By Casey Chalk
Friday, June 21, 2019
“The individual is foolish, but the species is wise,”
wrote eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, in a humorous
articulation of conservatism. Nineteenth-century American satirist Ambrose
Bierce, in his notorious Devil’s
Dictionary, carried on this witty tradition in defining a conservative as
one “who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who
wishes to replace them with others.” William F. Buckley, a leading light of
twentieth-century conservatism, similarly defined the conservative in 1955 as
“someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”
It would seem, then, that the best means of determining a
robust definition of conservatism in 2019 is to look the past. Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism,
largely forgotten after its original publishing in 1957 and now re-released by
Regnery, offers perhaps the best (and likely shortest, at 103 pages) definition
available.
An Essential
Conservatism
Kirk’s guide is an impressive feat, presenting
conservatism’s essential tenets in 12 chapters, all less than ten pages.
Religious faith, conscience, individuality, family, community, just government,
private property, power, education, change, and the republic are all addressed
in pithy, yet accessible language.
Like Bierce and Buckley, Kirk’s conception of
conservatism centers on what Edmund Burke called the “contract of eternal
society,” or what G.K. Chesterton termed the “democracy of the dead.” It is
suspicious of revolutions, top-down societal engineering, and technocratic sneering
that views the traditionalist as ignorant and backward. As intellectual
historian H. Stuart Hughes quipped, “conservatism is the negation of ideology.”
Nevertheless, Kirk in his first chapter, “The Essence of
Conservatism,” presents what he views as the “chief principles” of American
conservatism. Apart from a bow to the wisdom of the past, conservatives
recognize a universal moral law that finds its origin in God — something that
shouldn’t be controversial, given the Founders’ insistence in man’s rights
“endowed by their creator.” Conservatives also prize variety and diversity over
“uniformity and absolute equality,” meaning respect and safeguarding of
alternative opinions in the public square.
Conservatives prioritize justice and equal rights, “but not
to equal things,” a sentiment reminiscent of Jordan Peterson’s eschewing of
“equality of outcome.” Conservatives prize property and freedom, while seeking
to preserve checks and balances in political power. They recognize the need for
true, deep community. They set an example for the world, rather than trying to
remake it in America’s image. Conservatives are “suspicious of all utopian
schemes,” and believe, with Lord Falkland, that “when it is not necessary to
change, it is necessary not to change.”
Conservatism and
Religion
“The true conservative,” writes Kirk, “at heart is a
religious man.” He cites a long list, including Washington, Adams, Madison, and
Lincoln, among many other American statesmen, who all in their own way were
deeply religious. Edmund Burke labeled religion “the basis of civil society,
and the source of all good and all comfort.”
Kirk, in turn, says conservatives see “human society as
an immortal contract between God and man,” that men are created in God’s image,
and that “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” There is a utility to
this reasoning: A society denying religious truth “lacks faith, charity,
justice, and any sanction for its acts.” As scholar Arthur C. Brooks discovered
more than a decade ago, conservatives, and particularly religious
conservatives, are the most generous and charitable demographic in America.
Yet there is more to the argument. A religious society
recognizes the transcendent quality of life and community more broadly, seeking
to reflect, albeit imperfectly given our sinful natures, the eternal justice of
the divine. Only proper recognition of the divine moral law can help us
approximate a just society. Moreover, we are all ultimately going somewhere beyond here, meaning
materialist, utopian, this-worldly answers to our problems won’t obtain. We
can’t make our world perfect by “world planners, and civil servants and
enactments.” We have to await God to fully realize a new, perfect world.
This search for justice focuses not on amorphous
categories of “people,” or “the masses,” but on individual persons. As Orthodox
theologian Alexander Schmemann observed, atheist socialist movements focus on
impersonal societal categories; Jesus calls Christians to love this person, the
man or woman in front of you.
