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.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 2

Welcome to the second week of this course about Russell Kirk and Catholic social teaching. Last week, we had a general look at Kirk's ten principles of conservatism. This week we look in more detail at the first:

First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.
This word order signifies harmony. There are two aspects or types of order: the inner order of the soul, and the outer order of the commonwealth. Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand. The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.


Reading this week:

Russell Kirk: 'A  dispassionate assessment of libertarians' here
Russell Kirk: 'Civilization without religion' here

Commentary:

Although Kirk's precise formulation of this first principle varied over the years, the phrases 'ordered liberty' and 'the permanent things' became central to many of Kirk's writings. The pursuit of the policy of fusionism by American conservatives linked with William Buckley compelled traditional conservatives such as Kirk to work with libertarians. In the essay 'A  dispassionate assessment of libertarians', Kirk reflects on what links and separates these two different approaches. In essence, Kirk agrees with libertarians in their wish to impose restrictions on government, but disagrees with them particularly in their replacement of a focus on 'an enduring moral order' by individual licence. Restriction on government is necessary to allow not only the flourishing of individuals, but also of the 'little platoons' of civil society and of the family:

The primary function of government, conservatives say, is to keep the peace: by repelling foreign enemies, by administering justice domestically. When government undertakes objectives far beyond these ends, often government falls into difficulty, not being contrived for the management of the whole of life.

There are clear echoes here of subsidiarity:

186. The necessity of defending and promoting the original expressions of social life is emphasized by the Church in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, in which the principle of subsidiarity is indicated as a most important principle of “social philosophy”. “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them”[399]. [From the Compendium of Social Doctrine here]

Libertarians go wrong because they stop at freeing individuals from the state: they have nothing substantive to say about how individuals should make use of that freedom. Kirk, on the other hand, places religious values at the centre of the individual's (and society's) life:

In short, the culture can be renewed only if the cult is renewed; and faith in divine power cannot be summoned up merely when that is found expedient. Faith no longer works wonders among us: one has but to glance at the typical church built nowadays, ugly and shoddy, to discern how architecture no longer is nurtured by the religious imagination. It is so in nearly all the works of twentieth century civilization: the modern mind has been secularized so thoroughly that "culture" is assumed by most people to have no connection with the love of God. [From 'Civilization without religion'.]

Again, there are echoes here of Catholic teaching. For example, in Aquinas' De regno, we find

[106] Now the same judgment is to be formed about the end of society as a whole as about the end of one man. If, therefore, the ultimate end of man were some good that existed in himself, then the ultimate end of the multitude to be governed would likewise be for the multitude to acquire such good, and persevere in its possession. If such an ultimate end either of an individual man or a multitude were a corporeal one, namely, life and health of body, to govern would then be a physician’s charge. If that ultimate end were an abundance of wealth, then knowledge of economics would have the last word in the community’s government. If the good of the knowledge of truth were of such a kind that the multitude might attain to it, the king would have to be a teacher. It is, however, clear that the end of a multitude gathered together is to live virtuously. For men form a group for the purpose of living well together, a thing which the individual man living alone could not attain, and good life is virtuous life. Therefore, virtuous life is the end for which men gather together. The evidence for this lies in the fact that only those who render mutual assistance to one another in living well form a genuine part of an assembled multitude. If men assembled merely to live, then animals and slaves would form a part of the civil community. Or, if men assembled only to accrue wealth, then all those who traded together would belong to one city. Yet we see that only such are regarded as forming one multitude as are directed by the same laws and the same government to live well.

[107] Yet through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.

[From De regno, Book I ch 15 here]

In sum, the state (as all human endeavours) is directed ultimately to the pursuit of the supernatural end of the Beatific Vision. Failure to observe this ultimate end distorts the practice of government.

Further reading:

Roger Scruton's views often echo Kirk's. Scruton's essay on the role of religion in society is here.

We will approach again in this course the idea that there is an 'inner order of the soul'. A modern philosophical approach that is related to Aristotelian and Platonic ideas in this area is virtue ethics, an article on which is found here.


Next post: 15 August 2016


[Details of image: The Assumption of the Virgin by Botticini. Details here.]

Course on Russell Kirk: week 1

Welcome to the first proper week of the course on Russell Kirk. Preparatory material was given in last week's post.


This week's reading:

1) Essay by Russell Kirk: 'Ten Conservative Principles' here.
2) Essay by Lee Edwards: 'The Conservative Mind of Russell Kirk' here.

Commentary:

Kirk's breakthrough book was The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953) (see Edwards' essay linked to above) based on his University of St Andrews doctoral dissertation. Throughout his career, he was identified as a leading figure in American conservatism.

Accordingly, the first questions I'd like to consider to consider are:

a) What is the nature of Kirk's conservatism?
b) What is its relationship to Catholic social teaching?

a) As far as the nature of his conservatism is concerned, Kirk's essay above reduces it to ten principles, while Edwards' quotes a six principle version from The Conservative Mind. (My own view is that little hangs on the difference between these (and other) versions.) Kirk summarises conservatism in his essay as follows:

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives’ convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles; it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims.

b) Given the nature of this approach, how does it fit in with Catholic thinking?

At first sight, it may be difficult to see the connexions. I'll focus here on just two difficulties. First, Kirk makes no attempt to link in his thought here with an explicitly Catholic tradition. The key figure he mentions (and he remains a key figure in understanding Kirk's life and thought) is the Anglo-Irish (Protestant) philosopher, Edmund Burke. Although Kirk has been described as a post-modern conservative, one of the features of much post-modern thought (and indeed Kirk's own) is the embeddedness of thought within a tradition. If Kirk's thought is not embedded in Catholicism (so eg no Papal teachings, no reference to Aquinas), how can it be Catholic?

Secondly, and turning to the substance of his thought, Catholic social teaching might be thought to be based on natural law rather than 'a people's historic continuity' of tradition. (Any particular tradition may in principle fail to match Catholic understandings of natural law. Tradition is no guarantee.) Kirk's approach is based on cultural relativism and 'a body of sentiments'. Catholic teaching is (it might be argued) based on reason and divine authority.

In essence, exploring those two issues will take up the rest of the course! Feel free to explore these or other germane points in the comments box below.

Next session:

Next post will be on 8 August 2016.

The sessions from now on will (broadly) consist of taking the ten conservative principles and exploring them weekly in greater depth.

Exploring further (only if you want):

1) You can find out more about Edmund Burke and his thought here.
2) One modern Catholic thinker who has emphasised the role of tradition in philosophy and ethical thinking is Alasdair MacIntyre. You can find out more about his thought here.
3) A traditional Catholic understanding of natural law is here.

4) I shall be linking to online materials for this course. However, if you prefer 'proper' books, you may find the following interesting:

a) A generous selection of Kirk's writings may be found in the collection The Essential Russell Kirk here.

b) The recently published Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley Birzer is an excellent biography here.

These are the two works I'd recommend for a general interest in Kirk. More specialised:

c) On the relationship between Kirk and postmodernism, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk by Gerald J. Russello is excellent here.


Scottish snippet:

Kirk studied in St Andrews  between 1948 and 1952 for a DLitt. In Confessions of  a Bohemian Tory (1963) he writes:

The past walks in the thick St Andrews fog: for a man with a Gothic mind, few places on earth could have done more to quicken the imagination.

(The Essential Russell Kirk, 2007, p.302)

There's a hint here of at least a possible solution to the issues explored above: Kirk emphasises imagination as a key part of social thinking, and his imagination was soaked in (amongst other things) mediaeval Catholic St Andrews.

[Image: Cathedral ruins, St Andrews. Obtained here.]