Russell Kirk on Ideologues

From W. Wesley McDonald’s Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology p. 81-83:

Because the imagination of the ideologue is impoverished, the reason it begets will lead him deep into false views of reality, for example, utopian expectations or political fanaticism. The root cause of these moral and political errors lies not in the faulty reason behind them, Kirk argued, but in the still more basic defective imagion that fails to give a complete account of man’s universal experience. Kirk cited three ideologies, or constellations of ideological notions, as primarily responsible for working the most mischief in our times: liberalism and its numerous collectivist variants, libertarianism, and the behavioralist persuasion as manifested in the social sciences.

The presumptuous rationality characteristic of liberals from John Locke onward struck Kirk as liberalism’s major flaw. The Lockean liberal proclaims that tradition, authority and wisdom “must now now expect to exist on sufferance.” Hence, he desires that “everything in heaven and earth would come under the critical scrutiny of dispassionate private rationality.” Breaking even more sharply with classical and biblical views, the Benthamite utilitarian liberal expresses a pride and an unlimited confidence in the power of individual reason. His mentality is always on the level of the purely useful, of means and ends, because he is unable to comprehend the higher imagination or to understand the complexity of the motives of man. Utility, rather than love, is his main motive. He lacks warmth and a “sense of consecration” toward community, authority, inherited values, and institutions.

Doubting all things in heaven and on earth, accepting only what can be validated by empirico-quantitative reason, utilitarianism is a “philosophy of death; its morbidity is the consequence of Benthamite emphasis upon Doubt …and this is consummate folly. For Doubt is a surly envious, egotistic emotion, a bitter denial of everything but the sullen self; and one learns nothing by doubting. Doubt can never be wholly assuaged in many things, but we must manage to live despite our doubts (which are a condition of our imperfect temporal nature).” We must recognize, admonished Kirk, that we are ignorant of much and must accept much on faith. To doubt everything results in a paralysis of the will and the impoverishment of one’s spiritual existence. Such is the fate of the doctrinaire liberal who would follow Bentham in repudiating authority, tradition, and the prescriptive wisdom of his ancestors. He has succumbed to the Benthamite folly of believing that “private rationality henceforth would emancipate mankind from obedience to tradition, authority, and the past experience of humanity.” Without faith and standards to check his arbitrary will, the Benthamite liberal comes to believe, in his own pride, that he has the right to judge everything according to his private taste. The modern mind, having made utility the essence of politics and having thereby lost sight of the higher ends of existence, Kirk charged, “has thought of men as the flies of a summer, and so deprived himself of the wisdom of our ancestors, and laid waste that portion of posterity.” The result is a weakening of the social bonds that hold a community intact. A community lacking the restraining power of tradition or prescriptive institutions is rendered defenceless against the demands of special interests and selfish passions.

Lacking historical perspective and imagination, modern liberalism proceeds from Benthamite assumptions to the delusion that scientific reasons can solve all of mankind’s complex problems and thereby guarantee a golden age of prosperity and plenty. This abstract, utopian mentality, Kirk predicted, will be the ultimate undoing of liberalism.

In light of his vigorous attack upon abstract reasoning of liberals, Kirk’s equally strong criticism of similar deficiencies in libertarian thought is not surprising. Although many observers have regarded libertarians and traditional conservatives as natural allies because of their common opposition to the growth of modern collectivist state. Kirk vehemently and consistently opposed all attempts to form an alliance. Genuine conservatism would suffer as a consequence of such a merger of what he considered to be antithetical positions. The atomistic individualism and ahistorical rationality of the libertarians, reflecting their utilitarian mentality, would corrupt conservative thinking. Their exultation of reason uninformed by the moral imagination precludes any understanding of values beyond utility and self-interest. A conservatism incorporating old Benthamite or social Darwinist tenets would be worse than no conservatism at all. Like liberalism, its lack of imagination would be its undoing.

Bénéton on Autonomy

Our liberal modernity has departed from nature by emptying its own principles – equality, democracy, and the rights of man – of all their substance. Why the rights of man? Not because of some common nature, but because individual wills are sovereign. Why equality? Not because the fact of being human carries with it some meaning, but because the humanity of man is reduced to his indeterminate liberty. Individuals are autonomous; they are sovereign. The principle has become almost official since the moral revolution of the 1960s, and it is unfolding logically before us. Against this principle and its consequences, counter-revolutionary thought offers some antidotes.

To the myth of autonomy, it responds that the man of the radical version of modernity, the perfectly autonomous man, is a fiction. The French counter-revolutionaries, after Aristotle, Saint Thomas, and Burke, ceaselessly insisted with arguments difficult to refute, upon the social dimension of human existence. Man does not make himself by himself; he receives from others (his relatives, his contemporaries, past generations) much more than he gives. Man does not live alone; he has a deep, fundamental need for others because he is a being constituted by relations. He who would exercise autonomous judgement in fact relies upon a thousand things he takes on authority of others: that the world is round, that Napoleon existed, that his parents are his parents, and so on. He who would attempt to live in an individualist manner leaves behind him ties that matter; particularly those of the heart. Full and complete autonomy is a dream and a pernicious one at that. The consequences of this dream has been that in the midst of modern society, strong ties among men have been discarded in favour of weak ones. Modern individualism loosens true social ties, which are ties of attachment, in favour of contractual and utilitarian relations. Solid attachments are those which are created in the midst of communities, whether they be familal, religious, local, political, or professional communities. A good society cannot be reduced to a collection of individuals.

More fundamentally, a radical autonomy founded upon an indeterminate liberty is at once unrealistic and dangerous. It is unrealistic because each man is supported by things that do not depend on himself alone. Each of us is in some sense free to think that two and two make five, that he will never die, that the past did not exist, and that hatred is the most beautiful thing in the world, but what would such a liberty signify other than the liberty to free oneself from the human race? An interminate liberty is also dangerous because the political world cannot be given order simply by appealing to the human will. The counter-revolutionary critique frequently underscored the truth that power cannot be regulated unless it submits to principles that are anterior to it and come from religion or nature. In a world in which indeterminate liberty reigns, political power will oscillate between the extremes of libertarianism and despotism, or will combine features of both.

~~Philippe Bénéton. Foreword to Critics of the Enlightenment : Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition.