What Did Americans Inherit from the Ancients?

by Russell Kirk

Just what is this classical patrimony received by the inhabitants of North America and consciously cherished well into the twentieth century? To Europeans living west of the Elbe or south of the Danube, the remains of classical civilization are visible still: intelligent observes are aware of a continuity extending over many generations. For that matter, Roman ruins survive from the Atlantic shore of the Iberian peninsula all the way to the Euphrates, or from Scotland to Morocco. People who speak Romance languages cannot be altogether unaware of the Roman past, nor can Greeks forget their distant cultural ancestors.  But in North America, neither monuments of antiquity nor the roots of language can evoke memories of civilizations broken, yet somehow working through us in a ghostly fashion. Nevertheless, we pay public homage to long-dead Greeks and Romans. Why is the public architecture of our national capital still dominated by classical columns and domes? Why do we still pay some lip-service to the disciplines of the humanities, the sources of which may be traced back to Greece six centuries before Christ?

The Permanent Things & Imaginative Conservatism (part I)

by Winston Elliott III & Darrin Moore

Below is the first video segment of the recent discussion of conservatism and the American Republic with host Darrin Moore & editor of The Imaginative Conservative, Winston Elliott, on WAAM Radio Talk1600 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More to come...

The excellent graphics were produced by Darrin Moore.

Edmund Burke and the Constitution

by Russell Kirk

Constitutions are something more than lines written upon parchment. When a written constitution endures—and most written constitutions have not been long for this world—that document has been derived successfully from long-established customs, beliefs, statutes, and interests; it has reflected a political order already accepted, tacitly at least, by the dominant element among a people.

True constitutions are not invented: they grow. The Constitution of the United States has endured for two centuries because it arose from the healthy roots of more than two centuries of colonial experience and of several centuries of British experience. For the most part, the American Constitution expressed formally what already was accepted, practiced, and believed in by the people of the new republic. A constitution without deep roots is no true constitution at all.

In a symposium at Kenyon College, three decades ago, I expressed such views. Clinton Rossiter dissented. Why, a constitution can be created overnight, he said; just that had been done in many European countries shortly after the First World War and the Second World War.

"Where are those constitutions now?" I inquired. And today one might ask, with equal pertinence, "Where are now the constitutions of the emergent African states, so grandly promulgated in the 1950s and 1960's?" The framers of a successful constitution must take into account the history, the moral order, the resources, the prospects of a country—and much else besides. Those framers must be endowed with political imagination—which is not at all the same thing as political utopianism—and with much practical knowledge of affairs. Otherwise a constitution may live no longer than a butterfly.

Russell Kirk Would Have Been A Great Headmaster

by Robert M. Woods

Russell Kirk

With all the noise of recent months in the media about getting rid of Liberal Arts at certain colleges and universities in place of more "practical," or as the ancients would have classified it, "technical training for slaves," there comes a time to respond. But we begin with a defense of the barbarian position for a moment. Much of what passes in the name of Liberal Arts should be banished as it was never worthy of study. While one may enjoy the longest running animated series in television history, it really is not worthy of deep attention and three hours university credit. Or one may be obsessed with the most recent academic fad and desire to get a major in it through the "Liberal Arts Dept." I fear to mention one as tomorrow it will likely be different. Actually, it will likely be different in fifteen minutes.

If one is considering the value of a Liberal Arts education on the high school or college level, it would be most helpful to articulate exactly what a liberal arts education really is or should be. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Among the very fine explanations of what a Liberal Arts education is and should be, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education is to be considered. In truth, if adhered to, this little essay may go a long way in helping us avoid the way of Babel Technical Institute.

The Truth of Beauty: Educating the Moral Imagination

by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”)

These famous lines of Keats have charmed and delighted readers for nearly two centuries, but skeptics have scoffed at his claim, especially as beauty is well known to be wholly subjective, a value found only “in the eye of the beholder.” Even those of us who are inclined to agree with the poet’s bold statement have been known to wonder whether this is really all we need to know. Surely we must add at least two other categories to the formula, for philosophers have long considered three subjects of contemplation to be paramount: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. These topics give rise to the three prime branches of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. All three of these are considered by many people today purely relativistic concepts, and one of the goals of the Catholic educator must be to contradict the prevailing relativism, which is practically taken for granted even by many Catholic students, since, as T. S. Eliot says, secularism today “holds all the most valuable advertising space.”

