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:
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