Russell Kirk in the Ruins of Carthage, 1963
Nowhere are Roman ruins thicker than in Tunisia. For this, from the days when Scipio took Punic Carthage until the Vandals broke into the city, was the Province of Africa, wondrously rich and populous. St. Augustine was born in Carthage — of a patrician family — and died in neighboring Hippo, v/hen the Vandals were at the gates. I have just spent some days in Tunis and the country round about. In Carthaginian and Roman times, the town on the site of Tunis, across the bay from Carthage, was a slum; now it is the capital of a new state. But the greatness of this land is gone, and one comes chiefly to view the ruins. If one goes up to the Moslem town of Zaghouan, thirty miles inland from Tunis, he finds the springs from which the Romans took their water to supply the great Antonine baths at Carthage, and from which Tunis’ water still comes. Here stands even today the Temple of the Nymphs at the fountainhead, built in the Emperor Hadrian’s day. The colossal Roman aqueduct still stands in ruin all down to the coast, across arid hillside and plain. The ruined Roman cities of Tunisia are many, sacked by Vandal and Arab. Of them, Carthage by the sea is most evocative of the grandeur that was Rome. Though the Romans, having destroyed forever the Punic power, sowed with salt the site of the Carthaginian capital, later the Romans built their own city on the site. The eminence called the Birsa, where the people of Hannibal made their last ghastly stand in citadel and temples, is surmounted nowadays by the Catholic cathedral. But one sees elsewhere, the Tophet, the pit in which the Carthaginians sacrificed children; and many Carthaginian tombstones. Water made this land fruitful. But its forests were hewn down by militant Vandal and Byzantine and Arab, and erosion followed, and the great works of irrigation crumbled to dust. Until Decatur, Eaton, and other Americans taught the Barbary pirates a lesson, blackmail, freebootlng, and kidnapping were the industries of this blasted African shore. No strong power endures forever. In those times when Roman emperors were bred up in the Province of Africa, no man expected that all this splendor would become the abomination of desolation. Only after Alaric’s barbarian host had taken Rome did St. Augustine see that Roman might, too, was a vanity which must pass; and he wrote The City of God, which endures when the cities of this earth are given up to fire and sword. In the amphitheater of Carthage, still to be seen, St. Perpetua and many other Christians gave up the ghost. One finds, too, a little subterranean church dedicated to St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. Yet early Christian site though Carthage was, Islam triumphed long ago, and virtually the only Christians there now are resident Europeans. Their villas, and those of rich Tunisians, stand on the sites of big Roman houses, looking across the magnificent bay. Habib Bourguiba, president of the new Tunisian Republic and powerful as any Bey of Tunis of old times, is building himself a palace on these heights. One day, we must expect New York and Los Angeles will be as Carthage is now, laid low. As the centuries slide by, every civilized people forget or neglect the faith and the principles which raised them up to honor. You and I will be lapped in lead long before that day of wrath, I trust. Yet how soon or late a great city falls depends always on the courage and the wisdom of folk living long before the last agony.
Source: Russell Kirk, “Among the Ruins of Carthage,” To the Point (syndicated) Column (November 6, 1963).
Russell Kirk on Spoiled Priests and the Truly Humane, 1957
“’He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning,’ Edmund Burke wrote while he was still a young man, ‘is like a man who, having built and rigged a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock.’ Now I submit that the principal threat to academic freedom in the United States comes from the dry-docked minds; the minds of ideologues within the walls of the Academy.” (4)
“To feel one’s self a prophet, but at the same time to insist, ‘I am, and none else beside me,’ is to indulge a most dangerous mood. A prophet without a gospel is worse than a rebel without a cause.” (5)
“For the intolerant zealot within the Academy, having denied the existence of a supernatural order and enduring Truth, takes it for his whole duty to turn society upside down. His evangelical zeal is diverted to the demolition of received opinions and things established. He conceives it to be his mission to gnaw at the foundations of society; to convert his students to a detestation of whatever is old and enervated; to elbow out of the Academy all those among his colleagues who will not conform utterly to his own boasted secular ‘non-conformity’ . . . . He is a bulldozer in a black gown.” (5)
“The end of a university or college education is the apprehension of norms. The norm does not mean the average, the median, the mean, the mediocre, although positivistic pedants and ill-informed journalists would have endeavored to corrupt the word ‘norm’ to that usage. . . . A norm is an enduring standards. It is, if you will, a natural law, which we ignore at our peril. If is a rule of human conduct and a measure of public virtue. It is not, some professors of education to the contrary, merely a measure of average performance within a group. There is law for man, and law for thing; and it is through the apprehension of norms that we come to know the law divinely decreed for man’s self-governance.” (5)
