Rousseau. Russell was concerned primarily with science, Conrad with sentiments. One was a utilitarian, the other a romantic. Certainly there were important differences, too, between them—Russell regarding himself as something of a radical, and Conrad being regarded as something of a conservative. But both men had been strongly contrasted in certain respects, to my mind, with Irving Babbitt.

T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday

by Bradley J. Birzer

Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” a monumental work—the Purgatorio between the Inferno of “The Waste-land” and the Paradiso of the “Four Quartets”—has always been, as long as I can remember in my adult life, a comfort and a mystery to me. 

I assume it remained as such even to the Great Bard of the Twentieth Century himself.

Stephen Spender, one of Eliot’s friends, remembers a student asking Eliot, after a group of Roman Catholics had studied the poem with Father Martin D’Arcy, “please, sir, what do you mean by the line; ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’”?

Religious Freedom

by Stratford Caldecott

In the US, the so-called "contraception mandate" proposed by the Obama administration has been bitterly contested by the Catholic bishops and others – such as Steve Krason of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists in his "Call to Action", and President William Fahey of Thomas More College in his "Open Letter". Requiring Catholic employers to provide (or in the revised version at least indirectly support) contraception and sterilization services in employee health insurance plans seems a clear violation of conscience. Furthermore, as Dr Fahey points out,

This mandate casts human life and pregnancy in the same category as diseases to be prevented, and it reduces the beauty and goodness of human sexuality to an individual, utilitarian, and dangerous act. If birth-control, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs are to be considered curative – as the administration desires – one must ask what is it that they 'cure' or 'prevent'? Human life itself is now placed into a category of social burden, which the government now claims the competence and authority to control and define. Such an action undermines the very purpose of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Edmund Burke Reviews Adam Smith, Twice

TIC Readers, considering how much we revere Burke here, I thought it might be good to reprint the following two pieces from him.  While I knew he and Adam Smith were close friends, I did not realize until yesterday (February 19, 2012) that he had briefly reviewed each of Smith's major works.  Burke's words are, sadly, not lengthy, as he believed a book review should print as much as possible from the book reviewed.  Regardless, I find these fascinating.  I hope you do as well.  Yours, Brad Birzer

*****

It is very difficult, if not impossible, consistently with the brevity of our design, to give the reader a proper idea of this excellent work. A dry abstract of the system would convey no juster idea of it, than the skeleton of a departed beauty would of her form when she was alive; at the same time the work is so well methodified, the parts grow so naturally and gracefully out of reach other that it would be doing it equal injustice to shew it by broken and detached pieces.

George Washington and the Gift of Silence

by Stephen M. Klugewicz

In December 2009, a letter written by George Washington in November of 1787 to his nephew Bushrod Washington was auctioned for $3.2 million, the highest price ever paid for a letter written by our first president. In the letter, Washington urges Bushrod to support the newly-written Constitution, then under consideration for ratification by the states. To most historians, this is probably the more interesting part of the letter. But the personal advice that Washington gives his nephew, who had just been elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates, at the letter’s conclusion provides a window on a key aspect of George Washington’s character. Washington tells Bushrod:

“Rise but seldom—let this be on important matters—and then make yourself thoroughly acquainted with the subject. Never be agitated by more than a decent warmth, & offer your sentiments with modest diffidence—opinions thus given, are listened to with more attention than when delivered in a dictatorial stile. The latter, if attended to at all, although they may force conviction, is sure to convey disgust also.”[1]

Moral Visions of the Free Market

by Glen Austin Sproviero

Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny
edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler.
ISI Books (Wilmington, Delware), 350 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2003.

For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing importance as the ideology of capitalism gains unprecedented public support and globalization becomes unavoidable. The prospect of material triumph appears omnipresent, and the justifications for advancing the cause of wealth unmoored from traditional notions of the common good are finding allies in unlikely places. In this collection of essays, editors Doug Bandow and David Schindler bring together an eclectic mix of thinkers to discuss the morality of free-market systems. While the essays are not deliberately set in conversation, they naturally form a flowing dialogue.

