Stairway to Sacrilege

by Julie Robison

Ok Go, an alternative rock band known for catchy beats and viral YouTube videos, recently released a video in a Chevy commercial. The band drove a Chevy car through a two mile track of instruments, releasing their latest song, "Needing/Getting."

Their opening is, "I've been waiting for months, waiting for years, waiting for you to change./ Aw, but there ain't much that's dumber, there ain't much that's dumber/ Than pinning your hopes on a change in another./ And I, yeah, I still need you; but what good's that gonna do?/ Needing is one thing, and getting: getting's another."

This song, though about a girl, plays nicely into a recent NYT op-ed by psychologist Jonathan Haidt entitled, "Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness." He writes to show the Right and Left's cultural narratives and their amazing ability to talk past each other on issues.

Fraternity Only With God

The following quotes are all from a speech (his second) Kirk gave to national convention of the Chi Omega sorority in 1956 and reprinted as Russell Kirk, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” The Eleusis of Chi Omega 58 (September 1956): 417-430.

“Thus there cannot be brothers and sisters in a mystical sense without a mystical father. There is no brotherhood of mankind, in short, without the fatherhood of God. The Christian calls this kinship in Christ.” (420-421)

“Among the beliefs and institutions which we have received from the giants, from the ‘democracy of the dead,’ two of the most important are the principle of personality and the principle of diversity. Savages know little of personality and diversity. These acquirements are the products of a high civil social order. By ‘personality,’ we mean strong individual character, the distinctive characteristics which mark a truly human person. By ‘diversity’ we mean the great variety of talents, tastes, occupations, classes, interests, aspirations, rights, and duties which mark a truly elevated culture; what has been called ‘proliferating variety.’ Whether a civilization is advancing or decaying may be judged by some examination of the degree of personality and the degree of diversity found in the society under consideration. A civilization in full bloom displays a wide range of strong personalities and an interesting variety of tastes, talents and orders, as did Elizabethan England or fourth-century Greece; a civilization experiencing decline reveals a dearth of hearty individual character and an oppressive uniformity of opinion and station, as did the Roman system in the fifth century after Christ or the Byzantine system near the end of its tether.” (423)

“. . . the belief that (as Marcus Aurelius wrote) we human beings are made for cooperation, like the hands, like the feet; but that we lose our dignity if, exceeding the limits of cooperation, we force others to imitate our personality, or slavishly mold our personality upon some collectivist model. Man has dignity only when he seeks to emulate not another man, but a divine image.” (424-425)

“Men and women who believe in the dignity of man, and in the ideal of service, never seek impersonality and uniformity.” (425)

“The slogans of the Utopian doctrinaire vary from one generation to another. At present, a word and a concept very popular with the advocate of impersonality and uniformity is ‘integration.’ I am not referring especially to the problem of white and colored students in school. . . . What I propose to touch upon, rather, is the assumption, at present heard in many quarters, that somehow everybody ought to be ‘integrated’—that is, everybody ought to be just like everybody else with no distinction of station, wealth, taste, family, aspiration, opinion, or character.” (425)

Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Community

by Fred Donovan Hill

Unlike Max Weber or Emile Durkheim, Robert A. Nisbet has not produced a remarkably original theory that has shaken the sociological world or revolutionized its concepts and methods of analysis. What Nisbet has done over the period of a long career in American sociology is to act as a consistent, and sometimes quite powerful and realistic, exponent of some of the major European sociologists and social philosophers. He has persistently related the ideas of such original thinkers as Tocqueville and Burke to the developing problems of the contemporary world. In this lies his chief value as a writer. It is one of the purposes of this essay to explain how and why this is so. Another purpose is to provide an evaluation of Nisbet’s ideas on community and their relevance to the problem of the isolated individual in twentieth-century society.

Although Robert Nisbet’s view of history is complex and multifaceted, its essentials are clear: the history of the Western world since at least the Renaissance has been dominated by an unceasing battle between traditionalism and modernism; the former is most often associated with such values as “community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred” and the latter with “individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power”; and though Nisbet prizes the values of modernity, he is not so naïve as to believe that their triumph has brought only good to the lives of men and women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Rather, he is intensely aware of the erosion of one set of values by the other: that is, he sees the desiccation of community, the decline of authority, the devaluation of hierarchy, and the avoidance of the sacred by the overemphasis, and the often distorted emphasis, on the victorious values of modernism. In Nisbet’s philosophy, all of these values should have a place; and it is only the totalist ideologies—sometimes of traditionalism, sometimes of modernism—that seek the complete suppression of one set or the other.

