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.]