Eric Voegelin: Prophet to the Modern Academy

by Robert Woods

Eric Voegelin (1901– 1985) penned an essay entitled On Classical Studies (1973)--an essay that was shaped by the Classical west and the Christian faith and is philosophically opposed to the distortions of Enlightenment rationalism.

Reading Voegelin is akin to reading Amos or Joel. But instead of ancient Israel, it is the modern academy that is being rebuked. Here are just a few portions from his essay On Classical Studies to illustrate the significant problem that had occurred by 1973, "the fragmentation of science through specialization and the deculturation of Western society…specialized histories…institutional reduction…the life of reason; the end of ineluctable condition of personal and social order, has been destroyed." In addition, Voegelin says, "the climate of our universities certainly is hostile to the life of reason…the fanatically accelerated destruction of the university since the Second World War…a pathological deformation of existence."

A New Look at the Economics Behind the Civil War

by Brian Domitrovic

John C. Calhoun

A hundred and fifty years ago, our country was in the midst of the most difficult and deadly experience of its history, the Civil War, in which 660,000 would perish.

How had it come to be that the country was in Lincoln’s words, “half slave, half free,” and because of it, inflicting on itself such terrible blows?

A year ago in this space I had opportunity to tout the work of the young historian par excellence Phillip W. Magness, whose dissertation on tariffs in the nineteenth century is changing settled narratives of American political economy. Reading further into Magness’s work has begun to convince me that we need a new comprehensive explanation of why North and South developed so differently from 1815 to 1861 – so differently, that there had to be a most terrible war to settle things.

Theology on Tap

by Julie Robison

In college, the Dogwood Society (my major's academic honorary) was a little platoon of love and laughs. The handful of us would send encouraging notes during our regular all-night writing sessions, pass around humorous takes on American history and politics, and would periodically get together for "Founding Fridays" to share in fellowship over a few brews.

Though partial to wheat beers and amber ales, it is well known that I love Guinness beer. Therefore, when a dear fellow Dogwoodian suggested I read The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World by Stephen Mansfield, I knew my friend had excellent taste in both beverages and books.

This book is delightful. If you, dear reader, have any interest in beer, religion, family businesses, history, marketing, science, politics, or culture, you may enjoy this good read. Written with precision, The Search for God and Guinness reads like a methodical conversation or college lecture. Mansfield immersed himself into the wide topic of "Guinness" while remaining an excellent third-party observer. It seems he, as his reader, had a lot to learn about the Guinness family and their barley business.

Silence in the face of Evil

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

―Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The Marriage of Rights and Duties

by Russell Kirk

In 1755, the year when there began the French and Indian Wars, George Mason, gentleman freeholder, commenced the building of Gunston Hall. Ever since I was a boy I have come upon pictures of this lovely house, at once homely and eye-catching; I have longed to visit it; and at last here I am, aged seventy-three winters, being honored beyond my deserts on this plantation of the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Bill of Rights, and much else, a wise opponent of centralizing power.

Just half a century ago, while I was writing my first book – John Randolph of Roanoke – I first became acquainted with Mason, one of the three Virginian statesmen most admired by Randolph. Under the wings of the federal butterfly, said Randolph, Mason had perceived the poison – that is, the potency for the future growth of arbitrary political power.

As everybody knows, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States owe much to Mason, who feared that the powers of the several states might be swallowed up by a central administration, and that personal liberties inherited from the English political experience might be broken in upon by an innovating regime. No sooner had the federal Constitution been drawn up than Mason published his “Objections to This Constitution of Government,” in which he declares, “When we reflect upon the insidious art of wicked and designing men, the various and plausible pretenses for continuing and increasing the inordinate lust of power in the few, we shall no longer be surprised that freeborn man hath been enslaved, and those very means which were contrived for his preservation have been perverted to his ruin.” During the past two centuries, matters have not gone all that far under the Constitution of the United States; yet one thinks of a prescient book, published by a Frenchman in the 1950’s entitled The Coming American Caesars; and of the character and administration of President Lyndon Johnson.

