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.]

New online course on Russell Kirk

Over the next twelve weeks, I shall be presenting a course of discussions on the thought of the American Catholic intellectual, Russell Kirk.

I'll say more during the course on why I think Kirk's thought is worth engaging with from a Catholic point of view. As a brief taster, however, I'd give the following reasons:

a) Russell Kirk is an important social thinker and figure within American conservatism. He was also a Catholic convert. It would be surprising, given such a combination, if nothing worthwhile resulted from reflection on his thought.

b) He was a conservative and an important historical figure, together with other Catholics such as William Buckley and Brent Bozell, in the revival of American conservative thought and activity after World War II. This US Catholic intellectual engagement with politics is significantly different from the Christian Democratic tradition of Continental Europe, or the more centre-left tradition of Christian social thought in the UK. This difference will allow us to revisit Catholic social teaching from a fresh perspective.

c) Kirk thought of himself as a Burkean thinker. One of my own intellectual interests is in the importance of the 'little platoons' of Edmund Burke's view of society and the resonance in Catholic social teaching's understandings of subsidiarity. Apart from this, there is much else to be gained from comparing and contrasting other aspects of Burkean conservatism with Catholic thinking in politics, particularly in the area of natural law.

Suggested preparatory reading:

George H. Nash: The Life and Legacy of Russell Kirk (here)

Wikipedia article: Russell Kirk (here)


Format of course:

The course will run online for eleven weeks from 1 August 2016 on. It will take the form of weekly posts with the opportunity to engage in discussion in the comment boxes. All necessary material will be found online, although suggestions for further reading off line will be made.


[Details of image: By Russell Kirk Center - http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirkbio.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1278459 ]

Catholic Social Teaching and the Labour Party

Pope Leo XIII

It probably hasn't escaped many people's notice that the Labour Party, both in the UK as a whole and in Scotland, has been undergoing some difficulties recently.

I came across a BBC Radio 4 programme on Catholic social teaching ('Left turn to Catholic Social Teaching?' archived here) last broadcast in 2012 which deals with a (then) resurgence in the teaching particularly in the Labour Party. Figures from 'Blue Labour' such as Maurice Glasman and John Cruddas figure prominently in the discussion. Well worth half an hour of your time.

Looking back on this from four years' distance, it's odd how quickly it's become dated. There are odd resonances with today (eg: a discontent with neo-liberalism and a concern for different patterns of political authority) but also striking distances (eg: the lack of much mention of the EU seems odd in a post Brexit scene; the debate around Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and the relationship between the party members and MPs is also absent). So while it's dated, I'm not sure that is a totally bad thing: the fundamental issues seem unchanged, but the absence of present day excitements probably allows some critical distance.

On the substance of the programme, for me, the key point is the need for a continuing engagement with fundamental issues of human flourishing which stands apart from the daily noise of political discussion, but which does affect that debate. I'm slightly suspicious about the branding of the Church's insights into politics as a package of 'Catholic Social Teaching', with its foundation charter only arriving in 1891 with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. (This disquiet is in fairness addressed in the programme.) Whilst this does have the merit of making it easy to present as a package, it does raise deep questions about authority and application. Why should non-Catholics accept a Catholic package? (Indeed, isn't its status as 'Catholic' more likely provide a reason for its dismissal?) Perhaps more importantly, by presenting it as a package (or 'gift' as it is described in the programme), the role of practical reason in the development and application of those principles is obscured. Among other issues, this tends to sever deep connections between Catholic social teaching and other modern intellectual movements such as communitarianism and virtue ethics.

That said, the programme ends with the question: 'Will we be able to adapt to profound changes without social upheaval?' This takes up a theme that Maurice Glasman had addressed earlier in the programme (about 8 mins in) where he talks about the need for 'leadership from below' and 'negotiated change' and links both of these to insights from Catholic social teaching particularly on subsidiarity and solidarity  Not a bad focus for present reflection.


Further material:

Dr Adrian Pabst is a leading intellectual figure behind Blue Labour. A recent discussion between him and a critic of Blue Labour can be found here.

