The Couger Report

ABOUT

Russell Kirk, a prominent social critic and political philosopher, helped form the intellectual backbone of the modern Conservative movement. His book The Conservative Mind gave shape to post-World War II conservatism, and with the help of other prominent conservatives (William F. Buckley Jr., T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Eric Voegelin, Whittaker Chambers, etc.) a response to the crisis in modernism was born. Opposed to political and social ideologies (liberalism, libertarianism, communism, fascism, etc.), Kirk defined conservatism as “…not a political system, but rather a way of looking at a civil social order.” Contrary to most definitions, Kirk looked at Conservatism as a way to interpret or approach ideology. No one is ideologically conservative. “For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”

Here are Kirk’s 10 Conservative Principles:

1. The Conservative Believes in a Higher Moral Order

2.The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity

3. conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription (that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity)

4. Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence

5. Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety

6. Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability

7. Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked

8. Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism

9. The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions

10. The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

Please click here for more of Kirk.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

This section is not necessary. Kirk is responding to the modern temper.

MY ANALYSIS

It should be obvious that our Civilization is sick.  One does not need to look farther than, in Kirk’s words, “…our half-ruined American cities, with their ghastly rates of murder and rape, to perceive that we moderns lack the moral imagination and the right reason required to maintain tolerable community.”  And as the cities crumble, as the walls come tumbling down, the integrity of our intellectual and cultural heritage continues to decay.  Perhaps because “Books give way to television and videos; universities, intellectually democratized, are sunk to the condition of centers for job certification.”  And in search of meaning, “An increasing proportion of the population, in America especially, is dehumanized by addiction to narcotics and insane sexuality.”

More disturbing than modernism and its discontents is Kirk and Company’s forecast.  “To most observers, T.S. Eliot among them, it has seemed far more probable that we are stumbling into a new Dark Age, inhumane, merciless, a totalistic political domination in which the life of spirit and the inquiring intellect will be denounced, harassed, and propagandized against: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, rather than Huxley’s Brave New World of cloying sensuality.”  But if we do discount the value of our heritage, and demonize the champions of liberty, and offer vocational studies instead of legitimate liberal education, it seems like this is a probable outcome.  The decline of the Ancient Greeks was marked with hedonism and debauchery, as was the collapse of Roman Civilization. Why not America also?

As a conservative should, Kirk falls back on our heritage to begin to understand the origins of our civilization.  The seeds of Culture, Kirk asserts, arise from cults.  Not cults in the contemporary sense—likely drawing images of David Koresh—but a “joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power.”  From these roots, civilizations rise—people develop associations.  They begin to place emphasis on police, basic rules of law, property, arts, music, food.  Something of an organic social-compact is formed.  At least according to such “eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.”

America, of course, can be traced back to ancient cults.  A nation rooted in the Enlightenment, which is then rooted in the Renaissance and so on.  History is a chain of events that can explain so much: our ultimate foundation being “tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous insights of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.”

The core of Kirk’s argument is simple: we have let those roots deteriorate.  What is left is a hollow shell of a decaying culture.  A sick civilization with dozens of infections; And, of course,  very few are willing to reach back and understand how or why.  Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it.  And repeat it we might.

The solution, as Kirk points out, comes from an Israeli Sophocrat from Robert Grave’s allegory Watch the North Wind Rise.  “ ‘We must retrace our steps,’ he concludes, ‘or perish.’’’  To save America, and save the good principles that millions have championed and thousands more have devoted their lives to, we must retreat and understand. Not attack the roots, not foolishly discredit American and Western values with the intention of becoming “A Citizen of the World.” Not everyone is right, some are wrong. The millions of people that died at the hands of their communist governments can attest. Whittaker Chambers put it best:

A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind’s. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.

What Communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of the Lubianka, from all the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton. They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist State. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or Bogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps. They come from children whose parents are suddenly, inexplicably, taken away from them–parents they will never see again.

What Communist has not heard those screams? Execution, says the Communist code, is the highest measure of social protection. What man can call himself a Communist who has not accepted the fact that Terror is an instrument of policy, right if the vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century? Those screams have reached every Communist’s mind. Usually they stop there. What judge willingly dwells upon the man the laws compel him to condemn to death–the laws of nations or the laws of history?

Communism, according to Chambers, is the vision of man without God. There are more of these ideologies. And these visions of man without God is the disease that plagues our culture. “What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society’s affliction is the decay of religious belief. If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose.”

All in Kirk’s essay. I strongly encourage you to read it, and you can see his solution for yourself. This is a sobering read, but it changed my perspective. Perhaps it will change yours also.

Click here for the text of the essay.

For another related essay, Click Here for Whittaker Chamber’s Letter to my Children.