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.

An Interview with Russell Kirk

Dear Readers–

Here is a segment of a 1993 interview with Russell Kirk, the author of seminal work of American conservatism, The Conservative Mind.

(HT to The Spartan Spectator)

For a further elaboration of what Conservatism is, read (for example) Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles at The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

It is a great shame, that he is not better known in Australia. One Australian (apart from myself) who bemoans this state of affairs is R.J. Stove, who in a book review of a collection of Russell Kirk’s essays wrote:

The case of Russell Amos Kirk (1918-1994) forces upon America’s foreign well-wishers an all too urgent question: why does the United States export so diligently, and take such pride in, its very worst modern literature? There is a whole alternative canon of worthwhile recent American author – including Kirk himself – whose names mean virtually nothing abroad; whereas every deadbeat psychopath, deadbeat drunk, deadbeat drug-fiend, deadbeat thug, deadbeat adulterer, deadbeat homosexual, deadbeat communist, and deadbeat plagiarist who ever drew breath on American soil appears assured not only of reverential Hollywood treatment but (if he did not commit suicide first) of the Nobel Literature Prize.

This small post is a small attempt to correct the present sorry state of neglect of this Great Author.

Yours sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.

Promises, Promises

They don’t make election promises like they used to:

(Old British Election posters taken from The Daily Mail.)

Quotation of the Week – Robert Dabney on Conservatism

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

~~R. L. Dabney. “Women’s Rights Women”

(HT Back Water Report)

The Enemy of the Family

Dear Reader–

In a recent article, Scott of Adelaide Conservative has attempted to defend the Welfare State from a pragmatic Conservative viewpoint.

As much as I hate to quote Libertarians – Han-Hermann Hoppe in Democracy : the God that Failed makes some good points against this point of view – showing the innately pernicious nature of Welfare State to Traditional Conservative values, in particular that of the Family:

By subsidizing with tax funds (with funds taken from others) people who are poor (bad), more poverty will be created. By subsidizing people because they are unemployed (bad), more unemployment will be created. By subsidizing unwed mothers (bad), there will be more unwed mothers and more illegitimate births, etc.

Obviously, this basic insight applies to the entire system of so-called social security … of compulsory goverment “insurance” against old age, illness, occupational injury, unemployment, indigence, etc. In conjunction with the even older system of public education, these institutions and practices amount to a massive attack on the institution of the family and personal responsibility. By relieving individuals of the obligation to provide for their own income, health, safety, old age and childrens education, the range and temporal horizon of private provision is reduced, and the value of marriage, family, children and kinship relations is lowered. Irresponsibility, shortsightedness, negligence, illness and even destructionism (bads) are promoted, and responsibility, farsightedness, diligence, health and conservatism (goods) are punished. The compulsory old age insurance system in particular, by which retirees (the old) are subsidized from taxes imposed on the current income earners (the young), has systematically weakened the natural intergenerational bond between parents, grandparents, and children. The old need no longer rely on the assistance of their children if they have made no provision for their old age; and the young (with typically less accumulated wealth) must support the old (with typically more accumulated wealth) rather than the other way around, as is typical within families. Consequently not only do people want to have fewer children-and indeed, birthrates have fallen in half since the onset of modern social security (welfare) policies – but also the respect which the young traditionally accorded to their elders has diminished, and all indicators of family disintegration and malfunctioning, such as rates of divorce, illegitimacy, child abuse, parent abuse, spouse abuse, single parenting, singledom, alternative lifestyles, and abortion have increased.

….

