Happy 2017!

Happy New Year!

From Pope Francis' New Year message:

On this occasion, I would like to reflect on nonviolence as a style of politics for peace. I ask God to help all of us to cultivate nonviolence in our most personal thoughts and values. May charity and nonviolence govern how we treat each other as individuals, within society and in international life. When victims of violence are able to resist the temptation to retaliate, they become the most credible promotors of nonviolent peacemaking. In the most local and ordinary situations and in the international order, may nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions, and indeed of political life in all its forms.

Full message here

[Image from Catholic News Service.]

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from all at the Albertus Institute!





[Details of image: Master of Vyšší Brod, 1350. Full details here.

The beginning of Advent

The holy prophets prophesied both the first coming in his birth, and also the second at the great judgement. We too, God's servants, strengthen our faith by the services of this season, because in our hymns we confess our redemption by his first coming, and we remind ourselves that we should be ready for his second coming, so that we may follow him from that judgement to the eternal life, as he promised us.

[From Aelfric's sermon on the First Sunday of Advent. Discussed on A Clerk of Oxford blog here]

YEAR after year, as it passes, brings us the same warnings again and again, and none perhaps more impressive than those with which it comes to us at this season. The very frost and cold, rain and gloom, which now befall us, forebode the last dreary days of the world, and in religious hearts raise the thought of them. The year is worn out: spring, summer, autumn, each in turn, have brought their gifts and done their utmost; but they are over, and the end is come. All is past and gone, all has failed, all has sated; we are tired of the past; we would not have the seasons longer; and the austere weather which succeeds, though ungrateful to the body, is in tone with our feelings, and acceptable. Such is the frame of mind which befits the end of the year; and such the frame of mind which comes alike on good and bad at the end of life.

[From The Newman Reader, 'Worship, a Preparation for Christ's Coming' here]

Image: The Advent and Triumph of Christ by Hans Memling c 1480. Details here.

Feast Day of St Albert the Great

Happy Feast Day of St Albert the Great, our patron!


Albertus Magnus, also known as Albert the Great, was one of the most universal thinkers to appear during the Middle Ages. Even more so than his most famous student, St. Thomas of Aquinas, Albert’s interests ranged from natural science all the way to theology. He made contributions to logic, psychology, metaphysics, meteorology, mineralogy, and zoology. He was an avid commentator on nearly all the great authorities read during the 13^th Century. He was deeply involved in an attempt to understand the import of the thought of Aristotle in some orderly fashion that was distinct from the Arab commentators who had incorporated their own ideas into the study of Aristotle. Yet he was not averse to using some of the outstanding Arab philosophers in developing his own ideas in philosophy. His superior understanding of a diversity of philosophical texts allowed him to construct one of the most remarkable syntheses in medieval culture.

[Read more here from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article]


The influence exerted by Albert on the scholars of his own day and on those of subsequent ages was naturally great. His fame is due in part to the fact that he was the forerunner, the guide and master of St. Thomas Aquinas, but he was great in his own name, his claim to distinction being recognized by his contemporaries and by posterity. It is remarkable that this friar of the Middle Ages, in the midst of his many duties as a religious, as provincial of his order, as bishop and papal legate, as preacher of a crusade, and while making many laborious journeys from Cologne to Paris and Rome, and frequent excursions into different parts of Germany, should have been able to compose a veritable encyclopedia, containing scientific treatises on almost every subject, and displaying an insight into nature and a knowledge of theology which surprised his contemporaries and still excites the admiration of learned men in our own times. He was, in truth, a Doctor Universalis. Of him it in justly be said: Nil tetigit quod non ornavit [he touched nothing which he did not adorn]; and there is no exaggeration in the praises of the modern critic who wrote: "Whether we consider him as a theologian or as a philosopher, Albert was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary men of his age; I might say, one of the most wonderful men of genius who appeared in past times" (Jourdain, Recherches Critiques).

[Read more here from the Catholic Encyclopedia article]



Podcasts from History of Philosophy without any gaps:

Albert on nature here

Albert's metaphysics here


[Details of image: Fresco of St Albert by Tommaso da Modena 1352 (full details of image here)]

What's coming up

Monday 7 November 7pm: 

'God is not a thing!': Science and religion debates among young Catholics today.
19:00, Mon 7th Nov, 2016
The Garden Room, St Albert's Catholic Chaplaincy, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD. Entrance via George Square Lane.
Free.

To celebrate 800 years since the bull of foundation of the Dominican Order by Pope Honorius III, the Albertus Institute will be offering a series of three talks this autumn on Dominican influence on the teaching of the sciences. Lectures will be chaired by Dr Sara Parvis, Senior Lecturer in Early Church History at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.

The lecture by Michael O'Duffin on "God is not a thing!": Science and religion debates among young Catholics today' will be the third talk in this series. Michael is a schoolmaster and a Glasgow Lay Dominican.

Whilst lectures are free, we suggest a donation of a £5 for each lecture to cover costs. Tea and coffee will be available after the talk and questions.

Saturday 26 November

Conference on 'Modern Security and Human Values: The Changing Face of Conflict' - Saturday 26th November 2016

 Explore how modern security, conflict, the use of emerging technologies to counteract terrorism impacts on the state, civil liberties and the individual.


Speakers will include Hon Richard Stearns, a US Federal Judge; Dr Laura Cleary, Head of the Centre for International Security & Resilience, Cranfield University; General Zoltan Szenes, a retired military officer in the Hungarian Army; Richard Hoskins, retired senior official in the US FBI and Andrew Dolan, a consultant in training simulation exercises in various aspects of security. The Conference will be chaired by Professor Juliet Kaarbo, co-director of the Centre for Security Research, The University of Edinburgh and the Revd. Dr David G Coulter, CB, QHC, Chaplain General to HM Land Forces.