In The Sociological Tradition, Nisbet goes to some length to explain how the great sociologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have illuminated many of the aspects of the conflict of old and new values. Admitting that nearly none of these men could be accurately labeled “traditionalists,” Nisbet contends, nevertheless, that the major thinkers in sociology—Weber and Durkheim and Simmel and Tonnies among them—have taken the problems and conflicts arising out of the revolutions of the modern world and translated them into a powerful body of sociological typologies and concepts, and have done this in such a way as to show the attrition of one kind of values (the traditional) by the other kind (the modern) and to show the deleterious effects of this process in the life of the individual and that of the community.

Nisbet points out how Tocqueville and Weber, for example, go beneath the more sanguine attitudes of their periods to perceive in the very operations of society hailed as progressive and liberating the darker side of alienation from other men and the moral and spiritual isolation of the individual in modern society. And Nisbet argues that the “moral texture of these ideas is never wholly lost” in these analyses, despite the often elaborate sociological methodology employed. Even within the framework of scientific study, a thinker like Weber or Tocqueville is a moral philosopher concerned with the value of community for the individual and with the distressing effects of its loss. Ethical insight and even artistic intuition play roles in the great sociological theories, Nisbet maintains. “Can anyone believe that Tonnies’ typology of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Weber’s vision of rationalization, Simmel’s image of metropolis, and Durkheim’s perspective of anomie came from logico-empirical analysis as it is understood today? Merely to ask the question is to know the answer.”

Of all the concepts developed by these major figures of social analysis, community is the one which Nisbet has most often meditated and explored in his writings. In The Quest for Community (1953), The Sociological Tradition (1966), The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (1973), Twilight of Authority (1975), and in other works, community has been a prime concern. “By community,” Nisbet writes, “I mean something that goes far beyond mere local community. The word . . . encompasses all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time.” Community involves the whole man. It endures. It “achieves its fulfillment in a submergence of individual will that is not possible in unions of mere convenience or rational assent.” It is at the opposite pole from the ad hoc committee.

Faith, Civil Society and the American Founding

by Barbara J. Elliott

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he marveled at the faith that motivated civic life.  He wrote, “For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other.” [1] He was dazzled by the array of voluntary associations– civic, philanthropic, political, neighborly, moral, educational – and the vibrant good will they harnessed.  This kind of engagement was unique to America in this era, quite unlike the European culture.  In old Europe, it was much more likely that the nobility or the church hierarchy would take on a project, but seldom would individuals simply band together. But in the years since the first colonials stepped ashore, these European immigrants had been helping one another settle in and thrive. It had become a way of life.

         In the famous passage that illustrates the voluntary vibrancy of America, Tocqueville wrote:

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations.  There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile…immensely large and very minute.  Americans combine to give fetes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes.  Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way.  Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. [2]

  The variety of such associations was truly staggering. In The Tragedy of American Compassion, Marvin Olasky gives us a snapshot of the kinds of groups Tocqueville would have seen on his visit here. 

The Little Platoons: The Nucleus of American Character

By Brittany Baldwin

Community continues to nuture the American people, being the very lifeblood of the American tradition.

"Young Women Interns for Reagan's Attorney General," announces the front page of Alpena's Saturday paper. As my friend heads off to Washington, practically the whole town saw her off as they watched "one of their own" travel to the D.C. metropolis. She got emails and calls and letters congradualting her on her accomplishments. Now that she's in D.C., a part of her always remains tied to that little town in northern Michigan. The town where her family settled over six generations ago. The town where most of the churches gather together on Christmas and worship together. The town where they roll up their sleves and build their own fences, raise their own cattle, and plow their own roads. Everything depends upon each member of the community--her mother is a county commissioner, her uncle is a policemen, her brother is a volunteer fire-fighter, and her grandpa is a pastor, each tirelessly working to keep the town running. Recently, a barn caught on fire in the middle of a snowy night. Her brother was on the way home from his night shift and called his friend to plow the roads as he got the fire truck and drove to the scene. The people's sense of duty and self-sufficency remains rooted in the hearts and deeds of all men and women--from the farmer to the electrician to the professor, each knows his role and works to fulfill it.

In a world that seems more global and interconnected yet paradoxically more superficial and isolating, pockets of communities remain scattered about the chaos and dissalusionment of the modern world. As Robert Nisbet refelcts, in Quest for Community, "Nearly gone is the sanguine confidence in the power of history itself to engender out of the soil of disorganization seeds of new and more successful forms of social and moral security" (6). Yet, he notes that people fear this disorder and they dred the chaos that often ensues from moral relativisms, autonomy and selfishness of the modern era.