“Techniques, and the knowledge of techniques, are transitory; but norms are eternal and the knowledge of norms, once thoroughly acquired, endures all a man’s life.” (6)
“Once upon a time I was a professor of a state university which offered an omnium-gatherum course called “humanities,’ consisting mostly of a giddy dash through four thousand years of history, accompanied by colored slides. In the fullness of time, this department of ‘humanities’ issued a new syllabus, commencing with the words, ‘Humanities is . . . .’ On perceiving that this department of ‘humanities’ had thrown grammar to the winds, I cashed in my professional chips and sought another walk of life.” (6)
“For the true purpose of the humanities is to convey to us the significance of norms.” (6)
The Humanist “recognizes the supernatural and the natural worlds, and tries to harmonize the two in his own life and in society.” (7)
“A truly humane man is a person who knows we were not born yesterday. He is familiar with many of the great books and the great men of the past, and with the best in the thought of his own generation. He has received a training of mind and character that chastens and ennobles and emancipates. He is a man genuinely free; but free only because he obeys the ancient laws, the norms, which govern human nature. He is competent to be a leader, whether in his own little circle or on a national scale—a leader in thought and taste and politics—because he has served an apprenticeship to the priests and the prophets and the philosophers of the generations that have preceded us in our civilization. He knows what it is to be a man—to be truly and fully human. He knows what things a man is forbidden to do. He knows his rights and his corresponding duties. He knows what to do with his leisure. He knows the purpose of his work. He knows that there is a law for man, and law for thing.” (7)
“The founders of the Republic were bold and practical men; but they were humane. Even those who had read little at least were saturated, from childhood, in the Bible, Cicero, Virgil, and Plutarch, if only in translation or through a kind of intellectual osmosis. The model for the American Republic was the Roman Republic, modified by the English and colonial political experience; the models for American leadership were prophets, saints, and Plutarch’s heroes.” (7-8)
“In a true university, now as then, a humane education teaches obedience to norms: conformity to norms, if you will. ‘Conformity’ has become a devil-term in many of our universities. But there is no virtue in non-conformity for non-conformity’s sake. Whether or not a wise and just man should conform always depends upon what is he conforming to. To conform to fads, foibles, and the appetites of the hour is base and foolish. But to conform to eternal truths, to those norms which teach us what it is to be a truly humane person, is the path of duty.” (8)
“If a man depends altogether on the private bank and capital of his petty private reason, he is risking his nature at the Devil’s chess-game. But if a man fortifies himself within the disciplines of humane learning, he draws upon the wealth and power of the ages, and so is a fit match even for a diabolical adversary.” (8)
SOURCE: Russell Kirk, “The Spi’led Praist and the Stickit Minister,” Newman (Michaelmas, 1957): 4-8.
What a Rush! My Beginnings with Prog
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the amount of new music I’ve listened to since joining Progarchy, and I’ve been wondering how I managed to get along without much of the music I listen to on an almost daily basis now! I’ve also been thinking about my first exposure to what I know understand to be progressive rock. At the time, I would have just called it classic rock.
I was a little kid. Maybe 6th grade, but for some reason I think it was a few years earlier. Let’s go with 2004 or 2005. I remember sitting in my brother’s bedroom as my Dad plugged his 40 gig iPod classic (remember those, black and white screen, weighed a couple pounds) into my brother’s stereo to relive the glory days with his college roommate who was in town and over for dinner. My first experience hearing Rush was the…
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More Russell Kirk on Abraham Lincoln
Kind of blue.
As Americans continue celebrating, remembering, and analyzing the events of 150 years ago, the noble tragedy of the American Civil War, it is certainly worth considering the words of great and profound thinkers who have studied the event.
I just posted the magnificent Russell Kirk’s words on President Abraham Lincoln from a 1970 speech he delivered in California. Now, I am posting quotes/excerpts from a Kirk article, “The Measure of Abraham Lincoln,” published in the English Jesuit periodical, The Month, 1954.
As he did in the 1970 speech, Kirk here again painted Lincoln as the great conservative of his day, a man who understood timeless principles and who implemented them to the best of his ability.
The Right, unfortunately, remains rather conflicted about the legacy and significance of Abraham Lincoln. I write unfortunate not because I dislike debate (should the Right ever totally agree on some thing, we might very well expect the fourth rider of St. John’s Apocalypse to appear from around the next corner), but because the debate has become simplistic and polarized. Just as Manichaeism has been declared heretical, so should this polarization be declared.
Kirk offered a third approach. Russell Kirk was, after all, his own man.
*****
SOURCE: Russell Kirk, “The Measure of Abraham Lincoln,” The Month 11 (April 1954): 197-206.