Faith and Marriage Under Attack

by Stratford Caldecott

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing a concerted attack on Christianity and on the institution that the Church deems the fundamental cell of society, namely the family founded on the marriage of a man and a woman. In the US, Archbishop Chaput and other bishops have reacted strongly to the "contraception mandate" – the plans of the Obama administration to force Catholic agencies indirectly to fund contraception and abortion services. In the UK, the High Court ruled "unlawful" the practice of local town councils to open their meetings with a prayer. A government scheme permits girls as young as 13 to receive secret contraceptive implants at school without the knowledge of their parents. Meanwhile the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned against the movement to legalize assisted suicide or euthanasia as representing a disastrous shift in the "moral and spiritual atmosphere". In both the US and UK, where homosexual unions are increasingly regarded as normal, pressure is growing for the right to homosexual "marriage", contrary to the dictionary definition as well as the longstanding universal tradition that marriage is a lifelong union between a man and a woman, ultimately for the sake of offspring. (The question of offspring has been blurred by the development of IVF and surrogacy, and the question of same-sex unions by gender "reassignment", whether by legal decree or by surgery.) See Christian Concern for these and other relevant news stories.

All of this is predictable, and has indeed been predicted for some time (along with various disastrous outcomes) by many cultural observers. Of course, one can become unpopular by referring to a "slippery slope", but no other metaphor seems more appropriate in this situation. Once we have left the "level ground" of common sense on these matters, there is nowhere to go but down, and in a world where every handhold is rapidly demolished the speed of our descent can only increase. Common sense, here, is defined not only by the universal and perennial principles of an ordered society, but by the philosophy of natural law and virtues that underpinned that consensus, based on the intrinsic connection of truth, goodness, and beauty.

Taking Note of T.S. Eliot's Notes on Education and Culture

by Robert M. Woods

The end of World War II and our current moment have one thing in common when it comes to educational books. There was then, as there is now, a plethora of books putting forth various theories about education and calling for education reform. After more than sixty years of change, it seems things are more broken than ever. Few at that time, and certainly few, if any, at this time, have a sense of the history of education, let alone a rich philosophy of education. The great poet T.S. Eliot can help us considerably in this regard. In his book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he specifically addresses the issue of education and culture.

Beginning with the definition of education, Eliot relates the nature of education to culture as a whole. Specifically on culture Eliot says, "if we mean that Culture is what is passed on by our elementary and secondary schools, or by our preparatory and public schools, then we are asserting that an organ is a whole organism. For the schools can transmit only a part, and they can only transmit this part effectively, if the outside influences, not only of family and environment, but of work and play, of newsprint and spectacles and entertainment and sport, are in harmony with them." It may be here that one should spend a great deal of time for a long pause. Why? Because this is a matter that few educational theorist have thought about when examining education. And the point is this: the relationship between education and the broader culture is so important that one of the reasons modern education receives an "F" is because the culture from which it draws its identity and reason for being receives an "F."

Redeeming America’s Political Culture: The Kirkean Tradition in the Study of American Public Life

by Bruce P. Frohnen

By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend over America powers of taxation and administration never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an independence hardly anticipated.¹  Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind

Is the United States a revolutionary nation? Was it founded in 1776 out of whole cloth by men determined to construct a government and a people committed to radically new ideas of political equality and individual liberty? Or is American public life best understood as the outgrowth of a political culture—governmental structures and an unwritten constitution consisting of people’s habits, attitudes toward government and general ways of life—rooted in British and earlier traditions in the west? Were the founders politically innovating liberals or culturally and historically grounded conservatives?

Much hinges on the answer to this question because it indicates the nature and tendency of our founding documents and our nation’s intended path. If America is at its core a set of ideological beliefs we all must accept and serve, then we must constantly reshape ourselves and our way of life to fit these ideas. But if our nation was founded to preserve a pre-existing way of life that the founders valued deeply, then it is this concrete way of life—the institutions, beliefs, and practices central to the local communities in which we live—that we must work to conserve, rather than any abstract notion of the best political regime.