In my experience, these students are more likely to grant me metaphysical claims than claims about morality and beauty. If I say that the universe is not merely atoms and void, not merely matter, they tend to agree. It becomes more contentious if I say that there are universal moral truths. If I give as an example the claim that it is always wrong to enslave another person, they will readily agree, but if I say it is wrong (on essentially the same principle) to use human embryos for scientific research, I will have an argument with some. If I say that it is also wrong (still largely for the same reason) to bring about the conception of a human being in a laboratory in order to help an infertile couple have a child, I may meet with incredulity or even be denounced as a heartless disbeliever in the sanctity of motherhood.

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]

Russell Kirk and the Swords of Imagination

by Darrin Moore

The battle for our future is being fought within the imaginations of men. This has always been so. Russell Kirk explained: “All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendency over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided.” Today, with atheistic secular humanitarianism large and in charge, many fear that we may fall prey to immoral forces; avarice, envy and tyranny.

Being encoded by our Creator with free will, human beings have the capacity for both great good and horrendous evil. Man can rise to the level just below angels or sink to the depths just above the animals. Whether he slides into degraded savagery or soars with elegant eagles depends on his reasoning and his will–and these are shaped by his imagination. The ‘moral imagination’ is, in Kirk’s phrase, “a man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely from day to day, or rather from moment to moment, as dogs do. It is a strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.” Chuck Colson added, “The moral imagination is more than rational, it is poetic, stirring long-atrophied faculties for nobility, compassion and virtue. . . It begins with awe, reverence and appreciation for order within creation. It sees the value of tradition, revelation, family, and community, and responds with duty, commitment and dedication.”

Popular Government and Intemperate Minds: Democracy As Ideology

by Russell Kirk

At the beginning of the twentieth century, few states in the world could be called democratic. Yet much personal and local freedom existed under the reign of law.

Near the close of the twentieth century, nearly every political regime throughout the world professes to be democratic. Yet in many lands, personal and local freedom has been extirpated.

On the face of things, it appears that the triumph of democracy, far from preserving or enlarging freedom, has brought to power a host of squalid oligarchs.

The Inspired Wisdom of Burke

by George A. Panichas

Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, by Russell Kirk, with a Foreword by Roger Scruton, Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997.

Russell Kirk’s book on Edmund Burke, first published in 1967, now revised and handsomely re-issued, testifies not only to the “enduring Burke,” but also to the enduring Kirk. As a British statesman and political philosopher of “inspired wisdom,” Burke (1729-1797) continues to address our time and condition. And as an American man of letters, Kirk (1918-1994) fully possesses the critical and sapiential acumen-and the sympathy of vision-to elucidate Burke’s life and thought. In essence this book serves an introduction to the meaning and importance of Burke’s achievement. Indeed Kirk’s book, in its clarity of expression, its illumination of ideas, its cogency of organization and development, exemplifies standards that a critical study, if it is to have lasting value, has to satisfy. At the same time, its conveyed insight and wisdom make it far more than an introduction, and give it an added critical dimension. Unpretentious and straightforward, and with an impelling honesty of approach and interpretation, this book has the wonderful ability to guide a reader through the most significant and intricate avenues of Burke’s contribution.

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.

The War on Conservatism

The philosophical roots of modern political conservatism extend back over many generations through Burke and the natural law to the Middle Ages and classical antiquity. This meant that in every historical epoch in Western civil society there have always been some conservatives. Over the next three decades Russell [Kirk] and I found that this fact was so distasteful to Marxists, liberals, and their allies among so-called ‘neo-conservatives,’ that they totally disregarded the evidence in the tradition of Burke’s politics. Either out of invincible ignorance or moral perversity, they revealed a willful genius for self-deception. In order to denigrate the conservative tradition and deny it intellectual respectability, they claimed that American conservatism is of very recent origins, that it is centered in a mindless religious fundamentalism or jingoistic patriotism, and that it is devoted wholly to defending the status quo, especially the selfish interests of the business community. For more than three decades this has been the constant strategy of those at war with the conservative tradition, and it is a technique that will undoubtedly be used into the future.”--Peter Stanlis (The Unbought Grace of Life)

Russell Kirk on T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

by Robert M. Woods

In all of our Great Books based programs we exalt the primary readings, unmediated by commentaries, critical theories, jargon ladened treatises, and a mountain of secondary works explaining what a given author meant within his work.  What we generally do is encourage the students to jump right in and start swimming.  By asking interpretive questions and applying the Socratic method of clarifying and qualifying, the student has better understanding of the reading.  Of course, we all know that sometimes answers to our questions about a reading are not to be found within the work and sometimes we need additional outside, background materials to assist a fuller reading.  Typically, our students read introductions at the end and not the beginning.

