Our Captain, Kirk

National Review, June 16, 2003 by James E. Person, Jr.

Looking back on past triumphs is a good thing, especially during times of uncertainty and jolting change. At a time of recession, terrorism, and the fearful realities of war, glancing back a half-century seems to take one back to a time that now seems colorless and tame. Weren't the 1950s the age of "the man in the gray flannel suit," a time when the mood of the United States was by and large conservative -- perhaps excessively so?

As Russell Kirk would say: nay, not so. In the 1950s, liberal statism bestrode the nation like a colossus, triumphant and in command of the foreseeable future, and conservatism was struggling into existence. While many Americans possessed a commonsensical, Reader's Digest form of gut-level conservatism, they were voiceless. In the public sphere, conservative writings were widely mocked as wellsprings of bigotry and antiquarian fanaticism.

Such charges are still leveled, but they sound increasingly shrill, hollow, and silly. What a difference 50 years can make -- and in the history of the postwar conservative movement, the early years of that half-century spelled the difference between living and languishing. "Incredible as it may seem, in 1950 the great intellectual tradition properly described as 'conservative' had no recognized interpreter or spokesman," wrote former National Review publisher William Rusher. "That omission was brilliantly rectified in 1953 by the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. In this and subsequent books, Kirk revived the basic principles of conservatism, in particular as laid down by Edmund Burke, and applied them to modern America. Within five years, together with the principles of free-market economics, they had become the warp and woof of conservatism as we know it today."

That's quite a claim, but it is true: The year 1950 indeed saw no hope for the rise of anything resembling a movement among the ranks of America's anti-Communists, traditionalists, and libertarians. But over the next three years, three books appeared that drew together the scattered men and women of the Right and helped forge it into a living political force: William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale (1951), Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), and Kirk's great work.

In The Conservative Mind, Kirk -- who contributed a regular column to NR for 25 years and was described by Buckley as "this terribly mature, polished, knowledgeable student of American and European history" -- outlined the principles and key figures in the Anglo-American tradition "from Burke to Santayana" (the book's subtitle, changed in later editions to "from Burke to Eliot"). In doing so, he gave the modern conservative movement its pedigree and much of its definition.

But The Conservative Mind is much more than an artifact to be revered. It is a document that still speaks in ringing tones today, thanks chiefly to its author's articulate reminders that man is much more than a political and economic creature; he is also a spiritual being, who seeks meaning and purpose that cannot be found in wealth and comfort alone. He is a being in need of wise traditions and a sense of rootedness, what George Santayana termed "the old faiths, the old governments, the old economies, the old buildings, the old loves and loyalties." Man, despite his bent toward error and sin, is beloved by his Creator and meant for eternity. He is a player in the drama of history and part of a community of souls, formed in character by his forebears and a shaper of generations yet to come.

Kirk wrote that when man lacks an object of allegiance, a body of tradition to give context to his life, and small, voluntary communities of family and neighbors, he ends up in the clutches of boredom and aimlessness, and the society of which he is a part slides into decadence. Therefore the great test of the modern conservative is not how to make the economy start humming again -- laudable though that goal is -- but to restore "a living faith to the lonely crowd, how to remind men that life has ends," making for order in the soul and order in the commonwealth.

Thus the high value of The Conservative Mind lies in its power to remind the reader of what Kirk (after Eliot) called "the permanent things" -- timeless, normative truths, such as the rightness of honor, courage, and mercy, and the importance of high character. "In essence," wrote Kirk, "the body of belief that we call 'conservatism' is an affirmation of normality in the concerns of society." He added, "There exist standards to which we may repair; man is not perfectible, but he may achieve a tolerable degree of order, justice, and freedom; both the 'human sciences' and humane studies are means for ascertaining the norms of the civil social order, and for informing the statesman and the reflecting public of the possibilities and the limits of social measures." This, in miniature, is the key body of truth Kirk discusses in The Conservative Mind. Much of the political history of the past century is a horror story that came about only when men chose to cast aside these truths of tradition and history -- and to forget that which ought not to be forgotten.