A Conservatism of Imagination

‎"I hope, then, that our resurgent American conservatism will not be truly new, looking toward a wave of the future, but rather a genuine revival of intelligent interest in the old liberties and duties of American society. I hope, moreover, that it will be not merely a shop-and-till conservatism, a conservatism of timidity, but instead a conservatism of imagination, generous and charitable. I hope it will not be a clumsy muddling through our national problems, in contempt of principle, but on the contrary a conservatism illuminated by the wisdom of our ancestors and inspired by a revived consciousness of the moral nature of society."--Russell Kirk 1954

The Music of the Spheres

by Robert R. Reilly 

“[In] sound itself, there is a readiness to be ordered by the spirit and this is seen at its most sublime in music.” 
—Max Picard

Robert R. Reilly

Despite the popular Romantic conception of creative artists as inspired madmen, composers are not idiots savants, distilling their musical inspiration from the ether. Rather, in their creative work they respond and give voice to certain metaphysical visions. Most composers speak explicitly in philosophical terms about the nature of the reality that they try to reflect. When the forms of musical expression change radically, it is always because the underlying metaphysical grasp of reality has changed as well. Music is, in a way, the sound of metaphysics, or metaphysics in sound.

Music in the Western world was shaped by a shared conception of reality so profound that it endured for some twenty-five hundred years. As a result, the means of music remained essentially the same—at least to the extent that what was called music could always have been recognized as such by its forbearers, as much as they might have disapproved of its specific style. But by the early twentieth century, this was no longer true. Music was re-conceptualized so completely that it could no longer be experienced as music, i.e. with melody, harmony, and rhythm. This catastrophic rupture, expressed especially in the works of Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage, is often celebrated as just another change in the techniques of music, a further point along the parade of progress in the arts. It was, however, a reflection of a deeper metaphysical divide that severed the composer from any meaningful contact with external reality. As a result, musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.

Is There Ever A Line In The Sand?

by Mike Church ©2012

(Below are the prepared remarks Mike Church delivered to the audience of the Feb 11, 2012 Liberty Fest West event at the MCM Grande’ Hotel, Odessa TX)

• My Theme for the evening: it seems as though no matter the transgression “conservatives” will not draw lines in the sand, we need to start “drawing lines in the sand.”
• Why the line is important - if you are constantly giving up ground you eventually find yourself with nothing to stand on-see this years infights over who is most conservative, debt ceiling hikes, bailouts and moon bases, is that where you draw the line?
• Do we have history of famous men like the founders drawing lines? Yes, Thomson Mason, Charles Carroll and Patrick Henry all drew the line.

More on the elements

by Stratford Caldecott

But what are the four (or five) elements that T.S. Eliot was so interested in (see previous post)? The idea that the world is composed of just a handful of basic elements is common to all the great traditions, and in both the Egyptian, Greek and Indian traditions these elements are given the names Earth, Air, Fire, and Water – with the addition of a fifth "subtle" element or "quintessence" sometimes called Aether, the first element in creation. This latter is identified with "space" and may be taken as the substratum of all vibration (or "sound" in the broadest metaphysical sense, thus including what we now call electromagnetic radiation or light).

Plato posited an even more basic level of composition to the universe; particulate or geometrical in nature, rooted in the triangle. A footnote in my book All Things Made New reads as follows: "In the Timaeus, Plato hypothesizes that the elements themselves are made of particles built up from triangles into the forms of the five regular solids. Since the pyramid is the figure with the fewest faces, it must be the most mobile, the sharpest, most penetrating, and lightest. He therefore identifies it as the basic constituent of Fire. Air is composed of octahedrons, Water of icosahedrons. The fifth Platonic solid, the dodecahedron, being the closest in form to the sphere, was associated with the fifth element Aether, the Hindu Akasha, or Space. Though the existence of a too crudely imagined ‘Ether’ as the bearer of electromagnetic waves seemed to have been disproved by Michelson and Morley in 1887, the ancient concept reappeared as Einstein’s notion of a unified space-time continuum. The Platonic elements are basic to our experience of the world. The same can hardly be said of two further ‘states of matter’ recently created in the laboratory by super-refrigeration close to absolute zero, namely Bose-Einstein and fermionic condensates. Symbolically, therefore, the ancient scheme remains intact."