“But as Mr. Stanley Pargellis, in 1945, pointed out with cogency, in his cast of mind, his policies, and his empiricism, Lincoln was strongly conservative; and Mr. Weaver, for rather different reasons, holds the same opinion. Moreover, Lincoln’s original allegiance was to the Whigs, then the conservative party of the United States; and, says Mr. Weaver, ‘it is no accident that Lincoln became the founder of the greatest American conservative party, even if that party was debauched soon after his career ended. He did so because his method was that of the conservative.’” [pg. 199]
“In his great conservative end, the preservation of the Union, he succeeded; and he might have succeeded in a conservative labor equally vast, the restoration of order and honesty, had not Booth’s pistol put an end to the charity and fortitude of this uncouth, homely, melancholy, lovable man.” [pg. 200]
“Here was a man; and as the best of life is tragic, and as the highest reward of virtuous life is a noble and, so this man was fortunate in the hour of his death. Lincoln was struck down at the height of his powers, having endured with meekness and resignation all the agony of the war years; he died at the moment all his hopes were rewarded and all his acts justified. He passed from life unblemished by the rancor and corruption of the Reconstruction era, so that intended evil of Booth’s bullet was in reality, for link and a great relief and blessing.” [Pages 203–204].
Lincoln’s “proposals for Reconstruction in the South—carried out by Johnson so far as Johnson had the power to enforce them—save the Southern states from much of the ignominy, and some of the material ruin, which the Radicals would have inflicted upon them; and had his moderate projects for the gradual improvement of the Freedmen then made ineffectual, the whole present problem of race in America might be a good deal less distressing.” [Page 205].
“In this, for the most part, as in much else, Abraham Lincoln was a conservative statesman of a high order. Lincoln himself remarked of the founders of American independence (as Mr. Weaver reminds us), ‘they meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.’ To this ideal of liberty under law, Lincoln added his own example, which has worked in calculable good in the altered America which has followed 1865. His greatness came from his recognition of enduring moral principle.… Abraham Lincoln, knowing that there is a truth above the advantage of the hour, argued from definition, on most occasions.… This is a long way from the big battalions; it is also a long way from Jacobin abstraction. Lincoln’s strength, and his conservatism, did not arise from an affection for the excluded middle, which he called a ‘sophistical contrivance.’ He knew that what moved him was a power from without himself; and, having served God’s will according to the light that was given him, he received the reward of the last full measure of devotion.” [Pps. 205-206].
Russell Kirk on Abraham Lincoln, 1970
“As the Roman Republic was at the back of the minds of the framers of the American Constitution; it was their hope that the chief magistrate of these United States would conduct himself with “the high old Roman virtue,” becoming an exemplar of pietas, gravitas, constantia, firmitas, comitas, disciplina, industria, clemetia, frugalitas, and severitas. George Washington, a grand gentleman of the old model, suffused with the un-bought grace of life, set high the standard for these virtues. Eight decades later, there appeared a public man of an origin very different from Washington’s, who nevertheless has come to stand as Washington’s equal in republican virtue.”
“From a disaster greater still, we were saved by the presidential dignity of Lincoln, from whom few had expected any dignity at all.”
“Both the New England of Hawthorne and the backwoods Illinois of Lincoln were faced by the whirlwind of fanaticism that had first stirred in their youth, had wailed onward to Fort Sumter, and then had raved triumphant from Manassas to Appomattox. That whirlwind might have left total devastation, had not Abraham Lincoln’s dignity withstood it in some degree.”
“The war made Lincoln great–not by chance, but by summoning forth the noble fortitude and gravity that had no more than peeked out from him in his Illinois years.”
“How far Lincoln himself was conscious that a Providential purpose work through him, we cannot be certain; yet some such apprehension reins from the phrases of his speeches and letters between 1861 and 1865.”
“For all that, ever since his boyhood his friends had perceived in this curious being some element of greatness. Lincoln possessed the incongruous dignity that was Samuel Johnson’s, too. Here stood a man of sorrows. It always has been true that melancholy men are the wittiest; and Lincoln’s off-color yarns, told behind a log barn or in some dingy Springfield office, were part and parcel of his consciousness that ours is a world of vanities. When he entered upon high office, this right humor became an element of the high old Roman virtue: comitas, the belief that seasons gravitas, or the sense of grand responsibility.”
“He was no woman’s man, and his marriage was made tolerable only by his own vast charity and tenderness, but he never was the man to weep over his own blemishes or blunders.”
“Lincoln’s awareness of this ineluctable reality, combining with his knowledge of the weaknesses of poor sinning mortality, made demand strong in his sadness, and gave him the power to endure with humility and generosity the awful burdens of his office.”
“Pietas was his, too, in the old Roman sense: willing subordination to the claims of the divine, of ‘the contract of eternal society,’ of neighbors, of country.”
