Course on Russell Kirk: week 4

Welcome to week 4 of the course of posts on Russell Kirk and Catholic social teaching. Details of previous posts are given here.

This week we focus on Kirk's principle of 'prudence':

...conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

[From Kirk's 'Ten conservative principles' here]

Kirk's championing of prudence as the central principle of politics is part of a general focus on character and virtue. It has a negative aspect -a rejection of ideology and theory as a basis for politics- and a positive aspect -the need to cultivate character and wisdom based on the experience of past ages.

Reading:

Excerpts from Kirk's 'The American conservative character' here

Aquinas' Commentary on Aristotle's Ethics, lecture 4 here

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church says of prudence:

 Acting with prudence

547. The lay faithful should act according to the dictates of prudence, the virtue that makes it possible to discern the true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means for achieving it. Thanks to this virtue, moral principles are applied correctly to particular cases. We can identify three distinct moments as prudence is exercised to clarify and evaluate situations, to inspire decisions and to prompt action. The first moment is seen in the reflection and consultation by which the question is studied and the necessary opinions sought. The second moment is that of evaluation, as the reality is analyzed and judged in the light of God's plan. The third moment, that of decision, is based on the preceding steps and makes it possible to choose between the different actions that may be taken.

548. Prudence makes it possible to make decisions that are consistent, and to make them with realism and a sense of responsibility for the consequences of one's action. The rather widespread opinion that equates prudence with shrewdness, with utilitarian calculations, with diffidence or with timidity or indecision, is far from the correct understanding of this virtue. It is a characteristic of practical reason and offers assistance in deciding with wisdom and courage the course of action that should be followed, becoming the measure of the other virtues. Prudence affirms the good as a duty and shows in what manner the person should accomplish it. In the final analysis, it is a virtue that requires the mature exercise of thought and responsibility in an objective understanding of a specific situation and in making decisions according to a correct will.

[From Compendium here.]


Discussion:

If there is a heart to Kirk's approach to political thinking, it is in the character of the citizen, virtuous and wise through his immersion in the experience and wisdom of the past. Moreover (and this is perhaps something that distinguishes Kirk's thought from other conservative approaches) it is a wisdom that is imaginative, that needs to be fed by art, and which is creative and even individualistic.  (Kirk's autobiography is entitled Confessions of a Bohemian Tory. See eg essay here.)

Classical Greek and Roman political thought emphasises the links between virtue and politics.(Aristotle for example regards ethics as part of politics: the discussion of character is part of a wider discussion of what it is to live in society.) Prudence (sometimes translated as 'practical wisdom/reason' or left in the Greek 'phronesis') is at the centre of virtue. It cannot be replaced by systematic theory (hence the hostility of Kirk to attempts to systematize even conservative thought) and it is not even an art (where again, there is technique to be acquired). In modern terms, Kirk's thought lies opposed to both grand theories of society such as Marxism, and techniques of manipulation such as bureaucratic managerialism.

From the perspective of Catholic social teaching, this emphasis on the intellectual virtue of prudence should remove any tendency to regard Catholic thought on society as a simple manual which can be applied mechanically. Certainly there are principles. Certainly there are rules of thumb which will usually work. But politics is neither a science nor an art, and to treat it as such is to pervert its nature.

I've mentioned that a peculiarity of Kirk's conservatism is its emphasis on imagination. Kirk was, I think it fair to say, a character. As his biographer Bradley Birzer puts it (here): 'By almost any twenty-first-century American or western standard, Russell Amos Augustine Kirk (1918-1994) possessed a quirky, eccentric, and original personality.' Those eccentricities can lead him to be seen as a poseur or, at the least, annoy even those who otherwise sympathise with his positions. (Personally, for example, I find his avoidance of the first person in his autobiography offputting rather than endearing.) But there is a defence to this eccentricity. In an age which is hostile to conservatism or indeed to Catholicism, a willingness to see and act beyond what is regard as socially normal is essential. A thinker such as Kirk is always going to stand to some extent outside 'normal' society. Embodying that outsiderness (or Bohemianism) requires a certain style of performance of self-dramatisation. (I leave others to tease out the implications from this thought for (eg) clerical dress and behaviour!)


Additional reading:

Kirk: 'The moral imagination' here


[Details of image: from Crisis magazine here]


[Next post Monday 29 August 2016]