The Other Side of the Keyhole: Russell Kirk's Ghost Stories

by Robert M. Woods

During my years of teaching, I have frequently admonished students with this deeply held conviction. If you can find a cultural critic or essayist that you enjoy, and he or she also happens to write fiction—read it.

 
While Russell Kirk (1918-94) is best known as one of the founding fathers of post-World War II conservatism, a cultural critic, historian and political thinker, he has also been praised by the likes of Ray Bradbury, T.S. Eliot, and Madeleine L’Engle as a teller of ghostly tales.

Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales is a collection of nineteen of Kirk's best “ghostly” tales from periodicals and anthologies published throughout his life. The average literary treat is approximately seventeen pages in length. A few of these tales delightfully exceed forty. These stories are a real intellectual pleasure by an accomplished scholar and man of letters. The intellectual virtues wonderfully blended with form and content are manifested within this fiction, which conveys the essence of the permanent things by means of the moral imagination.

If this is the reader’s first encounter with the thought of Russell Kirk, great assistance comes by way of the helpful introduction by Vigen Guroian. Guroian contends that “for a comprehensive understanding of Kirk’s conservative vision, a familiarity with his fiction is necessary, for it is here that Kirk’s rich imaginative mind vividly casts the drama of the soul’s struggle with good and evil in relation to a transcendent realm of meaning and purpose.” 

After the introductory essay by Guroian, the reader may actually benefit by reading the concluding essay by Kirk. “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale” is an insightful addition in which Kirk muses over why he writes such stories. Kirk observes, “All important literature has some ethical end…and the tale of the preternatural — as written by George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other masters — can be an instrument for the recovery of moral order.”

What is the object of human life?--Russell Kirk

In the paragraphs below, from A Program for Conservatives, Dr. Kirk addresses conservatives with words which remind us of our pilgrim status in this world of tears. We are not called to material success. We are called to obedience. We are called to love. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful will find their true place in our culture only when many more of us are obedient to Love.

"What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death.

2 3/4 Cheers for Prejudice

by John Willson

 Prejudice, n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support. 

--Ambrose Bierce 

A farmer who dwelt in my home town was once arrested on the streets of Rochester, New York, while looking up at a large building which he owned. He was wearing, at the time, knee-high boots with unmistakable traces of the barnyard on them, dirty Oshkosh-by-Goshes over a tattered flannel shirt, and an old railroad engineer’s cap. The charge was vagrancy. His son favored similar clothing. I helped to paint the old farmhouse when I was seventeen or eighteen, and I remember how shocked I was when Dad told me that old Everett could buy the whole town of Phelps with his pocket change. Their name was Mott, and various members of the extended family owned some grape juice, some automobile factories, natural gas, real estate in most major cities, and who knows what all.

One could say that this branch of the Motts, father and son, were “vagrant men with no visible means of support.” And easy, therefore, for a Rochester cop to look upon with a certain amount of “prejudice” as the old man stood on the street spitting tobacco with his thumbs linked through the bib overalls. They both, father and son, were graduates of New England prep schools and Williams College.

Prejudice is not to be mistaken for its verb cousin, “discriminate,” which the redoubtable Bierce defines as “To note the particulars in which one person or thing is, if possible, more objectionable than another.” Prejudice is apparently a rather unobjectionable fellow, compared with the one who discriminates, especially if he also is the black sheep of the family, “Bigot,” who is “obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.”