“There have lived few Americans more abundantly graced with the theological virtues, charity most of all. The New Testament shines out from his acts of mercy, and the Old from his direction of the war. We all know the deep piety of his Gettysburg Address; and in some of his letters there looms a stern justice, at once Christian and classical.”
“Prudent amidst passion, Lincoln never was a doctrinaire; he rose from very low estate to very high estate, and he knew the savagery that lies close beneath the skin of man, and he saw that most men are good only out of obedience to routine and custom and convention. The reckless Fire–eager in the uncompromising Abolitionist were abhorrent to him; yet he took the middle path between them not out of any misapplication of the doctrine of the Golden mean, but because he held that the unity and security of the United States transcended any fanatics scheme of uniformity.… Here he was like Edmund Burke; yet it is improbable that he read much Burke, or any other political philosopher except Blackstone; his wisdom came from close observation of human nature, and from the Bible and Shakespeare. The Radical Republicans detested him as cordially as did the Southern zealots. In his conservative object, the preservation of the Union, he succeeded through the ancient virtue of prudential.”
“Lincoln was a conservative statesman on the intellectual model of Cicero. In his dignity there was no hubris, no presumption; much, he knew, must be left to Providence.”
“Lincoln knew that what moved him was a power from without himself and, having served God’s will according to the light that was given him, he received the reward of the last full measure of devotion. He did not assert dignity; rather, he was invested with it.”
SOURCE: Russell Kirk, speech, “Lincoln and the Dignity of the Presidency,” February 12, 1970. Typescript in the Russell Kirk Center, Mecosta, Michigan.
My Notes/Index to the 1989 Edition of Prospects for Conservatives
Most recent edition of PROSPECTS, edited by Winston Elliott.
Notes on Kirk, PROSPECTS FOR CONSERVATIVES, 1989
notes taken by Brad Birzer (May 10, 2002; revised on August 9, 2010)
In preparation for August 13, 2010 CAI conference, Houston, Texas
Me presiding/DL
Winston’s 50th birthday
***
Neither American liberalism nor conservatism an ideology (Kirk, PROSPECTS, xi)
scholar vs. intellectual (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 5)
quote J. Adams: ideologue as idiot (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 6); ideology justifies every atrocity (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 273)
all problems blend together: social, ethical, religious, politics (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 7)
must detest abstraction and seek the common good (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 9)
evils of twentieth century make the conservative’s burden greater (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 11)
liberals are “smugness incarnate” (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 11)
the archaic in America are those who still believe in progress and reason (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 12)
liberal is slave to his own prejudices (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 13)
for some problems, simply NO solution (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 14)
truth and beauty are terrifying to modern man (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 16)
sin is real (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 17)
myth is vital; transcendent truth (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 18)
object of life is love (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 21, 75)
must fight the machine (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 21, 93, 145)
conservative relies on habit and custom (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 22)
like all bodies, though, society must be willing to renew itself (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 25)
abolition of man (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 27)
real progress when good men and women fight evil (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 28)
American revolution to conserve (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 29)
Burke vs. French Revolution (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 30)
ideologues really just want power (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 31)
French introduced a horrible disease into the world (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 31)
T.J. more Anglo than French (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 32)
individualism: conservatism without tradition; not good (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 34-35); no simple solutions (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 261)
conservative fearful of the state (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 35)
extreme individualism is understandable–but still a mistake (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 36)
moderns dismiss the sacred and end in decadence (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 39)
Joad and decadence (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 40)
obsession with experience (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 42)
Must redeem the time (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 42, 71, 88)
Unbought grace of life (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 44)
Cicero, honesty, and character (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 45)
Burke (and Livy) on true patriotism: to love our country, our country must be lovely (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 49)
starving the moral imagination (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 50-51)
purpose of liberal education (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 51)
Quotes Paul Elmer More on liberal arts on virtue (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 53)
internal betrayel of the liberal arts (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 54)
liberal arts disciplines free minds (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 55)
Dewey makes men less human! (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 57-59)
every society needs an aristocracy (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 59)
modernity values speed over honor (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 65)
education: not for equality, but to develop gifts (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 67)
twentieth-century has been an age of propaganda (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 68)
but, we should be guardians of the word (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 69)
societal disorder is sign of interior disorder (of the soul) (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 73)
will vs. grace (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 74)
boredom results when we ignore/destroy the sacred (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 91)
we do everything possible to avoid suffering (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 94); death of character results (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 95)
modernity is purgatory, not hell (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 94)
should believe in authority (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 98, 100); large families not bored (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 99)
private judgment = mediocrity (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 101)
tradition-directed person not bored, as he understands purpose (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 101)
masses cruel and dangerous (Kirk, PROSPECTS, Kirk, PROSPECTS, 103)
the bored rule us (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 105)
the bored seek consolation in sexual and moral perversity (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 105)
if bored, means not know self or purpose (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 107)
to relieve boredom (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 108ff): must
1. Renew religious faith and piety (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 121ff)
2. Revive honor and dignity
3. Understand property rights and self-reliance
4. Reaffirm right of men to what is their own (justice)
