What Holds America Together?

by Robert Speaight

The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk.
[Revised edition: ISI 2003, 534 pages]

 

The President of a great American university told me not long ago that most of his students shared the opinion of Mr. Henry Ford: history was “bunk.” They would not have said that about heredity, which is supposed to unload the sins of the children upon the fathers, and cheerfully to leave them there.

Yet history, read as what has mattered and not only as what has happened, is simply another name for heredity. This important book by Dr. Russell Kirk is a study in the heredity of the United States. Its publication at a time when America is preparing to celebrate the bicentenary of its independence is a significant event. No doubt we shall be hearing a good deal about the American “revolution,” but Dr. Kirk shows convincingly that no revolution was less revolutionary than the War of Independence. The last thing the Patriots of the Thirteen Colonies wanted was to turn things upside down; all they wanted was to leave them as they were, but in the hands of a capable English gentleman called George Washington instead of an incapable English king called George III.

In God’s Own Good Time: Reflections upon American Order

by Russell Kirk

Imagine a man travelling through the night, without a guide, thinking continually of the direction he wishes to follow. That is the image of a man in search of order, says Simone Weil: “Such a traveler’s way is lit by a great hope.” Above even food and shelter, she continues, we must have order. The human condition is insufferable unless we perceive a harmony, an order, in existence. “Order is the first need of all.”

Before a person can live tolerably with himself or with others, he must know order. If we lack order in the soul and order in society, we dwell “in a land of darkness, as darkness itself,” the Book of Job puts it: “and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where light is as darkness.”

Once I was told by a scholar born in Russia of how he had come to understand through terrible events that order necessarily precedes justice and freedom. He had been a Menshevik at the time of the Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg, he fled to Odessa, on the Black Sea, where he found a great city in anarchy. Bands of young men commandeered streetcars and clattered wildly through the heart of Odessa, firing with rifles at any pedestrian, as though they were hunting pigeons. At any moment, one’s apartment might be invaded by a casual criminal or a fanatic, murdering for the sake of a loaf of bread. In this anarchy, justice and freedom were merely words.

“Then I learned that before we can know justice and freedom,” my friend said, “we must have order. Much though I hated the Communists, I saw then that even the grim order of Communism is better than no order at all. Many might survive under Communism; no one could survive in general disorder.”

In America, order and justice and freedom have developed together; but they can decay in parallel fashion. In every generation, some human beings bitterly defy the moral order and the social order. Although hatred of order is suicidal, it must be reckoned with: ignore a fact, and that fact will be your master. Half a century ago, perceiving a widespread disintegration of private and public order, William Butler Yeats wrote of what has become the torment of much of the modern world:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

During the past half-century, the center has failed to hold in many nations. Yet once war or revolution has demolished an established order, a people find it imperative to search for principles of order afresh, that they may survive. Once they have undone an old order, revolutionaries proceed to decree a new order – often an order harsher than the order which they had overthrown. Mankind cannot be governed long by sheer force.

No order is perfect: man himself being imperfect, presumably we never will make our collective way to Utopia. If we ever arrived at Utopia, indeed, we might be infinitely bored with the place. Yet if the roots of an order are healthy, that order may be reinvigorated and improved. If its roots are withered, “the dead tree gives no shelter.” The traveler in the wasteland seeks the shelter of living order.

We are entering nowadays, it appears, upon a period of renewed concern for order in this country. Social order is the arrangement of duties and rights in a society, so that justice and freedom and a large measure of cooperation may be achieved. The disorder of the past decade has turned many minds toward attention to the first principles of order.

Quote of the Day: Russell Kirk, Roots of American Order

Seek­ing for the roots of order, we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and Lon­don.  In Wash­ing­ton or New York or Chicago or Los Ange­les today, the order which Amer­i­cans expe­ri­ence is derived from the expe­ri­ence of those four old cities.  If our souls are dis­or­dered, we fall into abnor­mal­ity, unable to con­trol our impulses.  If our com­mon­wealth is dis­or­dered, we fall into anar­chy, every man’s hand against every other man’s.  For, as Richard Hooker wrote in the six­teenth cen­tury, “With­out order, there is no liv­ing in pub­lic soci­ety, because the want thereof is the mother of con­fu­sion.”  This sav­ing order is the prod­uct of more than three thou­sand years of human striving. (Roots of American Order)

Protect Our Progress!

by Julie Robison

Liberals have a new slogan (new to me, at least). They say, “Protect Our Progress!”