Elements in Eliot

by Stratford Caldecott

An important book by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr, Aethereal Rumours: T.S. Eliot's Physics and Poetics, does for The Waste Land and the Four Quartets something of what Michael Ward does for the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis in Planet Narnia. In his book, Michael Ward shows that each of the seven tales of Narnia was intended by Lewis to correspond with one of the seven astrological planets – taking these as spiritual symbols of perennial value (as he does in his academic works on Medieval and Renaissance literature, and in the Space Trilogy). Similarly, Lockerd shows that Eliot was always concerned with reconciling poetry with science, and unlike other modern poets "increasingly placed his poetry quite consciously and deliberately within the cosmos described by the ancient philosophical physics" of Heraclitus and Aristotle. He was an admirer of modern science, but not of scientism, meaning the cult of a science deemed purely "objective" in contrast to the "subjective" arts. He sought to overcome this false dualism in his own work, and so was drawn to a "science of essences" that he did not believe had been superseded by modern chemistry or physics. The Waste Land has five sections which correspond symbolically and thematically to the five elements (including the fifth, aether). Each of the Four Quartets corresponds to one of the four earthly elements. (I would only add that each of the Quartets contains five sections, and that perhaps we can see the fifth section as bringing each into harmony with the fifth "celestial" element. Aether, according to Lockerd, originates with Aristotle, whereas I see it as already implicit in Plato's Timaeus, at 55c, as equivalent to the fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, on which the Demiurge "embroidered" the constellations.) Lockerd's book was encouraged by Russell Kirk and partly written at Piety Hill. It is a valuable contribution to the literature connecting ancient and modern science, as well as science and poetry.

This originally appeared on Beauty in Education and is published here with the author's gracious permission.

All Things Made New

All Things Made New explores the Christian mysteries in the tradition of  St. John the Evangelist, and Mary, the Mother of Jesus, by studying the symbolism, cosmology, and meaning of the Book of Revelation, as well as the prayers and meditations of the Rosary, including the Apostles’ Creed and the Our Father. These reflections lead us step by step to the foot of the Cross, and to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, where all things are made new.

“A wide-ranging, exciting, and erudite exploration of the Christian mysteries…. A splendid achievement.”
— Philip Zaleski (editor of the Best Spiritual Writing series).

"On Classical Studies" by Eric Voegelin

by Eric Voegelin

A REFLECTION on classical studies, their purpose and prospects, will properly start from Wolf’s definition of classic philology as the study of man’s nature as it has become manifest in the Greeks.[i]

The conception sounds strangely anachronistic today, because it has been overtaken by the two closely related processes of the fragmentation of science through specialization and the deculturation of Western society. Philology has become linguistics; and the man who manifested his nature in the Greek language has become the subject-matter of specialized histories of politics, literature, art, political ideas, economics, myth, religion, philosophy, and science. Classical studies are reduced to enclaves in vast institutions of higher learning in which the study of man’s nature does not rank high in the concerns of man. This fragmentation, as well as the institutional reduction, however, are not sensed as a catastrophe, because the “climate of opinion” has changed in the two hundred years since Wolf’s definition. The public interest has shifted from the nature of man to the nature of nature and to the prospects of domination its exploration opened; and the loss of interest even turned to hatred when the nature of man proved to be resistant to the changes dreamed up by intellectuals who want to add the lordship of society and history to the mastery of nature. The alliance of indifference and hatred, both inspired by libido dominandi, has created the climate that is not favorable to an institutionalized study of the nature of man, whether in its Greek or any other manifestation. The protagonists of the Western deculturatian process are firmly established in our universities.

Owen Barfield: "Effective Approach to Social Change," (part I)

Few conservatives--with the notable exception of John Lukacs--remember or cite Owen Barfield any longer.  This is a shame, and Barfield should really stand with the great Christian Humanists of the previous century.  

Perhaps his best work is his first, Poetic Diction, originally his undergraduate thesis at Oxford (1922).  Published commercially in 1928, it has never gone out of print.

A sometime member of the Inklings, Barfield significantly influenced C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien; he also belonged to a group of Christians (ecumenical) called "The Moot."  Other members included T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, and Reinhold Niebuhr.  The following piece comes from The Moot's The Christian News-Letter, now rather difficult to find.  

Why Russell Kirk's Teaching Humane Literature in High Schools is MUST Reading

by Robert M. Woods

On occasion, someone will email me or ask me at a conference, "if there is one article or essay on the problems and solutions to modern education, that everyone should read, what is it"? Questions like this are wonderful on at least two levels--it gives me the exhilaration of mentally scanning the articles that might fit, and the opportunity to then to ask a few questions to narrow down the search.

Of course, there are hundreds that might fit, but the one that I most often place at the very top of the list is Russell Kirk's Teaching Humane Literature in High School. This intellectual treat was reissued back in 2007 in The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, with a number of other pieces well worth reading in this fine collection.