5. Security not better than true freedom
6. Reawake concept of contract of eternal society
definition of a proletariat (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 110)
love efficiency means suicide (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 115)
Progress = effeminacy (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 117)
discussion of true leisure (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 117ff)
cannot fight ideology with our own propaganda; only firm understanding of traditional moral principles will work (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 129)
justice rooted in nature (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 132); justice leads to diversity (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 133)
true justice allows man to receive reward for his gifts (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 135); Pope Pius XI agrees (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 138)
we’ve become a TV culture; mass mind (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 140-141)
variety is true life; only equality in hell (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 142)
justice demands inequality (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 143)
Ability (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 146)
Avarice (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 159)
consumer decadence (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 163)
government planning for economy destroys traditional virtues (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 169)
beautiful passage: “Stability instead of velocity, community instead of reckless self-expression, satisfying work instead of novel amusement, a decent competence instead of an incessant pursuit of luxuries–those are the ways to personal and social tranquility.” (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 172)
Roepke and the Third Way (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 180ff)
decrease in private trust=increase in public power (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 188ff)
subsidiarity, community, and the variety of talents; community allows true individualism rather than the “mass man” (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 190ff, 204)
too finite to govern ourselves unaided (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 196); God has assigned each of us a part (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 196)
order is natural (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 197)
Economy of Grace–as described in Ecclesiasticus (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 198)
meaning of words (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 208)
Quotes Burke on Jacobin attack on true individualism (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 212)
conservatives restrain power (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 215); two checks on power: moral and legal authority (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 216)
vs. conspiracies (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 216-217)
creeping socialism (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 219)
humanitarianism is simply ½ egoism (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 219)
peoples need to do penance (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 223)
definition of tradition (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 228ff)
church baptizes best of the pagan (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 230-232)
mystery (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 234)
virtue linked to tradition (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 245)
Conservatives must acknowledge that we may lose (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 252)
justice and freedom are gifts from our ancestors–who sacrificed much to give them to us (Kirk, PROSPECTS, 270)
Russell Kirk on Irving Babbitt and Liberal Education
One of the Harvard greats, Irving Babbitt.
“We may define Babbitt’s humanism as the belief that man is a distinct being, government by laws peculiar to his nature: there is a law for man, and law for thing. Man stands higher than the beasts that perish because he recognizes this law of his nature. The disciplinary arts of humanitas teach man to put checks upon his will and his appetite. Those checks are approved by reason—not the private rationality of the Enlightenment, but the higher reason which grows out of a respect for the wisdom of our ancestors and out of the endeavor to apprehend the transcendent order which gives us our nature. The sentimentalist, who would subject man to the rule of impulse and passion; the pragmatic naturalist, who would treat man as a mere edified ape; the leveling enthusiast, who would reduce human differences to a collective mediocrity—these are the enemies of true human nature.” (7)
“Irving Babbitt saw about him a civilization intellectually devoting itself to the study of subhuman relationships, which it mistook for the whole of life; that civilization was sinking into a meaningless aestheticism, an arid specialization, and a mean vocationalism. Babbitt’s attempted renewal of an understanding of true humanism was intended to return his generation to the real aim of education, the study of the greatness and the limitations of human nature.” (7)
“The purpose of studying humane letters was to seek after the Platonic ends of wisdom and virtue: that is, to develop right reason and sound character. The purpose of the rival utilitarian disciplines was to acquire power and wealth. Babbitt is demanding, what will become of college graduates who know the price of everything and the value of nothing?” (10)
“The curricula of even the better institutions, nevertheless, as the years passed, increasingly reflected the commercial and industrial interests of the American Republic, at the cost of humane studies.” (18)
“The aim of the oldfangled college education was ethical, the development of moral understanding and humane leadership; but the method was intellectual, the training of the mind and conscience through well-defined literary disciplines. A college was an establishment for the study of literature: it was nearly so simple as that. Through an apprehension of great literature young men were expected to fit themselves for leadership in the churches, in politics, in law, in the principle positions of leadership in their communities.” (63)
“Certain things a good college can do very well. It can give the student the tools for educating himself throughout his life. It can present to him certain general principles for the governance of personality and community. It can help him to see what makes life worth living. It can teach him basic disciplines which will be of infinite value in professional specialization at a university, or in his subsequent apprenticeship to any commercial or industrial occupation. And certain things no honest college can pretend to do at all. It cannot teach him directly how to win friends and influence people. It cannot make him a successful captain of industry or engineer or specialized scientist. It cannot guarantee him worldly prosperity. It cannot enroll him in a survey-course in “world culture” and pour wisdom into him, as milk is poured into a bottle.” (65)
“At best, what the typical college has offered its undergraduates, in recent decades, has been defecated rationality: that is, a narrow rationalism or Benthamite logicalism, purged of theology, moral philosophy, and the wisdom of our ancestors. This defecated rationality exalts private judgment and gratification of the senses at the expense of the inner order of the soul and the outer order of the republic.” (66)
“If we forget the primacy of moral worth in our scheme of education, we will establish no Arcadia of unchecked personal liberty, but instead bring upon ourselves a congeries of warring ideologies and fierce private appetites.” (66)
“Take away from the student his patrimony of moral imagination and ethical knowledge, and we are confronted, perhaps, by the secularized Pharisee, ignorantly denouncing as ‘immoral’ the imperfect but tolerable order to which he owes his existence.” (66)
SOURCE: Kirk, Russell. “Babbitt and the Ethical Purpose of Literary Studies.” In Literature and the American College, 1-68. Washington, D.C.: National Humanities Institute, 1986.
