“The Conservative Mind” turns sixty! (Sound of one hand clapping)

Actually, the sound of no hands clapping. From the perspective sheer scholarly effort, Russell Kirk’s 500-page tome, surveying Anglo-American conservative thought from Edmund Burke to T. S. Eliot, is an impressive work, examining dozens of both illustrious and obscure thinkers and arranging them in a coherent historical framework that shows considerable learning as well.¹ So what’s the beef?

The beef is Kirk. He makes every thinker sound just like, well, Russell Kirk. In his survey of George Santayana, for example, he quotes long chunks of Santayana at his most banal and bilious, swirling his pseudo-aristocratic cape about him as he sneers at the vulgarity of modern acquisitive society:

“The people had been freed politically and nominally by being given the vote, and enslaved economically in being herded in droves under anonymous employers and self-imposing labor leaders. Meanwhile, the liberal rich who had expected to grow richer and do so when individually enterprising, became poorer and idler as a class, and more obviously withdrawn from the aristocratic leisure, sports, and benevolent social and intellectual leadership which they had supposed themselves fitted for.”

If Santayana had looked at the facts rather than down his nose, he might have observed that the standard of living for all classes had increased during the nineteenth century, and I doubt if the new rich had been any idler than the past generations of aristocrats whom he idolizes, whose “sports” largely consisted of drunkenness, gluttony, adultery, and gambling. Missing entirely from Kirk’s account is the “good” Santayana of such works as Skepticism and Animal Faith, the five-volume Life of Reason, Three Philosophical Poets, and his three-volume autobiography.

Even worse, of course, is that Kirk makes every other “thinker” sound just like Santayana, and, thus, just like Kirk, railing against mass culture and longing for the good old days when gentlemen ruled the world. Intellectually, Kirk was a disaster. Like Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot, he both despised and feared the common man, the “folk”, he called them, with awkward condescension. The common man! He was ignorant, lecherous, stupid, lazy, gluttonous, and covetous—lower than a beast, actually, who actually behave themselves rather well. At least they don’t want to vote!

Kirk’s hatred of ordinary folk—people who didn’t restrain themselves as compulsively as he did—defined his whole thought. In his “amusing” treatment of John C. Calhoun, which embarrasses even his most fervent admirers,² Kirk bemoans the vogue for new state constitutions in the pre-war years, beginning as early as 1830, that “swept away those protections for property, those delicate balances of power, and those advantages of compromise that [John] Randolph and Calhoun praised.” And God knows it’s been downhill ever since.

Kirk believed that the vote should be limited, at a very minimum, to “freeholders”—those who owned land. But of course he despised 90% of the freeholders as well, despised everyone who failed to meet his exquisite standards, despised everyone who didn’t dream incessantly of that wonderful, far-off time when everything was in the hands of those who dwelt in great country houses, and everything was handled with grace, civility, and restraint.

The centerpiece of The Conservative Mind is Kirk’s portrait of Edmund Burke, portrayed as the great fountain from which all modern conservatism springs, and the picture he paints is as loving as it is inaccurate. Burke’s first work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, which Kirk passes over very quickly, is to my mind, a key to Burke’s entire thought. In his preface to the second edition, Burke “explained” very nervously that his little book was intended as a parody of the rationalism associated with infamous libertine Lord Bolinbroke,³ whom Kirk himself dismisses from the conservative pantheon for his lack of belief. But in fact it is not a parody but a young man’s statement, a young man who finds himself in a world where nothing makes sense, where nothing is natural, where everything is upside down, where, in a (modern) word, everything is a “construct”.

Defenders of Burke often proclaim that the Vindication is a work of Swiftian irony, and indeed it is, for both men saw society in the same way, that all our “eternal” values are merely costumes, which we doff and don at our pleasure. Both men believed in bishops—in “order”—but not in Christ.

Kirk interprets Burke’s remark “art is man’s nature” to mean that “man’s nature is revealed in the highest art”. I rather take it to mean that man has no nature, other than that which he invents for himself—that Burke was, consciously or not, echoing another radical skeptic, Pascal, who said that “nature is only a first habit; and habit, a second nature”. Over and over again, throughout his career, Burke decried any appeal to “first principles”—because he knew that if they were looked for, they would not be found. Kirk does note similarities between Burke and David Hume (the advantages are all to Burke, of course) but he does not notice how very close the two men were. Both believed that “reason must be the slave of the passions” (that is, reason is the slave of the passions), because the passions created reason to serve their ends.

Kirk’s Burke is a marmoreal bore, lacking all the remarkable contradictions that make him such a fascinating character—the man who always counseled restraint and caution, whose friends sat behind him in Parliament so that they could drag him to his seat by his coat tails when he rose in choleric rage over a passing comment; the great orator who often listened to himself rather than his audience, earning the nickname “the Dinner Bell,” because when he rose to speak half the members would leave; the man who fought constantly against patronage, yet who, once in office, immediately appointed his son, his brother, and his “cousin” to government positions and sought to have them retain those positions after he left office; the man who his great adversary, William Pitt, Jr., always regarded as mad, who said of one of Burke’s speeches delivered during the wars against France, “as with all of that gentleman’s efforts, I found much to admire and nothing to agree with.”

Burke is the great “modern” conservative because he was the first non-denominational conservative. Although he forsook his Irish Catholic heritage in form, his “conversion” to Anglicanism really left him between confessions, and he was unwilling to base his thought directly on the Bible, which he regarded rather shockingly as a vast, often contradictory, repository of human wisdom rather than revealed “Truth”.⁴ Because neither reason nor revelation could offer a reliable guide, he argued for an essentially unthinking allegiance to “tradition,” to be updated as appropriate for modern times by “gentlemen.” But the gentlemen could not maintain themselves.

Ultimately, Kirk’s argument is with the printing press, which, when allied with the Protestant Reformation, the invention of eye glasses, the mechanical clock, the lateen sail, double-entry bookkeeping, and a dozen other factors, led to the creation of societies with a large, educated elite⁵—a “Third Estate”, if you will—that owed allegiance to neither the aristocracy nor the church, an elite that, when confronted with an intellectually, morally, and, above all, financially bankrupt monarchy, was able to elbow aside both the gentlemen and the clerks and assume power for itself. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a work of astonishing prescience, but the society we live in today is much closer to Tom Paine’s ideal than Burke’s. And we are all the better for it.

Afterwords
Although uniformly ferocious in print, as far as I can tell, the “private” Kirk wasn’t necessarily so bad. A misfit himself, he seems to have had a tolerance for it in others. According to Robert Stacey’s review of a new biography, Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer, Kirk was a generous host—his “openness toward visitors and ‘strays’ was legendary, and hardly a day passed that [his] home was not occupied by an ever-changing assemblage of refugees, students, hangers-on, and vagabonds. Indeed, the collected stories of visitors to the Kirk home could certainly fill a volume unto itself.”