Of the many qualities found in Kirk's writings one can admire and certainly emulate, the way Dr. Kirk provides precise analysis of the crisis, and while never moving toward despair, offers a sound prognosis with much helpful advice for a possible cure.

In the article entitled Teaching Humane Literature in High Schools, originally published in 1977, Kirk provides much that we could gain from listening to as we strive in Classical Christian schools and home-school circles to offer the best education possible grounded in our great intellectual heritage.

John Taylor of Caroline: The American Cato

by Brittany Baldwin

Hedges lined the main quarters. The lawn was nicely trimmed. The brick house and coordinating outbuildings maintained a level of dignity appropriate for the landed gentry. The white columns rose to intersect a pediment, which was centered between the remaining windows, demonstrating the balance and structure so characteristic of the Greco-Roman architecture revived in the South. As guests entered the estate, they were greeted by the lovely Mrs. Lucy Penn Taylor, whose warm and generous demeanor instantly set them at ease. The furnishings matched the Taylor’s lifestyle—tasteful but never extravagant, “comfortable but not grand,” stylish but not aristocratic.[1] The house overlooked the Rappahannock River and 1200 acres of farmland. It was a respite from the political corruption that crept into burgeoning cities. It was a revival of the ancient art of farming. It was a recapturing of tradition paired with innovative agricultural methods.

Conservatism at its Highest

The...conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character--with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

--Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind)

T.S. Eliot: Anti Semite?

by Bradley J. Birzer

Sometime in 2011, a person I very much respect challenged me as to why I possess so much of an affection for T.S. Eliot, especially since it is known he was an anti-Semite.

At this point in my post, I should admit two things. First, I didn’t know that anyone still took the charges--especially as someone as well read, learned, and respectable as this person--of Eliot’s anti-Semitism seriously any longer. That this person stated this so openly, and with clear concern for me, made me pause.

Really, Eliot was anti-Semitic?

"A Time for Choosing" by Ronald Reagan

In honor of Mr. Ronald Reagan's one hundred and first birthday today.

Televised Campaign Address for Goldwater Presidential Campaign - 10/27/64.

The Conservative Movement: Then And Now

by Russell Kirk
(This address was given to an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in 1980. Should you wish to enjoy the video of Dr. Kirk making this presentation it is available on C-SPAN here. Ed.)

In the United States, as in Britain, the passage of some three decades is required for a body of convictions to be expressed, discussed, and at last incorporated into public policy. Ordinarily this slowness in the movement of public opinion is to the nation's advantage-by contrast with the mercurial politics of France, say. It is the devil who always hurries. However that may be, in America nowadays, it appears, such a fruition of ideas is about to take form.

I mean that we are entering upon a period of conservative policies in this American Republic. In both the great political parties, I suggest, conservative views will tend to dominate. Men and women who profess conservative convictions will be elected to office. And what matters more, the conservative political imagination will set to work to allay our present discontents and to renew our order.

For a thoughtful, renewed conservatism began to appear in print at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, with the publishing of books and periodical writings by men of a conservative bent. Ideas do have consequences, as Richard Weaver wrote about that time; and now, a generation later, those conservative concepts, popularized, are about to enter into practical politics.

Roll Over, Beethoven?

“President Barack Obama loves to serenade his wife by singing songs from Al Green, Marvin Gaye and other R&B greats…Michelle Obama told 'The Tonight Show' host Jay Leno…he also sings…even 'a little Stevie.' That's Stevie Wonder, for the uninitiated.

“'He likes the classics,' she explained.”

From The Daily Mail (UK)

The Prophet of Conservatism: Russell Kirk

by Darrin Moore

Russell Kirk

One of Ronald Reagan's favorite philosophers was a Michigander named Russell Kirk. Sadly, too few from the ranks of today's conservative movement are familiar with the 'Sage of Mecosta' and how he nourished the intellectual roots of America's philosophical heritage. This is the first in a series of short essays intended to reintroduce one of the brightest stars in the conservative constellation.*

The son of a locomotive engineer, Kirk was raised alongside the railroad tracks in Plymouth, Michigan, however he would come to see--and would see more deeply than most--many facets of America's society. He would work in factories for Henry Ford, in the military for Uncle Sam, in academia for behemoth universities, and among the ivory towers of politics for publishers and Presidents. Stoically independent, from atop 'Piety Hill' his ancestral home in Mecosta, he enriched and reinforced a massive movement by writing some thirty books and hundreds of articles, lectures and columns--many of which can be read at Kirkcenter.org.