Russell Kirk on Alexis De Tocqueville, 1953
“Tocqueville is a writer who should be read not in abridgment, but wholly; for every sentence has significance, every observation sagacity. The two big volumes of Democracy in America are a mine of aphorisms, his Old Regime is the germ of a hundred books, his Recollections have a terse brilliance of narrative that few memoirs possess.” (342)
“The spirit of the gentleman and the high talents of remarkable individuals, Tocqueville thought, were sliding into an engulfing mediocrity, and the society of his day was confronted with the prospect of a life-in-death. The futility of crying agains the monstrous deaf and blind tendency of the times made Tocqueville painfully conscious of his impotent insignificance.” (343)
“’I’m not opposed to democracies,’ he wrote to M. de Freslon, in 1857. ‘They may be great, they may be in accordance with the will of God, if they be free. What saddens me is, not that our society is democratic, but that the vices which we have inherited and acquired make is to difficult for us to obtain or to keep well-regulated liberty. And I know nothing so miserable as a democracy without limits.” (343)
“What menaces democratic society in this age is not a simple collapse of order, nor yet usurpation by a single powerful man, but a tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition enforced by the central government.” (345)
“That men are kept in perpetual childhood—that, in spirit, they never become full human beings—seems no great loss to a generation of thinkers accustomed to compulsory schooling, compulsory insurance, compulsory military service, and even compulsory voting. A world of uniform compulsion is death to variety and the life of the mind; knowing this, Tocqueville felt that the materialism which democracy encourages may so far obsess the public consciousness as to stifle, in all but a few independent souls, the notions of freedom and variety.” (346)
“Materialism, as a governing force in society, is open to two overpowering objections: first, it enervates the higher faculties of man; second, it undoes itself.” (347)
“Moral decay first hampers and then strangles honest government, regular commerce, and even the ability to take genuine pleasure in the goods of the world. Compulsion is applied from above as self-discipline relaxes below, and the last liberties expire under the weight of the unitary state. Once a society has slipped so far, almost no barrier remains to withstand absolutism.” (348)
SOURCE: Kirk, “The Prescience of Tocqueville,” University of Toronto Quarterly 22 (1953): 342-353.
Kirk’s On the Shoulder of Giants (Selections)
“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)
“But the trouble with this integrated society is that it is a life in death. All high aspiration, all real imagination, all personal and variety, all moral worth, are gone out of it; it is hideous. And I think that any thoroughly integrated society must be hideous.” (426)
“Truly human persons ought to be different from one another in many ways. There are certain enduring moral principles they all ought to obey; nor ought me and women to differ merely for the sake of differing, like so many irresponsible Bohemians. But they ought to recognize, and to defend, those incalculably valuable differences of talent, taste, station, and character which make life worth living. Life is not worth living in a tapioca-pudding society, in which the truly human person has been reduced to the condition of a mere constituent globule, exactly like all the other constituent globules. Tapioca-pudding is thoroughly integrated.” (426)
“For it is a law of all animate and vegetal nature that every living thing seeks, above all else, to preserve its distinct identity, which distinguishes it from other living things.” (427)
“Identity has primacy among motives, even in creatures that cannot be said to possess consciousness in any sense. We are obeying the deepest law of our being when we decline to allow some other living thing to swallow us up; when we refuse to allow ourselves to be reconstituted according to the grand design of some visionary energumen; when we prefer variety to integration.” (427)
“We need voluntary associations in every realm of our social existence to teach us our part in the contract of eternal society, to guide us in service, and to guard our identity. Without such associations, society decays into the mass-state, in which the identity of persons and groups is submerged. A nation which consists merely of a central government and an incoherent mob of private individuals, without local and voluntary associations to protect identify, cannot be free.” (428)
SOURCE: Russell Kirk, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” The Eleusis of Chi Omega 58 (September 1956): 417-430.