This day conference will be held at the Appleton Tower, University of Edinburgh, Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9LE. For further information and booking details visit the conference details on our main website here.

Course on Russell Kirk: final post and overall reflection

Welcome to the final post of our course on Russell Kirk. The previous posts can be accessed via the links on our Russell Kirk page here. In this final post I shall reflect on some of the key points which Kirk raises for Catholic social teaching.

For me, three points which are important in assessing Kirk's work are:

1) His emphasis on prudence and virtue as being at the heart of politics.
2) His emphasis on the importance of the past.
3) His emphasis on imagination.

The placing of prudence at the heart of political life echoes ancient philosophical thought which Kirk accessed primarily through Stoicism. Not only is there a focus on the importance of individual flourishing as the key end of politics, but there is a resistance to systematic accounts of political science as opposed to a reliance on the wise judgment of the sage. Both can be seen as being in tension with a certain understanding of Catholic social teaching as providing a recipe book of principles for politics and of its downplaying the individual's good in favour of the common good. Although there may well be moments either in Kirk's own politics or in American conservatism in general where prudence becomes mere pragmatism and a concern for the individual turns to subjectivism and self interest, such distortions are not a necessary consequence of Kirk's views. On the other hand, such emphases can be a needed corrective to modern tendencies to reduce the messiness of political life to techniques and the supernatural end of the individual soul to the emptiness of the merely collective life.

Kirk's conservative emphasis on retaining the past can certainly be criticised in the light of Catholic emphasis on natural law. Apart from noting that Kirk always acknowledged the need for change in some circumstances, however, it is important to remember that he is working within a culture constructed for 1500 years under a Christian influence. Whatever evils may exist within that culture are unlikely to removed by a wholesale abandonment of its main beneficial elements. Again, at the very least, an emphasis on the wisdom of tradition is a corrective to a modern tendency to regard the past merely as quaint or even as something from which to escape.

Finally, there is Kirk's emphasis on imagination. For all his affectation of the paraphernalia of the past, this makes Kirk a surprisingly modern, indeed, post-modern figure. His suspicion of technological reasoning and reliance instead on imaginative storytelling is based fundamentally on the ancient philosophical principle that human affairs can only be correctly governed by a virtuous ruler with the insight of wisdom. But to that basic foundation he adds a delight in playfulness and individual creativity. (For all their differences, he reminds me here of GK Chesterton.)

If I had to sum up the reasons for reading Kirk, I'd simply offer the thought that, whatever general principles can be established in  social thought, those principles still have to be interpreted and applied through practical wisdom (prudentia). Getting to grips with the insights of  the Wizard of Mecosta, both as a practising Catholic and major figure in American political thinking, is an important contribution to developing our own prudentia.

'Knowing that his death was coming soon gave great comfort to the family. At one of the last gatherings with his daughters, Kirk reminded his children to read always four specific works to sustain the moral imagination: Hans Christian Anderson's tale "Little Fur Tree," Tolkien's "Leaf by Niggle," C.S. Lewis's allegorical tale "Pilgrim's Progress," and George MacDonald's fairy tale "The Golden Key". He blessed each of his girls, promised to look over them from heaven, and made them promise to care for Annette. Kirk died on Friday morning, April 29, 1994, the Feast of St Catherine of Sienna, doctor of the church and patroness of communication. That morning Kirk had worried about John Paul II, who had just fallen, and had prayed for him. He and Annette had had breakfast together. Knowing this was probably his final meal, Kirk had asked for chocolate chip cookies and custard pie. As he had drifted off after breakfast, Monica, the oldest daughter, sang lullabies to him, the ones he had sung to her as a little girl. Russell Amos Augustine Kirk thus passed into timelessness.'

From Bradley J. Birzer (2015) Russell Kirk: American Conservative, University Press of Kentucky, pp. 392-3.

[That's all, folks! Normal blogging on general matters of interest for Catholic social thought will continue in future weeks...]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 10

Welcome to the tenth post in our online course on Russell Kirk. Links to previous posts may be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

This week we consider Kirk's final principle of conservatism:

Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects...

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host.

Reading:

Russell Kirk, 'The essence of conservatism' here

Russell Kirk: 'How dead is Edmund Burke?' here

Critical discussion:

Although it is easy to read Kirk (and Burke) as resistant to any change, as he makes clear above, Kirk at least is open to change and even progress. Unlike 'progressives', however, he is sceptical about the possibility of anything more than piecemeal improvements and is acutely aware of the dangers of destruction. Burke too is open to organic change n harmony with existing structures, and indeed is accused by Leo Strauss of being too willing to accept social change as a sign of God's will (see the passage from Strauss here).

In a scepticism about the benefits of change, Kirk is at one with a strong tendency in classical philosophy. For example, Plato in the Republic devotes two books (eight and nine) to the inevitable process of the decline of his perfect City, a decline that cannot be avoided but at best delayed. Both Plato and Kirk are primarily concerned with internal forces of change, but a strong tendency within modern thought (and echoed by Catholic social teaching) identifies modernity itself as an external factor which both disrupts the organic growth of society requires new responses:



87. The term “social doctrine” goes back to Pope Pius XI [139] and designates the doctrinal “corpus” concerning issues relevant to society which, from the Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum [140] of Pope Leo XIII, developed in the Church through the Magisterium of the Roman Pontiffs and the Bishops in communion with them[141]. The Church's concern for social matters certainly did not begin with that document, for the Church has never failed to show interest in society. Nonetheless, the Encyclical Letter Rerum Novarum marks the beginning of a new path. Grafting itself onto a tradition hundreds of years old, it signals a new beginning and a singular development of the Church's teaching in the area of social matters[142].

In her continuous attention to men and women living in society, the Church has accumulated a rich doctrinal heritage. This has its roots in Sacred Scripture, especially the Gospels and the apostolic writings, and takes on shape and body beginning from the Fathers of the Church and the great Doctors of the Middle Ages, constituting a doctrine in which, even without explicit and direct Magisterial pronouncements, the Church gradually came to recognize her competence.