Catholic social teaching's influence is certainly not confined to 'the Left'. For example, Phillip Blond (featured in the above programme) has been influential in putting forward 'Red Toryism'. He is Director of the Think Tank Respublica whose website is here.

Dr Anna Rowlands is featured on the programme where she summarizes Catholic social teaching as based on the four principles of dignity of persons, the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity. A more extended interview with her can be found here.

New course October 2016

 

From the Institute's main website here:


Making something out of 'a whole lot of nothing': the Dominican contribution to teaching philosophy.
19:00, Mon 3rd Oct, 2016

St Albert's Catholic Chaplaincy Edinburgh

Free.

To celebrate 800 years since the bull of foundation of the Dominican Order by Pope Honorius III, the Albertus will be offering a series of three talks this autumn on Dominican influence on the teaching of the sciences.

The lecture by Fr John O'Connor O.P. on "Making something out of 'a whole lot of nothing': the Dominican contribution to teaching philosophy" will be the second talk in this series. Further details on the other lectures in the series will follow shortly...


[Image: 'St Thomas Aquinas teaching a group of Dominican students c.1325' sourced here]

European Referendum: final week

Many no doubt have already made up their minds or even voted by post. For those of us still struggling to discern the correct way to vote, there are my final suggestions:

1) Pray:

"Lord, grant us wisdom that we may walk with integrity, guarding the path of justice, and knowing the protection of your loving care for all". (From the English and Welsh bishops here. Apologies to the Scottish bishops if I've missed their equivalent advice! )

2) Reflect:

a) The advice from the English and Welsh bishops is simple. It is to ask yourself:

How in the light of the Gospel, can my vote best serve the common good?

The common good is defined by the Compendium of Social Doctrine as:

 The principle of the common good, to which every aspect of social life must be related if it is to attain its fullest meaning, stems from the dignity, unity and equality of all people. According to its primary and broadly accepted sense, the common good indicates “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily”.[s.164 here]

b) Although a non-Catholic source, the advice from political scientists Paul Cairney and Andrew Glencross strikes me as being some of the most helpful I've seen on the actual process of decision (here).

c) The report of the Catholic Voices debate on the referendum provides a handy checklist of some of the issues Catholics ought to be thinking about (here).

Happy Europe Day!

Happy Europe Day!

I confess that I hadn't realised until now that 9 May was celebrated as Europe Day (details here) in honour of the Schuman Declaration of 1950 (here)  proposing what became the European Coal and Steel Community and eventually the European Union.

The declaration is relatively dull (text here). But since Europe Day is apparently sometimes known as Schuman Day, it's perhaps worth exploring Robert Schuman's role a little more deeply. (The Wikipedia biography of him is here.) A rather fuller account of Schuman's ideals in promoting the EU can be found in his Strasbourg 1949 speech here:

We are carrying out a great experiment, the fulfillment of the same recurrent dream that for ten centuries has revisited the peoples of Europe: creating between them an organization putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace. The Roman church of the Middle Ages failed finally in its attempts that were inspired by humane and human preoccupations. Another idea, that of a world empire constituted under the auspices of German emperors was less disinterested; it already relied on the unacceptable pretensions of a ‘Führertum’ (domination by dictatorship) whose 'charms' we have all experienced.

Audacious minds, such as Dante, Erasmus, Abbé de St-Pierre, Rousseau, Kant and Proudhon, had created in the abstract the framework for systems that were both ingenious and generous. The title of one of these systems became the synonym of all that is impractical: Utopia, itself a work of genius, written by Thomas More, the Chancellor of Henry VIII, King of England.
...
Today,  the commencement {of the Council of Europe} is characterized by a timorousness which many people will find disappointing. In this period while our States have not yet consented to renouncing any part of their sovereignty, and, when they make international decisions, they do not submit themselves willingly to each other as an engagement that they are fully observing their decisions, the debates of the Parliamentary Assembly {of the Council of Europe} can still have a moral and psychological effect. At least I hope so. They can influence the Governments and national Parliaments but they will create by themselves neither rights nor obligations.  We are still at the start of things. We would do well to bridle our impatience. If not, we are likely to make the doubters more distrustful and what is more serious, endanger not only the experiment but also the whole idea of a united Europe.

