The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not a big fan of politics. Honestly, I can’t stand political debates, political ads, campaign speeches, or election season in general. Personally, I’d rather turn the TV off and read a good novel. (And that’s what I often do, unless I have papers to grade.)

But as I’ve gotten older, I am realizing more and more that people who win elections have an enormous impact on the society that my daughters are going to live in. I’ve realized this especially in the last year, as the national debt has continued to grow unsustainable, as politicians push to make education more utilitarian, as the legal definition of marriage keeps changing, and as the government tries to defend spying on its own people.

This country is headed the wrong direction, with a bad combination of increasing government power and decreasing tolerance for people who do not agree with the majority.

So as much as I despise politics, I recognize that political ideas are important. So I am starting to appreciate books like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.

What I’ve discovered is that there’s a rich heritage of thought that begins with Edmund Burke and continues with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, Richard Weaver, and T.S. Eliot.

This heritage is very different from the utilitarianism/libertarianism of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, which has little regard for a meaningful culture or true community. In contrast, Kirk presents a heritage of true conservatism: a desire to conserve the elements of culture that bring goodness, stability, and meaning to a society.

At the same time, Kirk shows that true conservatives are not opposed to change. But they believe that change should take place carefully. One of Kirk’s “Canons of Conservative Thought” is the “recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress."

As Kirk says in one of his essays, “Conservatives are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know. Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls. Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted.”

Here are some of Kirk’s other “Canons of Conservative Thought”:
• "Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience."
• "Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems;"
• "Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and the Leviathan becomes master of all."
• "Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters, calculators, and economists' who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs."

Kirk lays these out in the first chapter. In the rest of the book, Kirk analyzes a long line of conservative thinkers, beginning with Burke, and contrasts them with their ideological opponents. He goes into much more detail than I’m interested in reading, but history buffs may enjoy it.

Those who are interested in reading something easier but along the same lines might enjoy Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...).

Here’s another good summary of this brand of conservatism (“Conservatism Needs Less Ayn Rand, More Flannery O’Connor”) by Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University: http://www.theimaginativeconservative...


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