88. In the nineteenth century, events of an economic nature produced a dramatic social, political and cultural impact. Events connected with the Industrial Revolution profoundly changed centuries-old societal structures, raising serious problems of justice and posing the first great social question — the labour question — prompted by the conflict between capital and labour. In this context, the Church felt the need to become involved and intervene in a new way: the res novae (“new things”) brought about by these events represented a challenge to her teaching and motivated her special pastoral concern for masses of people. A new discernment of the situation was needed, a discernment capable of finding appropriate solutions to unfamiliar and unexplored problems.
[From the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church here]

Questions:

Does Kirk underestimate the 'newness' of the changes in modernity and of the responses required to deal with them?

Given Catholicism's reliance on a body of achieved doctrine, shouldn't Catholics have a conservative bias in trying to retain the truth in the face of unexpected challenges?


Further reading:

Cardinal Newman: 'An essay on the development of Christian doctrine' here


[Next post: 10 October 2016. (This will be the final post of the series and will take the form of an overall reflection on Kirk's work.)]

[Details of image: John Henry Newman by Millais. Full details here.]

Talk today at Chaplaincy in Edinburgh

Just a quick reminder that there is a further talk today in the series 'The Dominican Order and the Teaching of the Sciences':

Dr Peter Hunter OP will now speak on ‘Science before Galileo? Early Dominican physics' on Monday 3 October at 7pm in the Garden Room at St Albert’s, 24 George Square, Edinburgh (entrance via George Square Lane) 

Full details on main Albertus website here

[Our online series on Russell Kirk continues tomorrow 4 October]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 9 (second post)

Welcome to the second post of the ninth week of our course on Russell Kirk. Links to previous posts may be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

This post deals with Kirk's eighth principle of conservatism:

Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. [...]
For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.

Reading:

Russell Kirk: 'Learn to love the little platoon we belong to' here

Edmund Burke: Extract from Reflections on the French Revolution here

Ben James Taylor: 'The "Big Society" and the politics of paternalism' here

Critical discussion:

Edmund Burke is one of the key figures in Kirk's understanding of politics and society. (I would suggest as others T S Eliot, Marcus Aurelius and Christopher Dawson.) Burke is important to Kirk not only in his sense that the organic growth of society must be respected, but also in his famous remarks on the importance of the 'little platoons' of society.

This emphasis on small communities is reflected in the Catholic Church's teaching on subsidiarity. But both in the way this teaching is sometimes presented and in Taylor's critical essay (above) on the elements of paternalism in the application of Burke's ideas, there is often an undue emphasis on the creation or support of such communities from above (ie from the central government of a State). In it origins, however, 'subsidiarity' acknowledges the real bonds of community that form below the State and indeed are prior to the State. It is the State's job certainly to support such communities, but, most importantly, not to stand in their way: such communities do not so much need to be created as to be allowed to grow naturally.

Although Kirk can be a bit of a name dropper in his writings, and certainly enjoyed the company of 'the aristocracy', my own impression is that this is much more part of his enjoyment of eccentricity and the odd survival of past ages than of any relish for power and social prestige. His emphasis is much more on resistance to centralising power than to a celebration of older forms of it. Although there is clearly a great deal that could be said on the subject, the differences between Kirk's American conservative celebrations of local sources of community and British conservatism which has itself long controlled centralising institutions needs to be borne in mind here.










[Details of image: Edmund Burke by Joshua Reynolds. Full details here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 9

Welcome to week 9 of the course on Russell Kirk. Links to previous posts can be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

This week, we shall be covering two of Kirk's principles. Today I shall look at principle 9:

Ninth, the conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

(I shall address the eighth principle (on voluntary associations) in a further post this week on Friday 30 September.)

I have already drawn attention to the importance of virtuous restraint in Kirk's understanding of politics. This has two aspects: social restraints (such as law and social condemnation by others) and self-restraint by way of virtuous and rational restraint upon the passions. I want to emphasise in particular today Kirk's indebtedness to Stoicism and especially to the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius.

From 'Ten exemplary conservatives' (from The Essential Russell Kirk, pp.34-5):

It was the heroic endeavour of Marcus Aurelius to conserve Rominitas, that grand system of law and order and culture. If he failed -even with his wife, even with his son- still he left an example of integrity that has endured, like his equestrian status on the Capitoline, down to our time. In [Albert Jay] Nock's words, 'The cancer of organized mendicancy, subvention, bureaucracy and centralization had so far weakened its host that at the death of Marcus Aurelius there was simply not enough producing power to pay the bills.' Eighty years of able Antonine rule 'could not prevent the Roman populace from degenerating into the very scum of the earth, worhless, vicious, contemptible, sheer human sculch.' We may make comparisons and draw analogies, near the end of the twentieth century...

The lesson I learnt from Marcus Aurelius is the performance of duty. Take this passage from the Meditations -the Emperor being on a hard Danubian campaign when he set down these lines: 'In the morning, when thou risests sore against thy will, summon up this thought: "I am rising to do the work of a man. Why then this peevishness, if the way lies open to perform the tasks which I exist to perform, and for whose sake I was brought into the world? Or am I to say I was created for the purpose of lying in blankets and keeping myself warm?" With that admonition I steel myself on January mornings at my ancestral village.

Detailed reading:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Marcus Aurelius' here

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Neo-Stoicism' here

Critical discussion:

Kirk lived with the Meditations at his side for much of his life. In being influenced by Stoicism, he was following a well-worn Christian path (see the article on Neo-Stoicism above). There are clearly difficulties in reconciling full blown ancient Stoicism with Christianity. However, in its emphasis on eudaimonia (human flourishing) as the aim of human action, and the understanding of that flourishing as lying in virtuous action, it sets the framework for much of the development of Christian ethics. Moreover, in focusing on the difficulty in overcoming passions with reason, it echoes a central Christian theme of struggling against temptation:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. 15 For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. 16 If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. 17 Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 18 For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. 19 For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. 20 Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 21 I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. 22 For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: 23 But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members.