According to the Organizing for America website, they recently held a phone bank in North Carolina. The informational page read:

We’ve made significant progress together in the last two years. There are those who want to stop our country moving forward to undo the progress we’ve achieved, but our community is looking toward the future. We’ll be meeting at the Charlotte OFA Office to protect our progress- - defending healthcare reform. Your voice is needed, so come out and join us at 6 p.m. to call Republican representatives and remind them that we are holding them accountable.

I have to admit- I like this little blurb! I like holding government officials accountable. I admire their tenacity in defending healthcare reform, which is more like healthcare overhaul and a love letter to special interests groups. My teeny-weeny remark I do have to make is this: the two year mark. I know that is the length of President Obama's presidency to date, but President Obama's passed legislation is not a proper measure of progress.

Roots of American Order: Jerusalem

By Gleaves Whitney

To understand America, do not start with 1787. Or 1776. Or 1492. To understand America -- or more precisely the most ancient roots of American order -- go back to the second millennium B.C., to the Hebrews. Ancient Israel has had more influence on American culture than you think. So argues Russell Kirk in his magisterial work, The Roots of American Order.

Why the Hebrews? After all, they were Bronze-age nomads who wandered on the edge of civilization more than 3,000 years ago, in the wastelands of Egypt and Sinai. When they finally did settle in Palestine, they never developed into a great power as did ancient Egypt, Assyria, Persia, China, India, or Rome. They left us no form of government to imitate. No economic system to marvel at. No enduring art or painting or sculpture to admire. The Western (Wailing) Wall from the foundation of the Second Temple is the best remnant of their architecture – hardly as grand as the pyramids of Egypt or temples of Greece.

Yet what these desert nomads gave us is arguably more powerful than any political system, more dynamic than any economic system, more vivid than any painting, and more enduring than any stone monument. What they gave us through their sacred writings were timeless laws of behavior, moral insights that people from every continent and every age have accepted as fundamental to right living. They helped men and women order their souls.

Let's explore ancient Israel's remarkable contributions to Western civilization in more detail.

Are We Worthy of Revolution?

Winston, not atypically, has asked a profound if somewhat inconvenient question (When Is a Change in Government a Duty?) regarding the right to revolution.  Inconvenient, that is, given the current disarray of our society and the sloppiness of most political, philosophical, and cultural discourse on such outlets as Fox “News.” 

For what it's worth, I offer two points. 

First, I think it’s very important to remember Kirk’s understanding that every right comes with a duty.  If we have a “right” to revolution, we must have a corresponding duty. 

Roots (and Shoots) of American Order

By Gleaves Whitney

Roots of American Order

Russell Kirk best tells the story of the West in The Roots of American Order. Now in its fourth edition, Roots is "simply one of the finest surveys of the classical, religious, and European influences on American political thought ever composed" (Lee Cheek). In his masterpiece, Kirk traces key cultural elements of four great civilizations and the cities that defined them -- biblical Jerusalem, ancient Athens, ancient Rome, and medieval and early-modern London. Leaders in each of the four civilizations carried forward the cultural DNA they inherited, often in creative ways that challenged the status quo. So Israel had its Moses, David, and Solomon; Athens its Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Rome its Cicero, Cato, and Augustus; Britain its Chaucer, St. Thomas More, and Shakespeare.

In the sixteenth century, the world was thrust into a new era when Europeans encountered the Western hemisphere and began planting their ambitions in its rich soil. On American ground, between the 1490s and the 1790s, the cultural DNA of the West eventually combined to make a remarkable new nation. The creation of the United States was organically related to previous civilizations, to be sure, but not a clone of any of them.

Culturally our early republic represented a unique grafting of key elements -- from the monotheistic promise of Jerusalem, to the unfinished philosophical quests of ancient Athens, to the civic republican inheritance of ancient Rome, to the evolving political institutions and common law of London.

Politically the Anglo-American errand in the wilderness was producing a new species of polity that began to blossom in Philadelphia in the mid 1770s. On the one hand, the early republic represented "a revolution not made but prevented," as Burkeans would characterize it. (See Edmund Burke's Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in which he discusses the principles of 1688.) On the other hand, as Alexander Hamilton reminds us, the new polity was the result of self-conscious reflection on American resistance to British tyranny. (See the opening of Federalist Paper Number 1.)

