The Imaginative Conservative

Virtue: Can It Be Taught?

2012-02-29T00:02:00.002-06:00

by Russell Kirk

Are there men and women in America today possessed of virtue sufficient to withstand and repel the forces of disorder? Or have we, as a people, grown too fond of creature-comforts and a fancied security to venture our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor in any cause at all? “The superior man thinks always of virtue,” Confucius told his disciples; “the common man thinks of comfort.” Such considerations in recent years have raised up again that old word “virtue,” which in the first half of this century had sunk almost out of sight.

In this essay I shall venture first to offer you a renewed apprehension of what “virtue” means; and then to suggest how far it may be possible to restore an active virtue in our public and our private life. If we lack virtue, we will not long continue to enjoy comfort - not in an age when Giant Ideology and Giant Envy swagger balefully about the world.

The concept of virtue, like most other concepts that have endured and remain worthy of praise, has come down to us from the Greeks and the Hebrews. In its classical signification, “virtue” means the power of anything to accomplish its specific function; a property capable of producing certain effects; strength, force, potency. Thus one refers to the “deadly virtue” of the hemlock. Thus also the word “virtue” implies a mysterious energetic power, as in the Gospel According to Saint Mark: “Jesus, immediately knowing that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?” Was it, we may ask, that virtue of Jesus which scorched the Shroud of Turin?

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What Is It That We Wish To Conserve?

2012-02-28T07:36:00.001-06:00

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.

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America’s Founding and Limited Government

2012-02-28T00:02:00.001-06:00

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.

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

2012-02-27T17:11:00.000-06:00

'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

2012-02-27T00:03:00.001-06:00

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.
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This I Believe

2012-02-27T00:01:00.004-06:00

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.
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The Oracle of the South

2012-02-26T00:01:00.001-06:00

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.
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Republican Virtue, Imperial Temptations

2012-02-25T00:02:00.003-06:00

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.
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Conservatism and Creative Energy Belong Together

2012-02-25T00:01:00.000-06:00

"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?

2012-02-24T15:17:00.001-06:00

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.
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The Conservative Adventure

2012-02-24T00:02:00.001-06:00

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.”
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Russell Kirk on The Sage as Novelist: Miguel de Unamuno

2012-02-24T00:01:00.003-06:00

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?
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Obama Contra Ecclesia

2012-02-23T00:03:00.002-06:00

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.

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Homage to Ash Wednesday

2012-02-23T00:02:00.003-06:00

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:

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Why You Must Accept Your Duties...NOW

2012-02-23T00:01:00.002-06:00

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?

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The Achievement of Irving Babbitt

2012-02-22T00:01:00.009-06:00

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.

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T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday

2012-02-22T00:00:00.004-06:00

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’”?

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Religious Freedom

2012-02-21T00:03:00.016-06:00

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.

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Edmund Burke Reviews Adam Smith, Twice

2012-02-21T00:02:00.008-06:00

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.
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George Washington and the Gift of Silence

2012-02-20T13:31:00.002-06:00

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]

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Moral Visions of the Free Market

2012-02-20T00:02:00.003-06:00

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.
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Eric Voegelin: Prophet to the Modern Academy

2012-02-20T00:01:00.001-06:00

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."
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A New Look at the Economics Behind the Civil War

2012-02-19T01:25:00.000-06:00

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.

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Theology on Tap

2012-02-17T23:27:00.005-06:00

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.
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Silence in the face of Evil

2012-02-17T00:02:00.002-06:00

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