 

[Romans 7:14-23; Douay-Rheims version]

[Next post 30 September 2016]

[Details of image: equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Full details here.]

Everyone who contends against odds in defense of the permanent things is an heir of Marcus Aurelius.

Additional video:

The following is an interview with the English conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton. The criticism of Kirk made by Scruton are of particular interest as they share so much in common. In particular, Scruton's claims that Kirk places more emphasis on the religious and transcendent than he does, and that Kirk's politics are unrealistic strikes me as well placed. Kirk is a Catholic and takes this much more seriously than Scruton's rather cultural support of the Church of England. Moreover, Kirk places much more emphasis on a romantic and virtuous individualism than does Scruton. (One of Kirk's key phrases which is constantly repeated throughout his career is the importance of 'ordered liberty'.)

Series of talks at Albertus Institute begins this Monday

Our next face to face session this Monday!

Update Saturday 24 September:

[UPDATE and change of speaker on Science and Theology talks:

Dr John O'Connor OP will now speak on ‘Making something out of “a whole lot of nothing”: the Dominican approach to teaching philosophy’ on Monday 26th September at 7pm in the Garden Room at St Albert’s, 24 George Square, Edinburgh (entrance via George Square Lane),

And Peter Hunter OP will talk on Monday October 3rd...]

Autumn 2016 Science and Theology talks at The Catholic Chaplaincy George Square Edinburgh. In the Garden Room at 7pm....

"The Dominican Order and the Teaching of the Sciences” is a series of three evening talks on
Mondays at 7pm in the Garden Room this autumn. First up...

Peter Hunter O.P on Monday 26 September: 'Science before Galileo? Early Dominican Physics'.

Admission is free but a donation of £5 would be welcomed from those who can afford it. Further
details on the lecture series can be found on the Institute's website here.

[And don't forget our conference on 26 November: Modern Security and Human Values: The Changing Face of Conflict. Full details here.]

Details of image: Albertus Magnus Expounding his Doctrines of Physical Science by Ernest Board from here.

Course on Russell Kirk: week 8

Welcome to the eighth week of the course on Russell Kirk. Full details of the course and links to previous posts can be found on our Russell Kirk page here.

We now reach the seventh principle of Kirk's ten principles of conservatism (detailed here).

For the institution of several property—that is, private property—has been a powerful instrument for teaching men and women responsibility, for providing motives to integrity, for supporting general culture, for raising mankind above the level of mere drudgery, for affording leisure to think and freedom to act. To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor; to be able to see one’s work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one’s own—these are advantages difficult to deny. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully.

Reading:

Russell Kirk: 'Capitalism and the Moral Basis of Social Order' here

Russell Kirk: 'The ideologies of capitalism and socialism' here

John Attarian: 'Russell Kirk's economics of the permanent things' here



Critical discussion:

Kirk's position on private property is that it is necessary for the fulfilment of human nature, particularly in allowing the pursuit of long term goods which go beyond an individual's lifetime. (Family life in particular would be undermined if people are unable to pass on property to the next generation.) On the other hand, unrestrained capitalism is just as evil as communism:

Of course one encounters here and there, still, well-meaning individuals who think of themselves, somewhat vaguely, as socialists. But one has only to observe at close range the exiting Labour Party of Britain—which, after all, is more humane than most socialist groups—to apprehend how dismal a socialist order would be. The aspirations of the 19th-century Christian Socialists of France and Germany, or of the British guild socialists, have gone glimmering altogether. How can one make an alliance with ghosts?

The “capitalist” ideologues who proclaim that the Holy Market is the be-all and end-all are working their own destruction. As truly private property gives way to colossal mergers and combinations, the prediction of Marx is increasingly fulfilled: monopolies and oligopolies find few defenders in rough times, and are converted readily into agencies of the state. As the liberals’ moral nihilism dissolves the inner order and the outer, truly things fall apart. For the sake of the permanent things, we ought to transcend mere faction and unite to redeem the time.

But to exchange “capitalist” claptrap for “socialist” claptrap will not suffice. So long as the socialist genuinely remains attached to socialist dogma, he will be the conservative’s adversary.

What defenders of the permanent things should seek is not a league with some set of old-fangled or new-fangled ideologues, but the politics of prudence, enlivened by imagination. Politics remains the art of the possible.

[From 'The ideologies of capitalism and socialism' -link above.]

Attarian's essay above, I think, rather understates Kirk's suspicion of capitalism, particularly as it existed in America at the end of his life. Kirk's own essays above seem to me fully within the spirit of the social teaching of the Church, for example:

The Church's social doctrine, while recognizing the market as an irreplaceable instrument for regulating the inner workings of the economic system, points out the need for it to be firmly rooted in its ethical objectives, which ensure and at the same time suitably circumscribe the space within which it can operate autonomously.  The idea that the market alone can be entrusted with the task of supplying every category of goods cannot be shared, because such an idea is based on a reductionist vision of the person and society.

[From the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, para. 349  here]

Scottish snippet:

Kirk was friendly with the sculptor, Hew Lorimer and his wife, Mary, both Catholic converts. (Lorimer trained under Eric Gill.) Kirk says of the Lorimers in his biography, The Sword of the Imagination  (p114):

Kirk's friendship with the Lorimers has endured warmly for three generations. Kellie [Castle] is National Trust property now; kindly Hew died in a Fife nursing home; but the two Lorimer sons and the daughter remain intimate with the Kirks, in whose library building at Mecosta are fixed the originals of three of Lorimer's allegorical figures for the National Library of Scotland -that is, the models in Hopetounwood limestone from which the colossal reliefs in Edinburgh were carved in situ, Kirk on the scaffolding with the sculptor one fair day. Kirk's three stone reliefs are Theology, with the sword of faith; on Theology's right, Law, bewigged and clasping a book; on Theology's left, History, with a long scroll and a quill pen. These carvings, with their Celtic dignity, may outlast the Common Reader.