In any case what should be clear now is that most if not all of the moral degeneration and cultural rot – the signs of decivilization – all around us are the inescapable and unavoidable results of the welfare state and its core institutions. Classical, old-style conservatives knew this, and they vigorously oppossed public education and social security. They knew that states everywhere were intent upon breaking down and ultimately destroying families and the institutions and layers and hierarchies of authority that are the natural outgrowth of family based communities in order to increase and strengthen their own power. They knew that in order to do so the states would have to take advantage of the natural rebellion of the adolescent (juvenile) against parental authority. And they knew that socialized education and socialized responsibility were the means of bringing about this goal. Social education and social security provide an opening for the rebellious youth to escape parental authority (to get away with continuous misbehavior). Old conservatives knew that these policies would emancipate the individual from the discipline imposed by family and community life only to subject it instead to the direct and immediate control of the state. Furthermore, they knew, or at least had a hunch, that this would lead to a systematic infantilization of society – a regression, emotionally and mentally, from adulthood to adolescence or childhood. (p. 195-198)

Let me just say that I find Traditional Conservatism more convincing than Social Democratic Conservatism that all the countries of the Western World have been subject to. The answer to the question of Public Opinion in regard to the Welfare State is not to modify Conservatism to suit Public Opinion but to try to change Public Opinion to a more Conservative awareness of the Harm it causes.

Yours sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.

Quotation of the Week

I have observed that the philosophers in order to insinuate their polluted atheism into young minds systematically flatter all their passions natural and unnatural. They explode or render odious or contemptible that class of virtues which restrain the appetite. These are at least nine out of ten of the virtues. In place of all this they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or benevolence. By this means their morality has no idea in it of restraint, or indeed of a distinct settled principle of any kind. When their disciples are thus left free and guided only by present feeling they are no longer to be depended upon for good or evil. The men who today snatch the worst criminals from justice will murder the most innocent persons tomorrow.

~~Edmund Burke to the Chevalier de Rivarol, 1791. (qtd. in The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.)

Quotation of the Week

Among the strange notions which have been broached since I have been in the political theatre, there is one which has lately seized the minds of men, that all things must be done for them by the Government, and that they are to do nothing for themselves: the Government is not only to attend to the great concerns which are its province, but it must step in and ease individuals of their natural and moral obligations. A more pernicious notion can not prevail. Look at that ragged fellow staggering from the whiskey shop, and see that slattern who has gone there to reclaim him; where are their children? Running about, ragged, idle, ignorant, fit candidates for the penitentiary. Why is all this so? Ask the man and he will tell you. ‘Oh, the Government has undertaken to educate our children for us.’
~~John Randolph. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention (1830) (quoted in The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia).

Quotation of the Week

The guilt of the liberal causes him to feel obligated to try to do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil … even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine or, for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problem even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem – when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it. ‘We cannot stand idly by while the world rushes to destruction … or women and children are starving … or able men walk the streets without jobs …’ or whatever. The harassed liberal is relentlessly driven by his Eumenidean guilt. It does not permit to ‘let well enough alone’ or… decide that the trouble is ‘none of his business’; or to reflect that, though the evil is undoubtedly there and he feels sincerely sorry for its victims, he doesn’t understand damn-all about it and if he did he hasn’t got the brains and resources to fix it up.

~~James Burnham. Suicide of the West. (1964)

Review: Look Homeward, America

Dear Readers–

One of the most enjoyable conservative books that I read last year was Bill Kaufmann’s Look homeward, America : in search of reactionary radicals and front-porch anarchists.

Through a mixture of American history, biography, sardonic observation, humour and autobiographical asides; Look homeward, America is an idiosyncratic and provocative celebration of those “radical reactionaries” who

… have sought to tear down what is artificial, factitious, imposed by remote and often coercive forces and cultivate what is local, organic, natural, and family centred.

In our almost useless political taxonomy, some are labeled “right wing” and others are tucked away on the left, but in fact they are embodiments of an American cultural-political tendency that is wholesome, rooted, and based in love of family, community, local self-rule, and a respect for permanent truths.

These are fighting words to those whom Conservatism means justifying the ways of Globalization unto Man, explaining how the Market was born free and is everywhere in Chains, and demanding an uncritical acquiescence to the whims of Big Business and the Welfare-Warfare State.

