AMERICAN LIBERTY:

Back to The Source: a review of Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology by W. Wesley McDonald (KEVIN HOLTSBERRY, National Review)

W. Wesley McDonald, a professor of political science at Elizabethtown College, has moved to fill this void by offering a stimulating intellectual biography of his mentor and friend. Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology avoids hagiography, and provides a serious and thought-provoking discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of Kirk's work. McDonald seeks to make Kirk's ideas understandable and accessible by examining them from the philosophical ground up; the result is a careful and engaging account of the battle of ideas at the heart not only of modern American conservatism but of Western political thought.

Central to Kirk's philosophy is the connection between order in the soul and order in the commonwealth. A society's politics reflects its culture, and hence its morality. Kirk sought — in McDonald's words — to "rediscover, articulate, and defend those enduring moral norms, now blurred in our consciousness, by which civilized peoples have governed their conduct." McDonald situates this effort within the concept of "ethical dualism," as fleshed out in the work of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. In this view, man is torn between two natures: his lower self, which focuses on selfish and momentary goals, and his higher self, which has the ability to envision something nobler. The moral man checks his lower self and seeks to strengthen his higher self.

Out of this inner tension comes an outer tension, one between order and freedom. For Kirk, true freedom is not the libertarian's total lack of external restraint but rather the opportunity to attain one's own natural potential, and to live in harmony with the moral order. "Liberty," writes McDonald, "can be found neither in individual self-gratification (as the utilitarian would hold) nor in flowing with one's spontaneous impulses (as the Rousseauists would affirm), but resides instead in [what Babbitt called] the individual's 'ethical self; and the ethical self is experienced not as expansive emotion, but as inner control.'"

Just as man must check his lower self, so must society restrain man's wilder impulses to build community. For Kirk, the goal of politics was the preservation of this genuine community. And in the same way man uses his moral imagination to envision something higher than his ego, society uses tradition, habit, ritual, and prescription to mold and protect community. McDonald sees this as central to an understanding of Kirk: "[Aristotle, Cicero, de Tocqueville, and Burke], among others, form within Western political thought an intellectual tradition in which community in its moral and social dimensions is valued as indispensable to civilized existence. The conservative thought of Kirk is, in fact, a summary and development of this tradition applied to the contemporary problem of community."

In his terrific little book, The American Cause, Kirk laid out his vision of the American civic religion as follows:

In essence, then, the Christian faith is this. God exists, a stern judge but a loving father to all mankind. Man has been made in God's own image; but man, an imperfect image of God, torments himself by his tendency to sin. The world is always a battleground between good and evil in human nature. All men are brothers in spirit, because they have a common spiritual father, God; and they are enjoined to treat one another as brothers. Because they are made in the image of God, and are brothers in Christ, they possess human dignity. From this human dignity comes rights peculiar to man which no one is morally free to violate. The revelations by God establish the way in which men are to live with one another. Justice and peace and charity all flow from God's commandments, given in a spirit of love. Christ will redeem from sin the man who accepts him as savior. The reward of loving obedience to God is eternal life, perfection beyond this world. The self-punishment of defiant sin is never to know God, and thus to lose immortality. Human nature and society never will become perfect in the course of history. Yet God's love rules the world; and happiness, if we are to find it at all in this life, comes from God's will. As the essence of man is more than merely mortal, so the destiny of man is more than merely human. The spirit will survive the flesh, and when the end of all earthly things arrives, those who love God shall find a peace that the mortal world never knows. Men who expect to create a heaven upon earth, in defiance of the laws of man's nature and the revelation of God, can create only hell upon earth.

Such is the Christian creed. Whether one subscribes to this religious faith or not, indisputably this is the religious framework upon which American society is built. Christian morality is the cement of American life; and Christian concepts of natural law, natural rights, and necessary limitations to human ambitions all govern our politics and even our economic system.

In an interesting way, this faith prevents Americans from deteriorating into what Eric Hoffer called True Believers. Kirk's American citizenry fits Hoffer's description of free men precisely:

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect.  The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2004 8:40 PM