People are meant to live forever, Kirk came to reflect with the passing of the years. Why do they perish? Plato and St Paul tell us that they do not perish -and St Augustine of Hippo, too; they merely depart from us. Mary Lorimer is in her grave now, but is fixed in Kirk's memory by her blithe spirit, her humor, and her coffee -the best ever brewed for guests; and Hew Lorimer, solitary, later entered eternity. What timeless moments Kirk spent with them!

[Next post: 26 September 2016]

[Details of image: Kellie Castle Fife, home of Hew and Mary Lorimer. Full details here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 7

Welcome back to the seventh week of the Albertus Institute's blog course on Russell Kirk and Catholic social teaching. The previous posts can be followed from the Russell Kirk page .

This week we turn to the sixth of Kirk's principles, that of imperfectability:

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination, and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. [The full ten principles can be found here.]

Reading:

Russell Kirk [synopsis of his book, The Roots of American Order] here

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Augustine: political and social philosophy' here


Critical discussion:

Kirk's vision of human imperfectability reminds me strongly of the Augustinian vision of the tension between the City of God and the Earthly City:

while Augustine doubtless holds that it is better for Rome to be Christian than not, he clearly recognizes that officially embracing Christianity does not automatically transform an earthly state into the City of God.  Indeed, he regards Rome as “a kind of second Babylon.”  Even if the Roman Emperor and the Roman Pontiff were one and the same—even if the structures of state and church merged so as to become institutionally the same—they would not thereby become the City of God, because citizenship in the City of God is determined at the individual and not the institutional level.
Augustine does not wish ill for Rome.  Quite the contrary, he supplicates God for Rome’s welfare,  since he belongs to it, in temporal terms at least.  He sees Rome as the last bastion against the advances of the pagan barbarians, who surely must not be allowed to overrun the mortal embodiment of Christendom that Rome represents.  Nevertheless, Augustine cannot be overly optimistic about the future of the Roman state as such—not because it is Rome, but because it is a state; for any society of men other than the City of God is part and parcel of the earthly city, which is doomed to inevitable demise.  Even so, states like Rome can perform the useful purpose of championing the cause of the Church, protecting it from assault and compelling those who have fallen away from fellowship with it to return to the fold. [From Encyclopedia article linked above.]

There is certainly room for the aim of improving human societies, but our final home is only with God, and any earthly city and politics will fall short of that.

One of the interesting things about Kirk's analysis above is the favourable attention given to Calvin. To quote from the above synopsis:

in Kirk’s phrase, there was still “a reserve of genius in Christianity,” something that ensured its self-preservation by making it a counterpart to temporal society. This aptitude came to the fore in the person of John Calvin, a Swiss lawyer and theologian. Kirk contends that Calvin—probably more than any other person during the thousand years between the decline of Rome and the founding of America —created a climate where church and state could complement rather than compete with one another. His intellectual feat was the joining of religious obligation of fealty to church and clergy and Scripture with equally valuable social and civic obligations—pay your taxes, obey the civil rulers, adhere to legal precepts, etc.—and he thereby helped make a functioning society possible.
     The application of the idea of responsibility to civic duty, which grew out of religious obligations, caused people to understand how order was to be achieved in both secular and religious affairs. Calvin’s influence was so fundamental and practical that he can be credited with having helped to make order pre-eminent in the theory and the practice of Western civic construction. His reality was the antithesis of the religious corruption of the Middle Ages when dispensations for any sin could be purchased from the clergy. The incongruous and sinister religion that Christianity had become was intolerable to those who witnessed the disjunction between the words in the Bible and the conduct of priests in the public square.      Once religious corruption was made a public issue during the Protestant Reformation and the clergy were “forced” to resume pious ways, freedom of thought (that is, the clergy and the church were no longer controlling minds through religious terrorism) allowed the flowering of the Renaissance. The Reformation’s intellectual revolt against thieving religious administrators (in both their temporal and spiritual aspects) became open conflict between the reformers and the clerisy. As Kirk explains the history of this era he observes that people no longer cowed by religious bullying could perceive a profound insight:
  

            Truth was knowable; order was real. Truth was obscured by man’s follies and passions, and order was broken by man’s appetites and desire for power. Yet right reason might disclose truth to men’s eyes again, and order might be regained by courageous acts of will. 

Kirk certainly described himself regularly as an Augustinian (Birzer, 2015, p.501 n.38). Moreover, he emphasises the way that Calvinism was the source of an emphasis in American culture on the Old Testament.

'Because freedom from slavery and oppression were dominant themes in the Old Testament,' Neal Riemer writes, the legacy of Israel and Judah nourished American liberty. 'It warned -as in the story of the Tower of Babel- against Man's attempt to be God. It forced Man- as in the story of Adam and Eve- to recognize his mortality and fallibility and to appreciate that there can be no Utopia on earth. Again and again, it inveighed against the belief that Utopia can be captured and made concrete in idolatry. On the other hand, however, it left ample room for effort to make life better. This is the central meaning, as I read it, of God's covenant with Noah and its reaffirmation with Abraham, with Moses, and with the later prophets.'

[From 'The law and the prophets' in The Essential Russell Kirk, p.78]

However, that historical truth did not prevent Kirk from having, in general, a highly critical view of the reformation and its effects:

Certainly, Kirk held no affinity for the Reformers, and he feared their  'moblike' actions in the sixteenth century nearly destroyed the town [of St Andrews]. 'When Knox and the Reformers dinged down the cathedral and the archbishopric of St Andrews, the soul would have gone out of this remote place had not the little University remained to shelter [the community].'

