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.]