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.]

George Mackay Brown (1921-1996)

George Mackay Brown died twenty years ago today.

Although this blog focuses mainly on Catholic social teaching, it's worth considering precisely how the arts -and in this case poetry- contribute to our life as social beings. At the funeral Mass, Archbishop Conti said the following:

I remember George describing the earth under the farmer's plough as being scourged -or was it the back of Christ he say being ploughed?...If my memory falters, it is because of George's characteristic interchanging of images, which revealed not only the twin sources of his deepest inspiration, namely his native Orkney and his adopted Catholicism, but also his easy integration of what for so many remain separate orders of life and faith. This is why his death at this season seems so right, for this is the season when the life of faith and the life of nature so marvellously correspond; when he who was hung up on the bare wood, and moistened it with his blood, made it to flower as the instrument of salvation; when He who ws buried in the dark earth, and shared it with its apparent sleep, burst forth from it revealing the new life of grace.

[From: Ron Ferguson's, George Mackay Brown: the Wound and the Gift, p.365]

Brown's work and Archbishop Conti's assessment of it above suggest two immediate thoughts for me. First, there is the link with Roger Scruton's use of the concept of the 'Lebenswelt' (roughly, the environment for human beings, constructed by our imaginative engagement with the world) and the need to repair and enrich it, in part through the use of literature and art. (For an article on this by Scruton, see here. For previous discussions of Scruton on this blog, see here.)

Secondly, and continuing with this first thought, Catholicism in Scotland can often be seen to be 'foreign' or 'other'. (The nineteenth century Protestant jibe of 'the Italian mission to the Irish' is relevant here as are more recent secularist attacks on the acceptability of Catholic understandings within a modern Scotland.) Brown reimagined Orkney as a Catholic landscape. He also reimagined Catholic Orkney as a central landscape rather than one marginal to Scottish and wider human concerns. Despite all the differences between them, Brown's enterprise here strikes me as at least analogous to Tolkien's construction of a 'legendarium'. Bradley Birzer's book, J R R Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth deals with this aspect in considerable detail:

[Birzer] also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T. S. Eliot, Dante and C. S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us every day, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.

[From review here.]

A small selection of Brown's poems, read by him, can be found here.

[Details of image: here.]