(Birzer, 2015, p.94).

What is one to make of all this? It should certainly be kept in mind that Kirk is not a systematic thinker and that his writing career lasted half a century and straddled shifts from Stoicism to Christianity to Catholicism. (Although the above dismissals of the Reformation precede his conversion and the praise of Calvinism postdates it.) The main thoughts, however, are the imperfectability of politics and the Burkean importance of tradition. Neither medieval Catholicism nor Calvinism produce the perfect society because, in his Augustinianism, Kirk sees that nothing can do this. In Europe, the Reformation destroyed tradition, not completely, but to a great extent. Kirk, as a conservative, is therefore critical of it. In America, on the other hand, it was part of the founding DNA. Whatever, problems that may have led to, it was not a wholly bad inheritance, and any correction of those problems has to respect that organic inheritance and work with it rather than wholly dismissing it.

[Next post: 19 September]

[Details of image: here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 6

Welcome to week 6 of the online course about Russell Kirk. Details of the course (which can be joined at any time) are here.

This week, we look at the fifth principle of Kirk's Ten Principles of conservatism,  that of variety.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.


Reading:

Russell Kirk: 'The aim of the conservative' (here)

Bradley Birzer: "More than ‘Irritable Mental Gestures’: Russell Kirk’s Challenge to Liberalism" (here)


Critical discussion:


Kirk states in the above article:

 “The American industrialist, by and large, has been a liberal, and so has the American labor organizer; they have different about means, rather than ends. I do not mean that no industrialists, or no union organizers, are conservatives; some are truly conservative, but they are exceptions. The session with economics—a Benthamite and Marxist obsession—which is oppressed nearly all discussion of the wants of Americans for a good many years, is only now beginning to give way to some serious discussion of what we really want from life, and of how we may keep life tolerable.”

To paraphrase this, Kirk is rejecting the modern obsession with productivity: with human beings producing things which are then alienated from them by being bought and sold. (In short, having produced a service or physical good by pouring your labour (heart and soul) into that production, you are left: a) with that good which is no longer yours and which benefits someone else; b) money.) This element of the criticism is not so very far away from Marx's in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (here):

All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. [...] The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

Kirk is not a systematic thinker, but at least part of his attack here can be articulated in the following:

a) Modernity, by abolishing the variety of inherited patterns of life, leaves a blank slate which, at best, takes an awfully long time to fill.

b) An obsession with money rather than other human goods reduces the variety of human life.

c) The emphasis on equality rather than traditional hierarchies again tends to reduce the variety of life.

Kirk would surely point to the liberal desire to remove or abolish as evidence of action to reduce variety. A liberal, however, might reply that this destruction of variety is only intended to free human beings from a 'traditional' oppression: if, in the short term, that results in a loss of variety, then it is only because it serves to liberate the forces of individuality and thus variety for the future.

Part of Kirk's response here is that societies will always embody differences between people: to pretend otherwise is foolish. But instead of such differences being sustained by oppression and power, they can be exercises of love. In his lecture on Malcolm Muggeridge, Kirk quotes with favour the following passage on the triumph of love:

As Ian Hunter writes in his able biography of Muggeridge:

...[he] has always been fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of power and those who wield it....Power is to the collectivity, he believes, what lust is to the individual-'an expense of spirit in a waste of shame' in Shakespeare's elegant phrase. Through the practice of half a century of journalism, and particularly since the advent of television, he has been brought in contrast with prime ministers, potentates, and despots, people who have achieved power over their fellowmen by acclamation, birth, persuasion, the ballot bow, or the barrel of a gun. Its effect on almost all of them, he has observed, is to corrupt-not in the more obvious sense in which Lord Acton spoke of power corrupting, but in subtler, more insidious ways; principally, by diverting their attention from what is enduring, true, and worthwhile to what is evanescent, circumstantial, and tawdry. 'Here am I, Captain of a Legion of Rome,' runs an inscription Muggeridge is fond of quoting, 'who served in the Libyan desert and learns and ponders this truth-there are in life but two things, love and power, and no man can have both.'

 Differences between human beings are not always the result of power but of love and nature. Instead of workers being exploited by capital or attacking their managers, the possibility of a variety of authorities and hierarchies exists which is sustained by love rather than force. This is very much in keeping with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum:

19. The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvellous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.

It is also reminiscent of Dante's Paradiso, Canto 1:

All things, among themselves, possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God.    Here do the higher beings see the imprint of the Eternal Worth, which is the end to which the pattern I have mentioned tends.    Within that order, every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Kirk's emphasis on love and the limitations of reason in expressing truth are also echoed by the closing words of the Divine Comedy: Eternal Light, You only dwell within Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing, Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself!    That circle—which, begotten so, appeared You as light reflected—when my eyes had watched it with attention for some time,    within itself and colored like itself, to me seemed painted with our effigy, so that my sight was set on it completely.    As the geometer intently seeks to square the circle, but he cannot reach, through thought on thought, the principle he needs,    so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see the way in which our human effigy suited the circle and found place in it—    and my own wings were far too weak for that. But then my mind was struck by light that flashed and, with this light, received what it had asked.    Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were moved already—like a wheel revolving uniformly—by    the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. In sum, unless illuminated by God and love, the human mind will tend to see all variety and all hierarchy as an exercise of power and oppression. Certainly, such oppression will exist and even, in our earthly life, is not totally avoidable. But the possibility exists of an earthly variety that reflects divine justice. Unless the possibility of such a beauty in traditional forms of life is considered, the correction of imagined injustice will itself become an exercise of the lust for domination. [Next post: 12 September 2016] [Details of image: From Russell Kirk Center here]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 5

Welcome to week 5 of the course on Russell Kirk. I have posted links to the earlier units of the course on the new Russell Kirk page.