From Russell Kirk’s 1954 Lecture to Chi Omega
“A friend of mine, about the time my book The Conservative Mind was published, told me that if I wanted to sell any copies, I ought to get the word “sex” into the title somehow, since only that sort of book seems to find a large public nowadays. Well, it might not be ill–advised for some one to write a book entitled The Conservative Sex. Women are the conservatives of this world. The advocates of female suffrage promised us a way of saving reforms if only women were given the vote; the opponents of the measure warned us that voting women would demolish everything established. In plain fact, nothing of the sort happened; ever since, women have been a bulwark of traditional society. They are conservatives because, even more than men, they venerate an order more than human and a wisdom more than the appetite of the hour.” [pg. 121]
“I think that the famous slogan of the French Revolution, ‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’ did infinite mischief in the world, from that time to this; and I believe that the cause of all this harm was the elevating of these words into abstractions, unrelated to realities. The great virtue of the leaders of the American Revolution, in contrast with the French, was that they related their every act and political policy to practical considerations and the wisdom of their ancestors; they did not turn fanatics for the sake of god–terms and devil–terms. I think that there is a true liberty, or rather that there are true liberties, but that these are valueless, or else positively harmful, unless they are defined and related to particular persons and institutions. I think that there is a true equality, but it is a quality in the sight of God and in the eyes of the law, not an abstract quality of condition. I think that there is a true fraternity, exemplified by your voluntary association, which is a world away from the compulsory and ferocious ‘fraternity’ of the radical doctrinaire. And I should like to contrast the conservatives idea fraternity, in particular, with the radicals and the liberals idea of fraternity.… In part, modern liberalism comes from Bentham—you still can see his mummy at the University of London, and his ideas walk among us still—his abstract principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ mathematically determined, and his emphasis upon Efficiency, and his contempt for everything old and complex, and his desire for a drab Utilitarian future. And, in part, modern liberalism is the child of Rousseau, with his romantic emancipation from old moral confines, his hatred of constituted authorities, and his exaltation of the common will to supremacy over every private and traditional right. In short, modern totalitarian democracy—what Tocqueville calls ‘democratic despotism’—is the consequence of these liberal ideas; and with the passage of time, the society which these notions create destroys the very liberties which originally was intended to bestow upon men.” [pp. 122-123]
“Now, the conservative, the thinking conservative, never has agreed that happiness, per se, is the object of human existence.… Not that conservatives believe men ought to be unhappy; conservatives seek with all their power to alleviate the injustice and misery of this world; but they know that, in plain fact, man is a creature fallen from grace, and that he never will be perfectly happy here below, and that if we pursue happiness directly, we never will find it. Happiness comes only as a byproduct of duty done and higher ends sought, in odd moments, most often in retrospect. The conservative knows that the object of life, and of society, is something else altogether. The conservative does not believe that the and or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learned that Love is the source of all being, and that hell itself is ordained by love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. He apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death. He has no intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine–operators, dominated by master mechanics. Men are put into this world, he realizes, to struggle, to suffer, to contend against the evil that is in their neighbors and in themselves, and to aspire toward triumph of Love. They are put into this world to live like men, and to die like men. He seeks to preserve a society which allows men to attain manhood, rather than keeping them with him bonds of perpetual childhood. With Dante, he looks upward from this place of slime, this world of gorgons and chimeras, toward the light which gives Love to this poor earth and all the stars.” [pp. 124-125]
“Rousseau proclaimed his intention of distilling a kiss upon the universe. That is a very tall order. As a matter of fact taken as a crowd, a mob, men and women are ugly, sour, treacherous, envious, violent, sinful. It is only when we know men and women in particular persons that we can come truly to love them; and there are some men and women we ought not to love, for they are hateful. Rousseau and most liberals, I think, have espoused a love indiscriminate and maudlin, sure to and in a detestation of humanity more bitter than sweats, when put to the test; Rousseau liberals of this breed, though professing to love all humanity in the abstract, will find themselves unable to love any person in particular. The conservative’s idea of love is a world away from the liberal’s idea; and when he is told to love his neighbor, the conservative first make sure that the people in question really are his neighbors.” [pg. 126]
“If we would love our country, we must first learn to love our family, our immediate associates, our parish, our town, all the institutions of percentage and community; the man who seeks to love his country in the abstract or mankind in the abstract, is in love with the phantom; and that phantom often takes the form of the nightmare. The conservative believes that true love must be discriminate and selective, and must appertain to particular persons in particular groups and institutions; once thus founded, perhaps it can grow; but love never can reach human proportions if, commencing in the abstract, it seeks gropingly to find human expression. Moreover, the conservative believes that the lovely society is one in which justice (in the classical definition of ‘to each his own’) and variety predominate, in opposition to the liberal tapioca–putting state characterized by a featureless quality and uniformity. To the conservative, true fraternity, like true love, must be the product of volition, the free wills of particular persons, never of compulsion; for brotherhood, like love, dies if it is forced.” [Pages 126–127.]
