Russell Kirk clarifies everything
[Turns out Russell Kirk had both religion and liberalism, two of this
list’s recent obsessions, figured out. This is from Alan Wolfe’s
review of a collection of Kirk’s “essential” works (who knew there
was such a thing?) in The New Republic.]
[…]
For Kirk, however, it is not fanaticism in general that gives cause
for worry, but one kind of fanaticism in particular: “the belief that
this world of ours may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise
through the operation of positive law and positive planning.” By this
definition, Jeremy Bentham–Kirk’s least favorite philosopher–was an
ideologue, but Edmund Burke–his most favorite one–was not. Reading
Kirk, it would seem that there are only left-wing ideologues, and the
term “conservative ideology” is an oxymoron that can make sense “only
if, with Humpty Dumpty, we claim the prerogative of forcing words to
mean whatever we desire them to signify.”
Kirk admits of two possible exceptions to his insistence that
ideology is a monopoly of the left, although each of them is cited to
confirm his point. Nazism, too, is an ideology–but we should not
forget that the Nazis, like all ideologues, held “that human nature
and society may be perfected by mundane, secular means.” Of all the
crimes committed by the Nazis, the proclivity for human
perfectibility is an odd one to choose; but it is Kirk’s choice. And
then there is the “objectivist” ideology of Ayn Rand and her
followers, for whom Kirk expresses deep contempt. Yet Rand, in Kirk’s
view, is more a libertarian than a conservative, and libertarians
take their inspiration from that quintessential liberal John Stuart
Mill. Libertarians therefore have nothing in common with
conservatives (a point once made, in reverse, by F.A. Hayek in a
famous essay called “Why I Am Not a Conservative”). “The
representative libertarian of this decade,” Kirk wrote in an essay
published in 1981, is, much like Dr. Jackman, “humorless, intolerant,
self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull.” Libertarians are “mad–
metaphysically mad…. I do not mean that they are dangerous; they
are repellent merely, like certain unfortunate inmates of mental
homes.’” You will not find many devotees of Russell Kirk at the Cato
Institute.
It seems odd for Kirk to vent his spleen against libertarians, since,
to him, ideologues believe in “positive planning,” which is the one
thing that libertarians detest. But liberals and libertarians do
share a trait, and for Kirk it is the definitive one: they both
substitute secular reasoning for the divine laws of God. Ideology,
you see, is religion turned inside out. “Ideology provides sham
religion and sham philosophy, comforting in its way to those who have
lost or never have known genuine religious faith, and to those not
sufficiently intelligent to apprehend real philosophy.” (Mill once
called conservatives the stupid party. Kirk is merely returning the
compliment.) This is why conservatives can never be ideologues;
possessing faith, and deeply versed in philosophy, they have no need
of any replacements. “Because ideology is by essence antireligious,”
Kirk once wrote, “Christians tend to be attracted to ideology’s
negation, conservatism.”
The opposite of an ideological mind, for Kirk, is a prudential one,
and conservatives by their very nature are prudential in a way that
liberals can never be. Liberals believe in abstract principles,
conservatives believe in the lessons of experience. Liberals are
extremist, conservatives are moderate. Liberals are universalists,
conservatives are particularists. Liberals insist on perfectibility,
conservatives insist on the limits of human nature. Unfortunately for
conservatives, we live in an age of ideology. Fortunately for them,
the United States is not an ideological land. Conservatives should go
about their business firmly, but also quietly and cautiously:
“Conservatism not being an ideology with pretensions to universality
and infallibility, there can be no Capitalist Manifesto to set
against the Communist Manifesto.”
[…]