I'm a great believer in the importance of stepping back and taking a review at key moments in a course. As we're roughly half way through the course now, I'd like to use today's post to invite you to step back from trying to engage with Kirk in detail and to suggest some key elements and some critical challenges to them that you should be reflecting on.

Reading:

The main reading will be the short passages I excerpt below. However, I'd encourage you to read this New York Times review of Bradley Birzer's biography of Kirk to get a sense of a modern critical reaction to Kirk (and indeed to Birzer's view of Kirk). Here. I'd also recommend the transcript of Birzer's speech on Kirk which reflects on (as he puts it) 'The awful humanity of Russell Kirk'. Here. (One of the things I'd pick up from both is the way in which Kirk's personality is important in understanding him. This placing of imaginative individualism at the centre of Catholic and conservative thought is, in my view, one of the key interests in Kirk. In particular, it provides an interesting tension with the impersonality of that other key Burkean strand in his thought, a respect for the traditional forms of society.)

Putting those titbits aside, the first reading for this week is an excerpt from the biography of Ernest Gellner by John A. Hall. (p.83).

Traditions are manipulations of the past (not indeed generally actual fabrications) for the purposes of manipulating the present and propping up current arrangements'. On the other hand, he insists that although 'tradition may be elegance, competence, courage, modesty and realism...it is also bull***t, servility, vested interest, arbitrariness, empty ritual'.

The second reading is a brief summary of Catholic social teaching given by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (here). In particular, it summarises such teaching in seven principles:

Life and dignity of the human person.

Call to Family, Community and Participation

Rights and responsibilities.

Option for the poor and vulnerable.

The dignity of work and the rights of workers.

Solidarity.

Care for God's creation.



Critical discussion:

Gellner has been described as a 'one man crusader for critical rationalism'. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he is extremely suspicious of approaches which downplay the possibility of the rational critique of inherited thought and practice. The above excerpt is aimed at Michael Oakeshott, a leading British conservative thinker but might equally apply to Kirk.

The questions I think Gellner's criticism should bring to the forefront of your mind about Kirk are:

1) Would Kirk accept Gellner's criticisms? How might he answer them?
2) Are there other elements in Kirk's work besides an emphasis on tradition which might provide the basis for a defence of Kirk?

(As a reminder, here are Kirk's principles of conservatism in their sixfold form (from Wikipedia):


A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.)


Turning to the seven principles of Catholic social teaching as summarised by the USCCB, I'd suggest the following questions as we move further through the course:

1) Compare the USCCB seven principles with Kirk's six principles above. What principles are missing from the USCCB list compared to Kirk's? What principles are missing from Kirk's list?

2) Paying attention to the absences noted in 1), in each case, which list is more closely allied with the tradition of Catholic thinking on society and why?

3) Bearing in mind the above, are the lists totally incompatible, in some tension, or completely compatible? Why?

[Next post: 5 September 2016]

Scottish snippet:

Kirk owned a house in Pittenweem (40 High St) and holidayed regularly there in the 1960s and 1970s. He believed the High St to be haunted and set a ghost story about a Doppelganger there ('The reflex-man on Whinnymuir Close' in the collection Ancestral Shadows (source).) Kirk's interest in the supernatural is discussed by Bradley Birzer here.

[Details of image: Pitteweem High Street. Copyright Ken Bagnall and licensed for reuse. Full details here.]

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]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 3

Welcome back to the third week of the course on Russell Kirk. The previous weeks' posts can be found here:

Introduction here

Week 1 here

Week 2 here

Although I am running this as an online course, please feel free to join in and contribute via the comments' box at any time. (There are no formal joining requirements or fees!)

This week I'm going to deal with two of Kirk's ten conservative principles (found here) together.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless.

[...]

Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription. Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription—that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often. Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part.

If Kirk's first principle is that of an enduring moral order, he turns here to the primary source of our knowledge of that enduring moral order, tradition.

Reading:

Russell Kirk 'What are American traditions?' here

Russell Kirk 'Burke and the philosophy of prescription'  here


Critical discussion:

Kirk sees himself as working within an American tradition which is itself not a creation of 1776, but a continuation in the main of British traditions especially the common law. Unlike the French Revolution which attempts to establish human rights on the basis of pure reason -and sees the past and its structures as an enemy of that reason- Kirk drawing on Edmund Burke sees the past and tradition as the prime way of accessing the 'enduring moral order':

History, for Burke, was the gradual revelation of a Supreme design—often shadowy and subtle to our eyes, but quite resistless, wholly just. Burke stops far short of Hegel’s mystical determinism, for his adherence to the doctrine of free will tells him that it is not arbitrary, unreasoning will, not material force or racial destiny, which make history, but rather human character and conduct. God makes history through the medium of human souls. It may become impious to resist the grand design, when once its character is irrefutably manifested; but a full comprehension of God’s ends we are rarely vouchsafed. The statesman and the thinker must know more than history: they must know nature. Burke’s “nature” is human nature, the revelation of universal and permanent principles through the study of mind and soul—not the Romantics’ half-pantheistic nature. The phrase “state of nature” was often irritating to Burke’s accurate mind; “natural rights,” as demanded by Rousseau and other equalitarians, he denied; but the usage of “nature” which was Cicero’s is Burke’s also. Know history and nature, and you may presume to guess at God’s intent.

[From 'Burke and the philosophy of prescription' (see above).]