So the establishment of the United States was a unique mix of old and new, fulfillment and promise. It did not exactly represent a novus ordo seclorum -- a new order of the ages -- as some American boosters claimed. (The phrase is still on our paper currency.) In reality, each of the four cities provided the cultural roots from which America's founders, framers, farmers, and forward-trekking pioneers would draw sustenance. These early Americans went about their daily lives with their Bible, Aesop, Plutarch, and Blackstone in hand.

Kirk carries this story of American order forward to the mid 19th century, culminating in the work of Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Orestes Brownson.



Shoots of American Order

As the title of his book implies, Kirk emphasizes continuity over change -- old roots over new shoots. And yet, new shoots there were. The hundred years from the 1760s to the 1860s was the first Time of Trial in American history. As a result of the American Revolution, War for Independence, birth agony of the new republic, and Civil War to resolve its paradoxes, American politics and culture began to diverge in significant ways from European politics and culture. What had changed?
- Politically: in the 1780s, a large republic was created in a world of settled monarchies.
- Ecclesiastically: there would be no national church.
- Socially: aristocratic titles and privileges were outlawed.
- Culturally: Noah Webster and other chauvinists endeavored to create a distinctively American culture.
- Geographically: the presence of the frontier renewed the possibility, again and again, of equality of opportunity and upward mobility (for white males).
- Economically: the world's largest, continuous, free-trade zone was coming into existence.
- Civil society: in the 1830s, Tocqueville observed that America's network of voluntary associations was the world's most developed, by far.
- Morally: in the 1860s, slavery was abolished on American soil by the Thirteenth Amendment; the greatest uncompensated but legal transfer of property in human history was effected; and four million men and women of African descent were freed from the shackles of the peculiar institution.
Innovations all, from the perspective of Old Europe's anciens regimes.

Violence of Transmitting Cultural DNA

The transmission of cultural DNA from generation to generation and civilization to civilization is rarely seamless. Because the four cultures varied from one another, there were frequent and ferocious clashes, and these clashes are an important part of the story. We well know the story of how Philadelphia clashed with London from the beginning of the American Revolution in 1761 (from John Adams's viewpoint, the true starting point) to the end of the War of 1812, when the War for Independence was finally resolved. We less frequently ask how Jerusalem's ideals clashed with those of Athens, how Athens's ideals clashed with those of Rome, and how Rome's ideals clashed with those of London. Yet these civilizational clashes are critical to understanding our roots as Americans.

David vs. Goliath: Jew vs. Greek?

It's not something most of us learned in Sunday school, but the story of David and Goliath may well have foreshadowed future conflicts between Jerusalem and Athens. In the 11th century B.C., both Mycenaean Greeks and Jews wanted to control Palestine. What were Mycenaean Greeks -- called "Philistines" in the Hebrew Scriptures -- doing in Palestine in the 11th century B.C.? It's a good question. One theory is that Mycenaean civilization collapsed suddenly around the time the Greeks were returning from the Trojan War. The collapse forced the Greeks to flee their homeland and seek refuge in other parts of the Mediterranean. The Mycenaean Sea Peoples who made the successful voyage to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean would have included Goliath's ancestors in search of a new homeland. But they ran afoul of King Saul, who was establishing a monarchy for the Jewish people in the region.

Given his size and reputation as a warrior, it is not improbable that Goliath was a descendent of one of the Mycenaean Greeks who had besieged Troy. It's uncanny that another great book of the ancient world -- the Iliad -- features a similar fight in which young Nestor slays the giant Ereuthalion (in Book 7). But in the David and Goliath story, the tables are turned, and it is the Mycenaean warrior who comes out on the losing end. Indeed, when the Bible describes David holding the decapitated head of Goliath up as a trophy (in 1 Samuel 17v51), it is as though the Jews are proclaiming their supremacy over the Mycenaean Greeks, whose exit from history ended the Age of Heroes and bequeathed a dark age to the ancient Mediterranean world.

Hebrew Jews vs. Greek Jews

Another critically important clash occurred in the 2nd century B.C., when Jerusalem -- the City of David -- was the scene of a fierce struggle between champions of Greek culture and freedom fighters for Jewish culture. It is not by accident that I compose this essay on December 1, 2010, at the start of Hanukkah. These Jewish holy days commemorate one of the most famous civilizational clashes in our cultural DNA.

Jerusalem was not a strictly Jewish city in ancient times. The armies of Alexander the Great conquered the Jewish people and imposed Hellenistic culture on them during the Second Temple period. Indeed, one of the kings in the wake of Alexander's conquest, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, reinvented Jerusalem as a Greek polis and renamed the city Antiochia. More, this Seleucid king issued a decree that forbade the Jews from observing the rites and laws of their religion. Instead, Jews had to follow Greek customs. Failure to do so could and frequently did warrant the death penalty. So utterly totalitarian was Antiochus IV that he rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem to the Greek god Zeus. Sacred prostitution was practiced within its precincts.

