The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T.S. Eliot

by Clinton A. Brand

In 1953, the first edition of The Conservative Mind was subtitled From Burke to Santayana; the second and every edition thereafter bore the subtitle From Burke to Eliot. Not only did this adjustment afford Kirk a bookend better consisting with Burke, but the change was also fortuitous as one element of a broader clarification of Kirk’s premise and purpose. For the second edition, Kirk enlarged his discussion of Eliot, and he also recast the final chapter, changing its final section from one called “The plan of action for American conservatives” to one entitled “The conservative as poet.” Thus, Kirk emphasized formally an argument that runs throughout his book—that the most vital expressions of conservative thought are not to be measured so much by effective political activity as by their reflection in the tradition of humane letters, particularly in those writers who (to borrow Kirk’s habitual wording) furnished anew the wardrobe of the moral imagination.

In T. S. Eliot, Kirk found just such an exemplar of thoughtful conservatism informed by an acute literary sensibility. Perhaps more importantly, in selecting Eliot as something of a latter-day counterpart to Burke—certainly as a figure more substantial than Santayana and one still living at the time of his writing—Kirk was looking ahead, beyond the tradition of thought he had surveyed, to identify possible models and resources for cultivating the “Conservatives’ Promise,” as he titled his concluding chapter. The golden anniversary of the original publication of The Conservative Mind offers an occasion to reassess that promise and to suggest what the legacy of T. S. Eliot has to offer another generation as we work the fields of a different cultural landscape, venturing to renew what Eliot called “The life of significant soil.”[1]

Dr. Clint Brand sends this piece by Esolen in response to my opening post

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/politics/pg0256.htm

A New Conservatism?
ANTHONY ESOLEN
Either it will be Christian or not at all.

"This year will mark a great opportunity for conservatives," said the voice over the radio, by which he meant that one style of politician wholly committed to the cramped secular vision of man would triumph over another style of politician committed to the same thing. Which caused me to consider that any new conservatism in America will be Catholic, or Christian at least, in both its looking forward to the kingdom of God and its gratitude for the gifts of the past, or it will not be at all.

What would such a conservatism look like? I suggest the following, at the least.

It must be rooted in natural piety. Our schoolchildren these days know next to nothing about the heroes of their native land, flawed though these heroes certainly were. They know little enough about the place where they live, as their days are devoured by the institutional school and the place-denying un-world of the television and the Internet. They are taught to dissociate themselves, in pride, from the narrow prejudices of their parents, thus enabling them all the more easily to absorb the narrow prejudices of their keepers in the schools and in the media.

The result of all this dissociation is that we hardly have citizens at all, who take pride in their localities and exert themselves to preserve them and pass their beauty along to the next generation. We have instead a mass of rootless people, isolated in time – since they come from nowhere in particular, and are going nowhere but to the place where their untrained wills must lead them – and alienated from one another. We must remember that piety is a natural virtue before it has been baptized; it is a deeply human thing to love one's place merely because it is one's own, and to cherish memories of those who dwelt in it before and helped to make it what it is.

It must recognize zones of authority. Libertarianism is, I am afraid, a false friend. It assumes that my freedom is defined by what others cannot legitimately prevent me from doing: from learning how to play the violin, if I so choose (to use Isaiah Berlin's example), or, far more sinister, from destroying the offspring in the womb. But that is a cramped view of freedom, and assumes that the relationship between freedom and authority is adversarial.

For authority is not opposed to freedom; it is rather its precondition. We can divine this from the suggestive Latin etymology: the auctor is one who gives increase. When, for example, the child cheerfully obeys his father, he liberates himself from both the unruliness of his youthful appetites and from the distractions with which the world besets him. He becomes a responsible young man capable of shingling a roof, or changing the oil in the car, or kneeling before the Lord in humble and exalting prayer.

The family, for instance, ought to be an area of freedom from state intrusion not, principally, because the individuals in it should be allowed to do as they please within the bounds of the civil law, nor even because the family can accomplish what the state cannot, but because it is in itself an area of law-giving and law-abiding. It has its own authority, which demands respect. The school, the parish, the neighborhood, the city, the workplace, the football team, indeed all free associations of human beings – both those that arise by nature and those that men create and choose – should be afforded freedom, not as part of a Madisonian compromise among competing factions, but as an acknowledgment by the state of what is after all human reality.