One danger which Kirk might be thought to run is the simple baptism of whatever happens to be. This line of criticism would run along the lines that such conservatives simply confuse the fact that certain traditions or practices actually exist with God's will or moral rightness. This seems to be very much the criticism that Leo Strauss has of Burke:

Burke comes close to suggesting that to oppose a thoroughly evil current in human affairs is perverse if that current is sufficiently powerful; he is oblivious of the nobility of last-ditch resistance. He does not consider that, in a way in which no man can foresee, resistance in a forlorn position to the enemies of mankind, "going down with all guns blazing and flag flying," may contribute greatly toward keeping awake the recollection of the immense loss sustained by mankind, may inspire and strengthen the desire and hope for its recovery, and may become a beacon for those who humbly carry on the works of humanity in a seemingly endless valley of darkness and destruction. He does not consider this because he is too certain that man can know whether a cause lost now is lost forever or that man can understand sufficiently the meaning of a providential dispensation as distinguished from the moral law. It is only a short step from this thought of Burke to the supersession of the distinction between good and bad by the distinction between the progressive and retrograde, or between what is and what is not in harmony with the historical process. We are here certainly at the pole opposite to Cato, who dared to espouse a lost cause.
[From Natural Right and History Google preview here]

One possible way of interpreting Kirk (and Burke) to remove such a worry would be to emphasize the difficulties in seeing past one's own culture and history. If one adopts a purely rationalist view, one runs the danger of mistaking one's own individual and group prejudices for eternal truth. If one adopts the perspective of tradition, then one still runs the danger of mistaking a bad tradition for a good one, but at least that danger is diminished by its having been passed through a variety of minds and sensibilities. It's worth noting (despite disavowals of abstract, philosophical reasoning) just how intellectual Kirk's sense of tradition can be:

Precisely what these rights are has never been entirely agreed upon, even among professed Christians. The medieval philosophers of the church debated for centuries on the character and extent of these rights: St. Thomas Aquinas’s description of the rights of nature is one of the more important. Richard Hooker, an English theologian, discussed natural rights and natural laws in the sixteenth century, and his writings greatly influenced subsequent English and American opinion. John Locke, in the seventeenth century, said that there are three primary natural rights, ‘life, liberty, and property.’ In America, Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, made these rights ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Edmund Burke, perhaps the greatest modern political thinker, when he criticized the confused notions of natural right then popular among the French revolutionaries, went on to say that there are certain true and abiding natural rights, though they cannot always be set down independently and without qualification.
[From 'Russell Kirk and the tradition of natural rights' here]

It's worth comparing this with St John Paul the Great's Fides et ratio (online here; sect 4):

Through philosophy's work, the ability to speculate which is proper to the human intellect produces a rigorous mode of thought; and then in turn, through the logical coherence of the affirmations made and the organic unity of their content, it produces a systematic body of knowledge. In different cultural contexts and at different times, this process has yielded results which have produced genuine systems of thought. Yet often enough in history this has brought with it the temptation to identify one single stream with the whole of philosophy. In such cases, we are clearly dealing with a “philosophical pride” which seeks to present its own partial and imperfect view as the complete reading of all reality. In effect, every philosophical system, while it should always be respected in its wholeness, without any instrumentalization, must still recognize the primacy of philosophical enquiry, from which it stems and which it ought loyally to serve.

Although times change and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole. Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness. Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all. These are among the indications that, beyond different schools of thought, there exists a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity. It is as if we had come upon an implicit philosophy, as a result of which all feel that they possess these principles, albeit in a general and unreflective way. Precisely because it is shared in some measure by all, this knowledge should serve as a kind of reference-point for the different philosophical schools. Once reason successfully intuits and formulates the first universal principles of being and correctly draws from them conclusions which are coherent both logically and ethically, then it may be called right reason or, as the ancients called it, orthós logos, recta ratio.

Here, St John Paul acknowledges the universal nature of philosophical thought ('it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole') while acknowledging the dangers of ignoring the fact that human beings inevitably work in a specific tradition and culture (In different cultural contexts and at different times, this process has yielded results which have produced genuine systems of thought. Yet often enough in history this has brought with it the temptation to identify one single stream with the whole of philosophy. In such cases, we are clearly dealing with a “philosophical pride”.)

A rather pragmatic (and rough and ready) interpretation of all this would be that no exercise of human thought particularly in politics is immune to the danger of confusing truth with error. But, on the whole, a thought process immersed in the past and alive to the previous debates and complexities is more likely to hit on the truth than one in thrall to  the  '"philosophical pride” which seeks to present its own partial and imperfect view as the complete reading of all reality'.

Questions: (please feel free to take these and any other questions up in the comments box below)

Do you agree that there is more danger in ignoring tradition than in following it?
Many modern systems of thought (feminism, Marxism, Nietzsche) teach a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' which suggest that the thought of the past is to be avoided precisely because it is the result of abusive power structures. Is this a healthy approach? Can it be reconciled with Catholicism?


Scottish snippet:

Russell Kirk tremendously admired Walter Scott and included him as one of his 'Ten exemplary conservatives' (essay here).

To Scotland we turn for my fourth conservative, Sir Walter Scott. Through the Waverley Novels, the Wizard of the North disseminated Burke's conservative vision to a public that never would have read political tracts; but Scott's achievement is considerably more than this labor of popularizing political doctrines. For Scott wakes the imagination; he reminds us that we have ancestors and inherit a moral patrimony; he pictures for us the virtues of loyalty, fortitude, respect for women, duty toward those who will succeed us in time--and all this without seeming didactic. As D. C. Somervell puts it, Scott showed, "by concrete instances, most vividly depicted, the value and interest of a natural body of traditions."

My mother gave me five of Scott's romances for my eighth birthday, and I have been reading Scott ever since. Until fairly recent years, one saw cheap editions of Scott's'novels on sale at British railway kiosks; but modern educational approaches are effacing that sort of literary taste. I do not mean to desert Sir Walter: indeed, I shall re-read The Antiquary once I return to my Michigan fastness. The popular influence of the novel.departed when television was plumped into the living room of nearly every household in the Western world; I suppose that fewer and fewer young people will read Scott, although books about him continue to be published; but those who do read him may be won to his understanding of the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.

[Details of image: Scott Monument Edinburgh. Full details here.]