'Merciful towards the absurd': Remembering William F. Buckley Jr.

Bill Buckley in his study. Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

I married a woman far more organized than I am. Only three months into our nuptials, I'm still reeling from the reorganization my (our) residence is undergoing now that she lives here, too. It's becoming a home rather than merely a functional storage system for books, papers, a bed, clothing, food, cigars, fishing gear, firearms, and (somewhere) a cat. Going through old documents as part of this reorganization (read: downsizing) that accompanies marriage, I came across Fr. George Rutler's homily for William F. Buckley Jr's funeral Mass. It's as worthwhile a read today as it was in 2008.

Mass for the Report of the Soul of William F. Buckley Jr.
Cathedral of Saint Patrick, New York City, April 4, 2008
Fr. George William Rutler

"NOW BETHANY WAS NEAR JERUSALEM…." JOHN 11:18

In the village of Bethany was the house of Mary and her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus. There Jesus wept when Lazarus died, and then he called into the tomb and Lazarus came forth alive.

The Lovely Dragon of Choice: The Freedom Not to Be Free

by Anthony Esolen

The simple knight Percival, on the quest for the Holy Grail, had not been much of a planner. Had he been, he would not have lost the trail of his desired companion, Galahad. He would not have lost both his own horse and the horse he persuaded a stable-boy to lend him. He would not now be sitting, arms across his knees, on a bare cliff overlooking the sea, expectant and hungry and disgusted with himself and his poor fortune.

But all things come to them that wait. Into sight silently draws a ship, draped in black silk, with a maiden of radiant beauty aboard, eager to speak to Percival and to him alone. She asks him the obvious question, “Percival, what are you doing here? Who brought you to this mountain, so lonely that your rescue hangs on a quirk of chance, and so utterly desolate that you will die of hunger and distress before anyone notices your presence?”

It is a rule of the questing life: Beware of maidens in black silk. Those maidens ask reasonable questions like this. Gentle and reasonable are the slopes to eternal loss. It is a broad and well-designed highway that leads to perdition, conveniently banked for the long bends; and precisely because it is apparently so capacious, so easy, so answerable to just what we like, many travel it. One could go down that road in one’s sleep, and many they are that do.

Latter Day President

by John Willson

Willard Romney is a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, by his own admission and the testimony of those who know him. He went to Brigham Young University as a dutiful son should, and later to Harvard to get his secular credentials; he did his mission in France, a spot for the best and brightest of Mormons, and converted his wife to the faith. His record, on just this much information alone, puts him in the elite of his faith. His money, as is true of any member of any religious creed, only adds to his prestige. His father was a high official in the church, and Willard will be also, if he does not make the Presidency of the United States of America.

Just as Americans had to ask themselves what it said about Barack Obama that he listened faithfully in the church of Mr. Jesse Wright for almost two decades (obviously not enough to disqualify him for our highest political office, although I admit it was a deal-breaker for me), it is time to ask what it says about Mr. Romney that he is, in the popular use of the word, Mormon.

First of all, Latter Day Saints are not Christians. I am well aware that coals will be heaped upon my head for saying so, but it is true. Christians, for whatever else they do not have in common, are Trinitarians: God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one. This is not the belief of Mormons. Nor do they believe that Holy Scripture is the Old and New Testaments complete and unified, and the Word of God, as Jesus is the Word. The Book of Mormon is to the Old and New Testaments exactly what the New Testament is to the Old in comparing Christianity with Judaism. In fact, and this is the most important theological fact that Christians must understand about the Latter Day Saints, they stand in relation to Christianity exactly as Christians stand in relation to Jews; that is, they “complete” what Christians started, and make it full and true.