This is the background to the heroic struggle that the Maccabees waged against those trying to impose a Greek cultural agenda. They sought to reestablish Mosaic law. But the Maccabees did not speak for all Jews, many of whom were eager to embrace Hellenism. The Hellenized Jews were attempting a cultural synthesis that more conservative Jews found threatening. Thus the civil war got nasty -- as civil wars inevitably do -- with the Maccabees seeking out and destroying any fellow Jew who abandoned the law of Moses.

After three years, Antiochus' edict was rescinded, and Jews were once again free to observe Mosaic law. They rededicated the Temple to YHWH in 164 B.C., which is what the modern Jewish holy days of Hanukkah commemorate.

And yet -- and yet -- what did the descendents of the conservative Jewish Maccabees eventually do with their new-found freedom? They accepted Greek names. They adopted Greek customs. They produced Greek literature. They read Old Testament books that had been translated into the Greek left behind by Alexander the Great. Two centuries later, Jewish-raised authors of the New Testament would write in Greek. The apostle Paul would vigorously argue for the inclusion of Hellenized Jews in the Church. The irony is rich.

Moral of the Story

The point of retelling this story is to remind ourselves that the roots of American order did not always grow harmoniously with one another. The story of the Maccabees shows how a civil war could arise when Jewish and Greek values clashed within the same culture. In America today, we are faced with some of the same kinds of tensions that erupted in civil war in the 2nd-century B.C.

What Makes Us Americans?

By Brittany Baldwin

As an American Studies major at Hillsdale, I am confronted with this question often. I have to admit that sometimes it is unsettling to think that I often feel incompetent in answering the questions that lies at the heart of my area of concentration. While I don't have a comprehensive answer, the following are some characteristics that I believe characterize the American people. I welcome and encourage discussion, criticism, additions, etc.

1) the little "platoons"--From Burke to Tocqueville to Kirk, some of the greatest minds have recognized the uniqueness of the American people to form voluntary assemblies and organizations. From the Temperance Society to the American Red Cross to the NRA to Boy Scouts to the YMCA, men and women have joined hands in creating communities that worked towards a common end. These common ends may often focus on one specific thing, but more often then not they seek to preserve the common good and to unify people towards a common cause. These associations, as Tocqueville so acutely recognized, tempered the rugged individualism that could easily veer into anarchy, or at the very least selfishness.

2) aesthetic purity--The American people have never been knights or royal blood, and though remnants of the Medieval serfdom and nobility seeped into American culture, particularly into the South, for the most part, a simple way of living seemed to define the American lifestyle until the Guilded Age. Ambition has always spurred immigrants to move to America and has also caused emigrants to move Westward. Yet, many of those Westward travelers did not hope to get rich fast, with exception of the miners; instead, they wanted to have their own plot of land to till the soil, plant crops, and cultivate the earth. They wanted to live self-sufficiently, revering God's power in nature, helping their neighbors when they suffered hard times, and strengthening the bonds of family in the midst of hard work. The Laura Engels Wilder books, Willa Cather's My Antonia, and the Ralph Moody books demonstrate this frontier life that began with the puritans and continued well into the 19th century. This simple lifestyle has diminished in much of modern-day America, with the decadence of American's diets, convenience of one new invention after another, and American's growing materialism, but I still believe the aesthetic purity lies dormant in many American's souls.

3) The guttural and intellectual instinct to protect and defend property--The republican ideal of property rights being our first and most important right has remained a definitive element of the American people. At the battle of Lexington and Concord, men stood together to defend their little plot of the earth, and to defend their families and their communities. Though armed, they followed the Anglo-Saxon myth of peacefully protesting by standing against Norman tyranny. The British forced fired at them and ended all hopes of restoration. Just as this moment lit the flames that inspired many colonists to sacrifice their lives for their rights, men have continued to cling to their rights, as demonstrated by recent events like the tea party movement. While Europeans seem willing to surrender to socialist programs, the American people remain determined to protect the individuals rights to keep what each man earns, free speech, freedom of religion, press, the right to bear arms, and many others. Though some have succumb to socialists ideas, the resurgence of conservative in the new House represents a rekindling of the Americans' love of property and their willingness to defend it.