Russell Kirk: Founder of Modern Conservatism

Russell Kirk, an American political theorist, historian, and literary and social critic, was particularly influential in shaping 20th-century American conservatism. (CC BY 2.5)

A recent New York Times article claimed that poetry is “dead.” The argument is not new, but since last month marked the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the modernists thought they would reiterate themselves. “We stopped writing good poetry because we are now incapable of doing so,” wrote the article’s author, Matthew Walther.

Science and technology, Walther argues, have made it impossible to have a holistic relationship with nature. Since “The Waste Land,” poets have only described “the fragmentation of human experience.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas wrote inspiring poetry, and Eliot’s later “Four Quartets” is, in my opinion, a much better poem than “The Waste Land.” Speaking from experience, I can testify that formal poetry is undergoing a revival today. Thanks to the internet, its practitioners have circumvented gatekeepers in academia and legacy media to bring average people the kind of poetry they like to read. At the forefront of this movement, the Society of Classical Poets is promoting new, original works, the likes of which have not been seen since the 19th century.

“Good literature and bad literature exert powerful influences upon private character and upon the polity of the commonwealth,” Russell Kirk once wrote in “Enemies of The Permanent Things” (Arlington House, New York, 1969). Those who take a morbid view of poetry (and other art forms) are not likely to see humanity at large in a much better light. The result is, inevitably, the debasement of moral imagination.

As one of the 20th century’s most significant men of letters, Kirk had a good deal to say about the way thought and high culture affect society.

Desert Monk

Born in 1918, Russell Amos Kirk grew up in poverty. He would walk down train tracks as a child, hunting for bottles to sell to the local grocer for pennies. He had immaterial riches, though, in the form of books. His mother instilled in him a taste for classic literature that bore fruit when, in 1942, he was drafted into the Army and stationed in the Great Salt Desert of Utah. Isolated at a chemical weapons testing camp through the war, he found himself with abundant leisure time to turn toward “the higher things.”

As Bradley Birzer notes in his biography, “Russell Kirk: American Conservative,” Kirk compared himself to St. Anthony, the monk in the desert, and struggled against the demon of depression by reading everything he could. Kirk’s disgust for military bureaucracy, as well as his horror of the internment of Japanese Americans and the dropping of the atomic bombs, fundamentally shaped his belief in a minimalist government.

After the war, he taught at Michigan State University but loathed the activist faculty and decline in educational standards. He then attended graduate school at the University of St Andrews, arriving in Scotland with everything he owned packed in a suitcase. He wrote a dissertation on the intellectual history of conservatism while exploring ancient destinations around Europe.

6 Rules for Life

This dissertation became his most famous book, “The Conservative Mind.” Published in 1953, it became an unexpected bestseller. In it, Kirk identified the canonical conservative thinkers in Britain and America, beginning with Edmund Burke, and summarized their key ideas in a clear and distinct way. For this reason, he is considered the founder of the postwar conservative tradition.

Kirk selected figures to include in this canon based on how well he felt they preserved “the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” He extracted six principles from Burke that these authors expressed:

• Every person is a divine being, and society should conform itself to a body of natural law. (“Political problems are, at bottom, religious and moral problems,” Kirk wrote.)
• Human life is mysterious and shouldn’t be homogenized through logical systems.
• Social order: Equality of opportunity is good, but equality of condition results in “servitude and boredom.”
• Personal freedom can’t exist if people can’t own things.
• Reason can’t guide us through every problem. We must rely on tradition and feelings to navigate circumstances.
• Change is inevitable, but hasty innovations usually result in destruction rather than progress. Cautious adaptation is more stable.

Kirk also identified five schools of thought that pose a threat to society:

• In the 18th century, French philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot believed in shaping a new world according to reason.
• Rationalism terminated in the “emancipations” of Rousseau and the French Revolution.
• Jeremy Bentham theorized that actions are right if they benefit a majority.
• Positivism (or Scientism): Auguste Comte thought everything in the world could be verified through logical and mathematical proofs.
• Collectivistic materialism: Karl Marx thought private property should be abolished and society leveled.

In comparing the six principles to the five threats, one notices something. The former, though occasionally defended by individuals, are rooted in the wisdom of the species. The latter are the inventions of specific intellectuals. Since Kirk’s time, it’s possible to update his list. A sixth threat, postmodernism—the brainchild of Jacques Derrida that “deconstructs” binary categories, which has culminated in the transgender craze—has several points in common with the first five. They all fly in the face of natural law, ignore reality, and seek to sweep away the past through radical egalitarianism.

The greatest error perpetuated by these paradigms is that humanity has no limits, that each person is a wax tablet who can be molded into anything. The belief in human perfectibility always seems to coincide with a disdain for the imperfect average person. In application, these ideas betray a lack of respect for individual dignity and give rise to inhumane systems.

A New Conservative Renaissance?

Conservatives “prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know,” as Kirk says. Conservatism isn’t an ideology itself, but a disposition toward renouncing ideology. Its dilemma lies in reconciling individualism with community, and preventing its alliance with capitalism (such as communism, a materialistic system) from degenerating spirit and character.

Today’s conservatives often look back to the 1950s as a golden age of American values. Kirk himself helped self-consciously create that image in a society that was emerging from the New Deal and contending with the specter of international communism. This prompts reflections upon our own time: In an era when the left’s fanaticism and “internecine ferocity” (as Kirk put it) is leading many moderate liberals to go over to the right, the balance of talent is shifting. There is some indication that we are seeing the beginning of a conservative renaissance today. A number of artistic movements, such as that occurring within poetry, are once again applying norms of truth, beauty, and goodness to combat the malaise of low aesthetic standards being promoted by elitist mainstream institutions.

Progressive ideologies, by the very fact that they erase the past, timestamp their own obsolescence. Just as hardly anyone calls themselves utilitarian or positivist anymore, the current proliferation of fashionable “isms” is sure to dissolve. All conservatives, though, (whether or not they realize it) remain Burkeans—and Kirkians.