Conservatism thus must inculcate a healthy conscience
that possesses a loyalty to individual persons, rather than the more vague
“society at large.” Indeed, it is foolhardy to expect impersonal laws or
obligations to inculcate virtue. Rather, when man views the persons around him
as individuals created in the image of God, he is more likely to love them and
feel a certain obligation towards them.
Conservatism and
Community
This necessarily broadens the conversation to contemplate
the broader community. Although individual persons must regulate their behavior
through informed consciences, this does not negate the obligations placed upon
the citizen. This begins, says Kirk, with the family. He writes:
The conservative feels that the
family is the natural source and core of any good society; that when the family
decays, a dreary collectivism is sure to supplant it; and that the principal
instrument of moral instruction, ordinary education, and satisfactory economic
life always must remain in the family.
The family is our very first “little platoon,” in the
favorite Burkean phrase. Although Kirk writes more than 60 years ago, his
reflections on the family could have been penned yesterday. Progressives
attempt “to have the political state assume nearly all the responsibilities
which the family once possessed.”
We observed this in the increasing number of stories of
state intervention in parents’ decisions regarding their children’s sexuality,
and the heightened tension between the sexes as women publicly — and with warm
societal approval — deride their own husbands. Yet the family is not a “simple
arrangement for the gratification of sexual impulses, and more than a mere
housing device.” It is, rather, where we are taught “the meaning of love and
duty, and what it is to be a true or a true woman.” Erode the family, and you
inevitably erode the nation.
Indeed, the familial catechesis of children enables them
to participate in their communities, as individuals learn to practice the love
and sacrifice they have been taught in the home. Again prophetic, Kirk warns of
“the centralization of production and distribution, the decay of rural patterns
of living, the excessive mobility of population, the standardization of
amusements and customs, the well-meant (though mistaken) drift in many quarters
toward consolidation of local political and charitable functions into state and
federal bureaucracies.”
Much of this can be blamed on allowing centralized power
to assume the burdens of local community. This disastrously removes
decision-making further away from the communities affected by those policies.
Although it is “vexatious to serve on local school boards or to have to attend
the meetings of private charitable societies, or to pay for local improvements
out of local funds,” the alternative is to undermine the very existence of
local communities.
Conservatism and
Government
This is not to say that government, even the federal
government, is evil. As Kirk writes, “government is a necessary good — so long
as it is just, constitutional, balanced, restricted government. Justice, order,
and freedom are dependent upon a satisfactory balance between government
authority and private rights.” Indeed, Kirk adroitly argues that the American
political experiment is a conservative melding of Jewish morality, Roman law,
and Christian dignity, while also a careful preservation of centuries of
English law.
When a French reformer claimed America had created an
entirely new thing based on abstract principles, John Adams retorted: “Fool! Fool!”
Conservatism promotes subsidiarity, or what American political theorist Orestes
Brownson called “territorial democracy,” the tenet that whatever political
functions can be managed lower down the chain of power, all the better.
Given the weaknesses of human nature, conservatives
recognize that all men and women “always will seek power.” Thus, power must be
restrained through a political balance that avoids consolidating it in one
branch or one level of government, while promoting ethical instruction and good
laws.
This also extends to foreign policy, limiting political
leaders’ attempts to wield various arms of power — the military, economic and
political influence, U.S.-funded nongovernmental organizations— to remake the
world in America’s image: “It is better not to do a thing at all than to do it
by means which may imperil the whole complex civil social order.” Sadly the
“conservatives” behind many of the global conflicts of the last twenty years
have neglected this principle.
As should be evident, Kirk’s “manifesto” is a powerhouse
of succinctly crafted articulations of conservatism. His excellent chapter on
education, for example, includes the haunting lament that “many college
graduates today cannot write a simple letter as well as a sixth-grade student
would have written it fifty years ago.” This
was written in 1957.
Kirk’s guide has aged remarkably well, and remains a
powerful summation of conservative principles and a warning if these principles
are abandoned. Kirk witnessed their erosion at a time many conservatives wish
we could return to. How much further must we fall before we heed Kirk’s
warnings?
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