Russell Kirk, qtd. in "Want Truth? Work for Beauty" by Gerald Russello: 

The man of letters teaches the norms of our existence, often rowing with muffled oars. Like William Faulkner, the writer may write much more about what is evil than about what is good; and yet, exhibiting the deprav­ity of human nature, he establishes in his reader’s mind the awareness that there endure standards from which we may fall away; and that fallen nature is an ugly sight. Or the writer may deal chiefly, as did J. P. Marquand, with the triviality and emptiness of a smug society which has forgotten norms. The better the artist, one almost may say, the more subtle the preacher. Imaginative persuasion, not blunt exhortation, commonly is the strategy of the literary champion of norms.

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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From Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

At least five major schools of radical thought have competed for public favor since Burke entered politics: the rationalism of the philosophes, the romantic emancipation of Rousseau and his allies, the utilitarianism of the Benthamites, the positivism of Comte's school, and the collectivistic materialism of Marx and other socialists. (p. 9)

From Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind:

Radicalism since 1790 has tended to attack the prescriptive arrangement of society on the following grounds:  

(1) The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a proclivity toward violence and sin. 

(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes. 

(3) Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical idea. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.

(4) Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.

(5) Radicals unite in detesting Burke's description of the state as ordained of God, and his concept of society as joined in perpetuity by a moral bond among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born--the community of souls.

Russell Kirk's description of conservatism in The Conservative Mind:

There are six canons of conservative thought:   

1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.  

2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."  

3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress.

5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.  

6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Russell Kirk's "Six 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;"
• "Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a 'classless society'." 
• "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." 
• "Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress."

"Once supernatural and traditional sanctions are dissolved, economic self-interest is ridiculously inadequate to hold an economic system together, and even less adequate to preserve order." 

Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things