As is probably obvious from that extract, Schuman was a devout Catholic and much influenced by the social teaching of the Church. (An article on the Catholic background to the EU is here.) He mentions Dante as one of his inspirations in that Strasbourg speech and Dante's De Monarchia (putting aside its other concern of the relative ranking of Papacy and Emperor) also envisages the merits of international government:

Wherever strife is a possibility, in that place must be judgment; otherwise imperfection would exist without its perfecting agent. This could not be, for God and Nature are not wanting in necessary things. It is self-evident that between any two princes, neither of whom owes allegiance to the other, controversy may arise either by their own fault or by the fault of their subjects. For such, judgment is necessary. And inasmuch as one owing no allegiance to the other can recognize no authority in him (for an equal cannot control an equal), there must be a third prince with more ample jurisdiction, who may govern both within the circle of his right. This prince will be or will not be a Monarch. If he is, our purpose is fulfilled; if not, he will again have a coequal beyond the circle of his jurisdiction, and again a third prince will be required. And thus either the process will be carried to infinity, which is impossible, or that primal and highest judge will be reached, by whose judgments all disputes are settled mediately or immediately. And this judge will be Monarch, or Emperor. Monarchy is therefore indispensable to the world, and this truth the Philosopher saw when he said, “Things have no desire to be wrongly ordered; inasmuch as a multitude of Princedoms is wrong, let there be one Prince.”

(Chapter X, Book I. Full text here.)

Bearing in mind the coming referendum, the general lines of a powerful argument in favour of European integration under one government can be seen here. But what might be the arguments against it? It strikes me that there are two paths here. First, and in principle, you might reject the very idea of the benefits of international institutions. (This might take a strong form (denial of the benefits of any international institutionalised order) or a weak form (denial of the benefits of any form of government beyond the nation). Whatever the merits of such an approach, it is relatively difficult to reconcile with Cathiolic social teaching and I therefore put it aside, at least for now. Secondly, you might argue that, in fact, this particular institution of the EU has turned out to be a counterproductive form of institutionalisation.  Again, this might take two forms: a denial of the effectiveness of the institutions; or a denial of the more concrete forms that the general principles have been realised by in the current EU. Questions of the effectiveness of institutions are rather tricky to deal with in a blog, but the often heard criticism that the EU's regulations dampen economic development would be an example of that line of criticism. Having noted the possibility, I again put it aside for now.

This leaves us with the criticism that the EU as it has developed, has adopted concrete principles that are damaging either specifically to the UK or more generally to European countries. One example of this criticism is contained in the interview linked previously with Alan Fimister (here) :

However, its [ie the EU's] embracing of the culture of death would have appalled him. Schuman’s slightly more ambitious goals also led him to appreciate more vividly than Maritain the possible consequences of the corruption of his vision. “An anti-Christian democracy,” he said, “would be a caricature ending in anarchy or tyranny.”


Another criticism would be that the form of international government actually realised by the EU is antithetical to the principles of subsidiarity and nationhood envisaged by the Church:

The rights of nations are nothing but “‘human rights' fostered at the specific level of community life”. A nation has a “fundamental right to existence”, to “its own language and culture, through which a people expresses and promotes ... its fundamental spiritual ‘sovereignty”', to “shape its life according to its own traditions, excluding, of course, every abuse of basic human rights and in particular the oppression of minorities”, to “build its future by providing an appropriate education for the younger generation”. The international order requires a balance between particularity and universality, which all nations are called to bring about, for their primary duty is to live in a posture of peace, respect and solidarity with other nations.

[From section 157, Compendium of Social Doctrine here]

Finally, in view of the rather secularised environment we now inhabit, Schuman's reflections on Christianity and democracy make rather interesting reading:

This is where the Christian doctrine comes in. Democracy owes its existence to Christianity. It was born the day that man was called to realise in this temporary life, the dignity of each human person, in his individual liberty in the respect of the rights of each and by the practice of brotherly love to all. Never before Christ were such ideas formulated. Democracy is therefore bound to Christianity, doctrinally and chronologically. It took shape with it by stages and with periods of stumbling, sometimes at the price of errors and falling back into barbarism.
[Full piece here.]


[Image details: here]