Robert Nisbet's "Conservatism: Dream and Reality"

By Chuck Chalberg

                  Originally published in 1986, Robert Nisbet’s recently reissued study of the history and prospects of both conservative thought and political conservatism from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan is as relevant today as it would have been over the course of many yesterdays and as it will be for many tomorrows.  No doubt intended to shore up dispirited conservatives in the dying days of the Reagan years, this short book would have been even shorter had Nisbet not chosen to include and comment on the various manifestations of Reagan-era conservatism.  It should also be noted that his edition includes an introduction by Nisbet biographer Brad Stone, who briefly summarizes what has been called “Nisbetism” before taking the dreams and realities of modern conservatism into the 21^st century.

                  Just what is “Nisbetism?”  It is at once a thesis, a plea, and a lament.  At its heart is Robert Nisbet’s assertion that a decent and healthy society nourishes those intervening institutions of family, church, and voluntary organizations that simultaneously guard against an intrusive state and restrain the urges and excesses of the isolated individual.  One of Robert Nisbet’s great insights (with more than a little help from Tocqueville and others) is the unholy alliance between advocates of a powerful state and those who would be its alleged and even actual beneficiaries.

                  A society that is at once grounded in collectivism and individualism would seem to be a contradiction in terms.  Not so, Tocqueville prophesied.  And not so, Nisbet observed.

                  Not that Robert Nisbet liked what he was observing.  Far from it; hence his insistent plea for the survival, nay the shoring up and flourishing, of those crucial intervening institutions, those “little platoons” of Edmund Burke; and hence his temptation to lament their obvious decline when he wasn’t engaging in his own prophesying about their feared collapse.       

Time, Compacted: The Importance of Winston Elliott

Yesterday, on the third floor of a west Houston office building, I had the opportunity--well the blessing, really--of being with some truly wonderful persons, discussing one of my favorite books, Russell Kirk's Prospects for Conservatives. The roll call of participants: Father Donald Silvio Nesti, John Hittinger, John Rocha, Clint Brand, Bob Stacey, Glenn Davis, John Creech, Susanna Dukopil, Brittany Baldwin, Brian Hildebrand, and, our ever gracious hosts, Barbara and Winston Elliott. Houston's finest, to be sure. We analyzed Kirk's 1954 work for six solid hours, and we did so with wit, wisdom, appreciation, and, for the most part, budding hope for what such a book still means, even in a culture imbued with imperial decadence.

Yesterday was also a time of joyous celebration as the leader of this little platoon and remnant, Winston Elliott, reached the half-century mark. No man I know possesses the classical virtue of fortitude in more abundance than does Winston. For two thirds of his life--in a variety of causes, all ultimately leading to the One cause, that of the reestablishment and reformation of Christendom--Winston has fought relentlessly. He has fought with meaning. He has fought with purpose.  He has fought well.

Hospitality: An Invitation to Love

I have witnessed both Christ-like hospitality and Southern hospitality, which often echoes Calypso more than Eumaios, especially as I waver between residence at a hearty Midwestern college, and the quasi-southern quasi-international metropolis of Houston, my family’s home. But, in the midst of having found genuine people in both settings, I have discovered that I have the opportunity to awaken others to the beauty of the transcendent. It is not because I am a saint, for I am not, but because I understand one simple concept which equips me to serve and welcome others—hospitality. This word hospitality plays a vital role in the reflection of the human heart. From Eumaios’ care for the old man to Plato’s welcoming of intellectual discussion, as he invites others to join him in his quest for truth, from Abraham’s welcoming of the Divine to Christ’s open arms in heaven, from Babbitt’s feast to the shepherds sacrifice for Father Valiant in Cather’s "Death For the Archbishop", true hospitality never ceases to reveal some aspect of the Divine. As individuals welcome friends and neighbors, coworkers and intellectuals, into their homes, they have the opportunity to manifest Christ’s sacrificial love—to give up their own comfort in order to give others a real sense of Christ’s love.

Russell Kirk and his wife, Annette, have always exuded this Christ-like hospitality, as they welcomed refugees, hobos, professors, students, and curious individuals into their home, which is why Piety Hill seems to be such a fitting name for that rather majestic house in Mecosta, Michigan. For, Russell Kirk knew what it was to be a Conservative because he understood the cult--that is, the community's reverence for the Divine--to be the center of life on earth. He lived this transcendent ideal in his quaint, Gothic-style, catholic home. He was a host to Conservatism, both in the books he wrote and the life he lead, and we must aspire to open our doors in order to rekindle the cult.

