Our Captain, Kirk

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

"The permanent things" are bound up in the first "canon of conservatism" articulated by Kirk in the opening section of The Conservative Mind: "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." Informing all life, acknowledged or not, is a transcendent order -- what many would call the providential truths of God -- from which depend those areas of life that make man more than a mere trousered ape: the life of the spirit, the life of imagination and wisdom, the high worth of family, land, and love. Thus the first concern of the modern conservative, wrote Kirk, is "the regeneration of spirit and character -- with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded." He considered this "conservatism at its highest." In a time of social decadence, conservatives must be a remnant who "are not looking for a brave new world, but instead seek to restore what once was, and so may be again."

After 50 years, Kirk's masterwork still serves. At a time when pleasant, cultured voices encourage Americans to believe that there is no connection between the state of the soul and the state of the commonwealth, it is plain that The Conservative Mind retains its relevance as a literary touchstone for those who seek and value ordered freedom. Kirk issued a call for all the verve, all the imagination, all the prudential wisdom the rising generation had to offer -- and his call still reverberates.