All this is stated to provide the exceptions.  Sometimes there are those writings about the Great Books that offer such assistance and are so rich with insight that the secondary work in conversation with the primary work comes a work well worth reading and analysis.  One could immediately think of T.S. Eliot's reflections on Dante's Divine Comedy.  Another would be Russell Kirk's ruminations on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

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.

Edmund Burke and Natural Rights

by Russell Kirk

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke was at once a chief exponent of the Ciceronian doctrine of natural law and a chief opponent of the “rights of man.” In our time, which is experiencing simultaneously a revival of interest in natural-law theory and an enthusiasm for defining “human rights” that is exemplified by the United Nations’ lengthy declaration, Burke’s view of the natural juridic order deserves close attention.

Unlike Bolingbroke and Hume, whose outward politics in some respects resembled the great Whig statesman’s, Burke was a pious man. “The most important questions about the human race Burke answered . . . from the Church of England’s catechism.”[1] He takes for granted a Christian cosmos, in which a just God has established moral principles for man’s salvation. God has given man law, and with that law, rights; such, succinctly, is Burke’s premise in all moral and juridical questions. The religion of Edmund Burke is a very interesting topic which cannot be examined in detail here; but it needs to be mentioned before any consideration of Burke’s political fundamentals, for he was as devout as his Tory friend Johnson. Leslie Stephen’s observation that Whigs were invincibly suspicious of parsons does not apply to the greatest Whig of all. God gives us our nature, said Burke, and with it he gives us natural law. But that law, and the rights which derive from it, have been misunderstood by the modern mind—thus Burke continues:

The rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. If these natural rights are further affirmed and declared by express covenants, if they are clearly defined and secured against chicane, against power, and authority, by written instruments and positive engagements, they are in a still better condition: they partake not only of the sanctity of the object so secured, but of that solemn public faith itself, which secures an object of such importance. . . . The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men.[2]

The Inhumane Qualities of Labels

by Bradley J. Birzer

Winston and I started The Imaginative Conservative website almost 2 years ago now. In that brief time, I’m proud to say that we—and by we, I mean Winston—have done extremely well in attracting visitors to this site and creating discussion here and around the internet. I’m certainly proud to be associated with the site and with Winston.

One of the most surprising things to me, however, is our constant need to re-examine the word “conservatism.” Over the past 44 months, a question about definition or label or something related to this has come up at least 44 times, if not more.

From these questions and desires, I can only conclude that we crave to grasp and define this thing, “conservatism.” As all TIC readers well know, our modern and post modern worlds have all too frequently degraded and debased not only our words and the our English language but even the very idea of language as a whole.

Conservatism is Not an Ideology

by Brad Birzer, TIC co-editor

Russell Kirk deserves special attention on the topic of ideologies. In his twenty-nine books on politics, history, constitutional law, literature, social criticism, economics, and fiction, the legacy of the French Revolution and the loosening of the ideologues upon the world haunted him at a profound level. Tellingly, Kirk’s most important influence was Edmund Burke, the originator of conservatism in the post-medieval world and the most articulate spokesman against the French Revolution. Following the careful scholarship of Raymond Aron, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, and Gerhart Niemeyer as well as the social criticism of Eliot, Kirk argued that one could define ideologies through three of its “vices.” 

In Honor of Mr. Jefferson's 269th Birthday: Quotes from Russell Kirk, Clyde Wilson & Suggested Essays

by Winston Elliott III

"Temperate, sound in morals, sound in taste, learned in more than one discipline, open-handed, ready to fill great offices at personal sacrifice and then to retire modestly to Monticello--this was the genuine Jefferson, no doctrinaire egalitarian, no abstract intellectual...Jefferson indeed was a Whig through and through, with the virtues and the defects of the breed. Joined with this Whiggery was another facet of his character...a bitter partisanship, not overly scrupulous...Jefferson could be ferociously emotional in politics."