Friendship Ways by John Willson

Most of us learn about friendship from our families, just as we learn about everything else worth knowing from our families.  Mine is an old New England family, farmers and preachers and doctors and lawyers, and tradesmen, not many in commerce.  Nobody up to my generation was ever rich, nobody particularly poor, so there was comparatively little arrogance and comparatively little envy.

New Englanders were historically family-loyal, but not clan-loyal.  Harriet Beecher Stowe thought that of all the English ideas her ancestors brought with them, that not even democracy was able to “obliterate, was that of family.  Family feeling, family pride, family hope and fear and desire” were what made New England.  My Grandmothers Willson and Fuller, two ladies who could not be more unlike each other, both said, often--no debate--”family first.”

Traditional New Englanders were “town-born” and thus attentive to their neighborhoods and local associations, and more often than not rather interested in the affairs of the comity.  This made them good neighbors but not always good friends.  They might have to stand up in the Congregation and accuse the person next door of some breach of individual or community morality, which called for a certain reserve.  As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Why I AM a Conservative by John Willson

It’s really too bad that so many wimps are running away from the word “conservative.” It’s become fashionable. Now, don’t get me wrong. When Billy Kristol claims that the “Weakly Standard” is conservative, I at least chuckle. When Fox News is called “right wing” I giggle. When the psychiatrist Dr. Krauthammer positions himself as the moral spokesman of conservative foreign policy I break out in a sweat before I laugh, hard. If Iran is the contemporary version of Carthago, delenda est it’s probably true that “conservative” has lost a little of its meaning.

But only a little. “Liberal,” it is true, is a dead term. Think about Michael Dukakis in a tank, or Jerry Brown calling for a constitutional convention. Or to bring it up to date, think about Algore inventing the internet or Ted Kennedy as a venerable statesman. Once something in public life gets too funny, you must indeed ditch the label or get laughed out of serious discourse.

To “conserve,” however, is a fairly simple thing. While “liberals” and “progressives” keep changing what lovely things they see in the future, “conserving” means knowing what’s important and trying to save it. The opposite of “conservative,” in fact, has never been “liberal”; it has always been ideology. Ideology, as my friend the great historian Forrest McDonald says, is “dogmatic, scientific, secular millenialism.” It’s been around the western political world since the French Revolution. Ideology is older than that, of course, it is “we shall be as gods.” Conserving, its exact opposite, is understanding the order of creation, and trying as hard as we can to stay somewhere in its near vicinity.

Redeeming the Time

By Barbara J. Elliott

One advantage I have in this conversation is that the Elliott household continues the discussion in more hours and words than we can capture on this scroll. We wrestled with some ideas today I would like to share with the rest of you.

One is a hope for us in this discussion to remember, reclaim and formulate anew the truths that comprise a body of thought worthy of living by, which we can pass on to our children and students, while taking up the sword of imagination to do battle with the present culture. Part of the weakness of conservatism has been a tendency to only look backward, often with nostalgia, which can only result in a kind of melancholy acceptance that most good things have been lost and the best we can do is hunker down and survive.

Another weakness of the current conservative movement is its uber-politicization. What we need is a revitalization of the life of the mind and spirit, because it is here that the deep wellspring can nourish us as individuals and as a movement. I am certain that we are pilgrims with an eternal destination, and that the political circumstances of that journey are secondary or tertiary in importance in the grand scheme of things. The culture we create has a profound effect on our lives and those that follow us. But as T. S. Eliot reminds us in “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture,” cultural disintegration is the most devastating and the most difficult to repair. It takes a long time to grow the grass to feed the sheep, which will provide the wool to make the yarn, to finally produce a coat.

I am reminded of a presentation given years ago at the Center for Constructive Alternatives by a Member of the British Parliament, Rhodes Boyson, on “How Ideas Become Political Reality.” His model is so good that we used it in the early days of The Heritage Foundation to move ideas through the steps quickly and effectively. It runs something like this:

Russell Kirk's Ten Principles of Conservatism

1. First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.
2. Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.
3. Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.
4. Fourth, conservatives are guided by the principle of prudence.
5. Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.
6. Sixth, conservatives are chastened by the principle of imperfectability.
7. Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.
8. Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.
9. Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.
10. Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

These are from the Kirk Center web site: www.kirkcenter.org