“Community… stands at the antipodes from collectivism. Community is voluntary and diverse; collectivism, enforced in uniform. Community grows up from love; collectivism lives upon compulsion. A truly liberal society, whatever the 20th–century liberals say, is the fine growth of the voluntary cooperation of a great many men and women, working through there several free associations and orders in society—through their church, their local government, their guild or professional group, their club, their fraternity. When these voluntary organizations expire, then real freedom and representative government perish, and the ‘liberalism’ which survives, in Lord Acton’s phrase, is ‘fit for slaves.’” [Page 127.]
“Law and order, and the democracy of elevation, could not survive one year among us without the principle of true fraternity, the voluntary cooperation of persons acting as a group for the sake of the commonwealth, and joined by common interests, common associations, common memories, and to some extent common origins. These voluntary associations are the great barrier against tyranny over minds and bodies; it is no coincidence that the first act of the Nazis and the Communists was to destroy all those voluntary associations which would obstruct the total power of the radical state. Voluntary associations, true fraternities, unite individuals by the power of sympathy against arbitrary measures, and train their members to stand forthrightly against oppression; thus they are detested, always, by this early in India’s radical reformer, with his fanatic one idea, who is resolved to tolerate no obstacle to the consummation of his lust for power.” [Pages 127–128.]
“In the United States, thanks to sound constitutions and traditions, democracy has been a good, most of the time.… Our voluntary societies take the place which, in the old system of Europe, an hereditary nobility and a system of guilds and corporations used to supply—that is, the function of aristocracy. No democracy of elevation can survive without some ingredient of aristocracy in its composition; when the true leadership which ‘aristocracy’” means is destroyed, then the usual consequences are democratic despotism, and presently the ruthless oligarchy of a fanatic new elite. All individuals are not identical or equal by nature; nor ought they to be. Such a world would be unbearably monotonous. We hold some men and women dearer than others, and I hope we never shall cease to; for if we cease, then human beings will not become no more than so many equipollent units, like ants, or the parts of an unfeeling machine. It is no more wrong to prefer the company of old associates and persons of similar tastes than it is for a husband to prefer the company of his wife to other women’s. In short, we touch here upon the question of human personality; and lesser matters shrink to insignificance beside the dilemma of humanity in this century. The grand question before us is really this: is life worth living? Are men and women to live as human persons, formed in God’s image, with the minds and hearts and individuality of spiritual beings, or are they to become creatures less than human, herded by the masters of the total state, debauched by the indulgence of every appetite, deprived of the consolations of religion and tradition and learning and the sense of continuity, drenched in propaganda, aimless amusements, and the flood of sensual triviality which is supplanting the private reason?” [Pages 128–129].
“Great civilizations do not fall a single blow. Our civilization has sustained several terrible assaults already, and still it lives; but that does not mean that it can live forever, or even into or through another generation. Like a neglected old house, a society whose members have forgotten the ends of society’s being and of their own lives sinks by degrees almost imperceptible toward its ruin. The rain comes in at the broken pane; the dry–rot spreads like the corpse of the tree within the wall; the plaster drops upon the sodden floor; the joists grown with every wind; and the rat, creeping down the stair at midnight, gnaws his dirty way from desolate kitchen to the mildewed stack tunes of the parlor. We men of the 20th-century have this house only, and no other; the storm outside, in the winter of our discontent, will allow of no idle building of dream–castles; the summer indolence of the age of optimism is long gone by. The conservative, if he knows his own tradition, understands that his appointed part, in the present forlorn state of society, is to save man from fading into a ghost condemned to linger hopeless in a rotten tenement.” [Page 130.]
SOURCE: Russell Kirk, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Fraternity,” lecture given in June 1954 to Chi Omega, reprinted with same title, Eleusis of Chi Omega 58 (February 1956): 121-130.
Russell Kirk, “The Great Education Debate,” 1961.
SOURCE: Russell Kirk, “The Great Education Debate 59 (May 1961): 4-7, 26, 28.
Stormfields 