Although the book does require some knowledge of American history and politics to fully appreciate its allusions – its praise of: the settled life over relentless nomadism, the small over the big, the rural over the urban, mothers raising their own children over housing them five days a week in childcare so that their mothers can be free to do the same soul destroying jobs that men do, the needs of local community over the demands of far-off, rootless cosmopolitan elites, and peace over war would strike a chord with many Australians, as with Americans.

For example:

In one of those sententious post-Watergate books … Nixon quoted De Gaulle that “France was never true to herself unless she was engaged in a great enterprise.” To which the Trickster added, “I have always believed that this was true of the United States as well. Defending and promoting peace and freedom around the world is a great enterprise. Only by rededicating ourselves to that goal will we remain true to ourselves.”

True to ourselves. You might think you can be true to youself by raising a family, planting a garden, participating in the life of a small and vital community, writing books about your people’s history, building houses or farming land or simply studying with the birds, flowers, trees, God, and yourself, as Dvorak put it-but you would be wrong. Worse, you would be small, meager, mean, niggardly. The measure of a man’s greatness is his willingness to abandon his family and go abroad to murder strangers on behalf of … your guess is as good as mine. Mr Nixon’s “great enterprises,” I guess.

I can not say that I necessarily agree with everything that he says – but much of what he says appeals to my sense of what a humane life should be even if we poor mortals fail to live up to it.

For other more extensive reviews Readers may go to Caleb Stegal, Rod Dreher and 2blowhards; and for a five part interview with Bill Kauffman go to 2blowhards here, here, here, here and here.

Yours sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.

Hal G.P. Colebatch vs The American Conservative; Or, Yes, Virginia, There Are No Paleocons

Dear Paleoconservative Readers–

The Australian writer R.J. Stove, in 2006, wrote an article for the American Conservative on what he saw as the intellectual shallowness of the Australian Conservative political scene and its main magazine Quadrant.

In what may be a response to this article (and certainly a demonstration of its accuracy), the January-February 2007 edition of Quadrant, has an article by Hal G.P. Colebatch entitled “American Conservatives and the Second World War” that is basically a savage attack upon the American Conservative, with a puzzling emphasis on a book review by Bill Kauffman from 2004.

Unfortunately Mr Colebatch’s article is not available online – so I will have to reproduce the relevant portion referring to the American Conservative for the edification of my occasional Paleocon readers. Let me categorically state the opinions expressed in this Quadrant article are not the opinions of The Sectarian Strand.

When I first learnt that Mr Patrick Buchanan was setting up a new magazine called the American Conservative, I was delighted. There is always room for another conservative journal of culture and ideas.

Now I have read the American Conservative. Unfortunately, rather too much of it stinks. It has its good moments, but it’s also a showcase for the worst in what might be called the conservative mentality – provincial, appeasing, insular, demanding both economic and political US disengagement from the world, and well as being … er … how shall I put this tactfully? … overly critical of the supposed influence of Israel. Much of the time its true archetypal hero seems to be Petain, if you can imagine Petain as a Milwaukee ward-heeler. It seems to be in some ways a Transatlantic mirror-image of that snobbish, quasi-Philbyesque British Toryism whose leitmotif is jealousy and resentment of America.

A recent effort from the American Conservative is an attack on those so-called “neo-cons” who dare to criticise that well-known pillar of George Washington’s heritage and friend of freedom, Vladimir Putin, for ending the Russian people’s right to elect their own provincial governors.

It’s raison d’être appears increasingly to be not to uphold, expound or promulgate conservative values against the big battalions of the chattering-class intellectualoid Left and the general horrors of what Evelyn Waugh called the modern age in arms, as does William Buckley’s National Review, but to attack and ridicule the “neo-cons”, to divide the conservative movement, and to promote and mythologise dichotomies in it which do not exist.

The modern conservatives who look to tradition and values, who respect or love hierarchy, ritual splendour, romance and ancientry, and who look back to the likes of Edmund Burke, and the modern conservatives who look to internationalism and economic freedom and back to the likes of Adam Smith, are not natural enemies. Attempts to drive a wedge between them are destructive and mischievious.