--Russell Kirk (pg. xvii, introduction to Mr. Jefferson by Albert J. Nock)

"Jefferson and his friends came to power (the “Revolution of 1800”) in opposition to the economic and moral imperialism of Hamilton and his friends - a program of taxes, manipulation of the economy for the inevitable benefit of the few and the burden of the many, moral dragooning of the population, and involvement in foreign power politics. It was this threat that Jefferson and his friends put down, and kept down, for half a century - the happiest era of the Union."

--Clyde Wilson (Thomas Jefferson's Birthday, see link below)

Recommended essays regarding Mr. Jefferson on The Imaginative Conservative:

Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday by Clyde Wilson
Jefferson Was Right by Joseph Sobran
Calhoun, Jefferson, and Popular Rule by Lee Cheek
The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition by Clyde Wilson

Posts Tagged "Thomas Jefferson" on TIC, including Jefferson Quotes

Revolution Defined

by Russell Kirk

The following excerpts are from the chapter A Revolution Not Made, but Prevented in Kirk’s book Rights & Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution. Our excerpter, Darrin Moore, suggests—like a sommelier—that the reader might find The Beatles counter-revolutionary tune Revolution a perfect pairing to this article if one hopes for Kirk’s ideas to “ferment in the mind.” One can listen to that counter-revolutionary song here. Moore was spurred to compile this collection of excerpts to further clarify Kirk’s definition of the term revolution when challenged by a comment on the essay previously published (Russell Kirk On the American and French Revolutions) here.

We need first to examine definitions of that ambiguous word revolution. The signification of the word was altered greatly by the catastrophic events of the French Revolution, commencing only two years after the Constitutional Convention of the United States. Before the French explosion of 1789 and 1790, revolution commonly was employed to describe a round of periodic or recurrent changes or events—that is, the process of coming full cycle, or the act of rolling back or moving back, a return to a point previously occupied.

Russell Kirk and Ideology

by Gerhart Niemeyer

Gerhart Niemeyer

“Philosophy"—love of wisdom—is a word first used by Heraclitus. "Sophia" as listed in the dictionary means "perfect scientific knowledge, wisdom," but a "sophist" is “a quibbler, a cheat." And Plato made a sharp distinction between sophistes, philosophos, and the sophos, the sophistes being a person who, claiming that he possesses wisdom, takes money for teaching it. The philosophos, by contrast, knowing that he knows nothing, is one who all his life loves wisdom, seeking and striving for that which is truly possessed only by the gods. Aristotle, who was Plato's student for twenty years, distinguishes between a philosophos arid a philomythos, while Plato already had set the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, off against the philodoxer, the lover of opinion. This shows how anxious the Greeks were to distinguish between the mind's trustworthy productions and its treacherous ones. It is too bad that our language has not adopted "philodoxer" together with its cousin, "philosopher."

Reinvigorating Culture

by Russell Kirk

Anyone who pushes the buttons of a television set nowadays [written in 1994, Ed.] may be tempted to reflect that genuine culture came to an end during the latter half of the twentieth century. The television set is an immense accomplishment of reason and imagination: the victory of technology. But the gross images produced by television are symptoms and causes of our civilization’s decadence: the defeat of humane culture.

The contrast between the success of technology and the failure of social institutions is yet more striking when we look at any large American city. Some time ago I spent a day in Detroit, once styled “the arsenal of democracy,” latterly known as “America’s murder capital.” I have known Detroit ever since I was a small boy, and have observed the stages of the city’s decay over the decades. Except for some financial and political activity, and a little surviving commerce, about the foot of Woodward Avenue near the river, old Detroit is a dangerous wreck. The length of Woodward Avenue, up to Eight Mile Road and beyond, one drives through grim desolation: Beirut in the midst of its troubles might have seemed more cheerful. One passes through Detroit’s “cultural center,” the Institute of Arts on one side of the avenue, the Public Library on the other. Immediately north or south of those splendid buildings, immediately east or west, extends the grimy reality of a broken and dying city. “Culture” has become something locked into an archaic museum.