Ethical Labor

by Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk

Thirty years ago, Irving Babbitt wrote that the highest order of true work is an ethical working, labor of the spirit; and that no important problem of economics or politics can be solved within its own terms. "When studied with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical, problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem." Now for almost the whole of the twentieth century, the study called ethics has been abandoned to Dr. Dryasdust, degraded to a subject abstract and often purely semantic, dully lectured upon in decaying departments of philosophy at universities dedicated to material aggrandizement. Here and there a stubborn man or an old-fashioned college stood out against this neglect of the most humane of the sciences; but by and large, the sterile "ethics" of Bentham or of Dewey, grubbing in the dust of barbarous vocabulary and arid generalization, have smothered the Aristotelian tradition. Many clergymen, even, have confounded the science of ethics with a dim creed of "service" or with moralizing. The world, taking the hereditary guardians of Ethics at their own valuation, was prompt to assume that ethics somehow was a vestige of systematized primitive conventions, or a bookish conspiracy to restrain the natural heartiness and freedom of man; and, in the absence of any convincing alternative (for every age must be saddled with Ethics, whether it knows this truth or not), the world reverted to an ethical principal still more nearly primitive than tribal convention, "That they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can." Two tremendous explosions, subsequently and consequently, have suggested to some of us that ethical studies need to be undertaken on a plane higher than this.

Education and the Individual

by Richard M. Weaver 

The greatest school that ever existed, it has been said, consisted of Socrates standing on a street corner with one or two interlocutors. If this remark strikes the aver­age American as merely a bit of fancy, that is because education here today suffers from an unprecedented amount of aimlessness and confusion. This is not to suggest that edu­cation in the United States, as compared with other countries, fails to command attention and support. In our laws we have endorsed it without qualification, and our provision for it, despite some claims to the contrary, has been on a lavish scale. But we behold a situation in which, as the educational plants become larger and more finely appointed, what goes on in them becomes more diluted, less serious, less effective in training mind and character; and correspondingly what comes out of them becomes less equipped for the rigorous tasks of carrying forward an advanced civilization.

Recently I attended a conference addressed by a retired general who had some knowledge of this country’s ballistics program. He pointed out that of the twenty-five top men concerned with our progress in this now vital branch of science, not more than two or three were Americans. The others were Europeans, who had received in their Euro­pean educations the kind of theoretical dis­cipline essential to the work of getting the great missiles aloft. It was a sad commentary on a nation which has prided itself on giv­ing its best to the schools.

It is an educational breakdown which has occurred. Our failure in these matters traces back to a failure to think hard about the real province of education. Most Americans take a certain satisfaction in regarding them­selves as tough-minded when it comes to successful ways of doing things and positive achievements. But in deciding what is and is not pertinent to educating the individual, far too many of them have been softheads.

An alarming percentage of our citizens, it is to be feared, stop with the word “educa­tion” itself. It is for them a kind of con­juror’s word, which is expected to work miracles by the very utterance. If politics become selfish and shortsighted, the cure that comes to mind is “education.” If ju­venile delinquency is rampant, “education” is expected to provide the remedy. If the cultural level of popular entertainment de­clines, “education” is thought of hopefully as the means of arresting the downward trend, People expect to be saved by a word when they cannot even give content to the word.

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Somewhat better off, but far from sufficiently informed and critical, are those who recognize that education must, after all, take some kind of form, that it must be thought of as a process that does something one can recognize. Most of these people, however, see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one eco­nomic plane to a higher one, or in some cases from one cultural level to another that is more highly esteemed. They are not wholly wrong in these assumptions, for it is true that persons with a good education do receive, over the period of their lifetime, larger earnings than those without, and it is true that almost any education brings with it a certain amount of cultivation. But again, these people are looking at the out­ward aspects and are judging education bywhat it does for one in the general economic and social ordering. In both of these respects education is valued as a means of getting ahead in life, a perfectly proper and legiti­mate goal, of course, but hardly one which sums up the whole virtue and purpose of an undertaking, which, in a modern society, may require as much as one quarter of the lifespan. Education as a conjuror’s word and education viewed as a means of insur­ing one’s progress in relation to his fellows both divert attention from what needs to be done for the individual as a person.

Education is a process by which the indi­vidual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. Now when one views this idea from a certain per­spective, it appears almost terrifying. How does one go about taking human beings and making them better? The very thought seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others, a supposition that is resisted in some quarters. Yet nothing can be plainer, when we con­sider it, than this fact that education is dis­criminative. It takes what is less good physi­cally, mentally, and morally and transforms that by various methods and techniques into something that more nearly approaches our ideal of the good. Every educator who pre­sumes to speak about his profession has in mind some aim, goal, or purpose that he views as beneficial. As various as are the schemes proposed, they all share this gen­eral concept of betterment. The teacher who did not believe that his efforts contributed to some kind of improvement would certainly have lost the reason for his calling. A sur­face unanimity about purpose, however, is not enough to prevent confusion and chaos where there is radical disagreement about the nature of the creature who is to be educated.

If man were merely an animal, his “educa­tion” would consist only of scientific feed­ing and proper exercise. If he were merely a tool or an instrument, it would consist of training him in certain response and be­havior patterns. If he were a mere pawn of the political state, it would consist of indoc­trinating him so completely that he could not see beyond what his masters wanted him to believe. Strange as it may seem, adherents to each of these views can be found in the mod­ern world. But our great tradition of lib­eral education supported by our intuitive feeling about the nature of man, rejects them all as partial descriptions.

Gather Round the Hearth to Enjoy Things

Imaginative conservatives in the school of Kirk take long views, and, as Dr. Kirk often reminded us, religion and ethics trump politics. Nevertheless, it is easy to understand why many of us grieve the passing of the old Republic. As John Randolph defined it - and where Dr. Kirk began his foray into historical scholarship - republican principles meant "love of peace, hatred of offensive war; jealousy of the State Governments towards the General Government, and the influence of the Executive Government over the co-ordinate branches of that Government; a dread of standing armies; a loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizen; jealousy, Argus-eyed jealousy, of the patronage of the President...."

Our pessimism begins with the realization that very few of our neighbors subscribe to such views today, maybe excepting the "loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises." As Professors Frohnen and Birzer state, with the Louisiana Purchase, the original republican himself, Jefferson politically succumbed to the impulse to expand the nation and inflate the desires of a restless people. The modern American identity has become synonymous with expansion, with inflationary expectations, where a wise understanding of limitation, or "inner-check", has become anathema. Richard Weaver called this "the spoiled-child psychology," the belief of the mass man that "there is nothing that he cannot know...and there is nothing that he cannot have." In this decadent world, order is not transcendent, it is not the result of the great work of time, but is rather the ephemeral result of the consumption faculty. "We have given them a technique of acquisition," wrote Weaver, "how much comfort can we take in the way they employ it?"

As conservatives - as teachers - we must stand with the philosophers and the theologians against the sophists and keep asking, "to what end?" Kirk urged us to look deeper than politics, to take long views, to seek out clearer distinctions, and to flesh out a deeper understanding.

How do we redeem the time? As everyone on the blog has affirmed, we start by "brightening the corner where we are," by improving ourselves, by helping our neighbors, by loving our families, by setting high standards for our students, and by exercising the inherited liberty bequeathed to us from the founders, responsibly, yet joyfully. "Freedom is something that gathers around the hearth, inheres in local associations, and endears to a man his place of habitation. It was a protection to enable him to enjoy things, not a force or power to enable him to do things," wrote Weaver. And always reflect upon and advocate the permanent things.