It is a happy and symbolic fact of history that Burke and Smith were close personal friends and in agreement with each other’s writings. They punished Dr Johnson’s claret together, and Smith among other things nominated Burke for membership of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which he had helped found. Both believed successful society depended on correct understanding of human nature, not on transforming human nature, and saw morality and economic rationality as going together – indeed both held them to be necessary partners for society and civilization. Their works form a luminious and coherent whole, and their respective heirs should have no quarrel.

Buchanan’s writing and those of the other contributors to the American Conservative are at times sensible and worthwhile, and can be conservative in the best sense. Buchanan’s book The Death of the West I think was also important, valuable and brave. As a warning of demographic suicide it should be universal reading, though I suppose only time will tell if it is justified (the future has a way of cheating the prophets). His recent deconstruction of the revolting Dan Rather and CBS is a masterpiece of cold forensic brilliance, and I dips me lid.

However, the bad of the American Conservativeis bad enough to remind one of the saying that lilies when festering smell worse than weeds. A review by Bill Kauffman of a novel by Philip Roth, The Plot against America, titled “Heil to the Chief”, is a good example. It begins with the sneer:”Philip Roth’s The Plot against America is the novel that a neoconservative would write, if a neoconservative could write a novel.”

Roth is an American liberal with whom I would not normally feel much empathy. However, I’m with him against Kauffman. Kaufman has identified himself (in the far-left Counterpunch, edited by Alexander Cockburn) as:

of the other America … ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live…

A vision (which is not necessarily the reality) of parochial, stupefied, know-nothing insularity. The sort of Weltenschaung which in selfish ignorance supported Smoot-Hawley and high protectionism, smashed world trade in the 1920s and brought on the Great Depression and, indirectly, the Second World War. (Naturally, the American Conservative is passionately protectionist.)

I won’t go into jokes about lynchings and the difficulties of sleeping between between sheets where you catch your toes in dem durned ol’ eye-holes, because the real rural America doesn’t deserve it. I also believe that rural life has spiritual treasures and in some ways I envy those who can live it. But it is not a complete way of dealing with the world. As Kauffman says with loathing in the same article, perhaps unwittingly echoing Chamberlain at the time of Munich: “Empire focuses our attention on matters distant and remote.” Tolkien made the point in The Lord of the Rings that the rustic, contented Hobbits of the Shire were on the verge of being wiped out by terrible enemies and didn’t know it.

Firstly, I was disappointed that Mr Colebatch didn’t use a few more foreign terms – I’m sure he could have used such bons mots as: Zeitgeist, or Götterdämmerung, or even bien pensants if he had really tried. Secondly I was impressed with his ability to seemlessly slip into the dialect of the lower orders (e.g. “and I dips me lid” and “you catch your toes in dem durned ol’ eye-holes”) – you wouldn’t know he had a privileged upbringing as the son of a leading Western Australian politician.

Thirdly, to be serious, it takes a certain gall for an Australian to tell others what an American Conservative is and what they should believe. The mere existence of the American Conservative magazine and its authors and readers should have told Mr Colebatch that there are differences between some conservatives (the unmentionable Paleocons) and the Neocons (or so-called “neo-cons” as Mr Colebatch prefers). And these differences won’t go away with incomprehensible name calling and insults. Comparing Americans who are remaining faithful to the expressed statements of many of its Founding Fathers; such as George Washington advice to avoid “foreign entanglements” or Thomas Jefferson who favoured “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none”, or  John Quincy Adams who wrote that the US “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”; to traitors and collaborators, such as Petain and  Philby, is grotesque. And I’m still trying to work out how Bill Kauffman’s somewhat romantic paen to small town life exactly warrants bizarre references to the Ku Klux Klan and vituprative abuse.

I shall deal in more detail with Mr Colebatch’s comments regarding Bill Kauffman in another post. Those wishing to respond to the gross caricature found in this Quadrant article can find Quadrant’s contact details here or at the Feedback page.

Yours sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.