Kirk and Conservatism

A new book by W. Wesley McDonald is coming out about Russell Kirk, the man who essentially established the word "conservative" as a political term. Although I don't believe Kirk ever wrote anything about Catholicism (of which he was a convert to) one gets the distinct feeling from reading a few of his works that he would have made a fine apologist for the faith.

What Kirk extracted from Burke's thought -- and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot -- was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able to provide a real measure of freedom. Reformers and revolutionaries might appeal to disembodied, universal concepts to justify changing the world, or to draw up blueprints for a new society. But for Kirk, what must be cultivated was not reason but "the moral imagination" -- a resonant, if ambiguous notion that Mr. McDonald devotes much of his book to elucidating.

The "reason" that Kirk found so objectionable, writes Mr. McDonald, caused liberals to define themselves "as enemies of authority, prejudice, tradition, custom, and habit." For liberal rationality, the social order was a contract among individuals "bound together ... not by love or duty, but rational, enlightened self-interest."

By contrast, Kirk's "moral imagination" enabled people to see their lives as part of, in Burke's words, "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." The obligation to preserve old institutions and ways of life -- and to change them, if at all, only very slowly -- was not a matter of nostalgia. "The individual is foolish," wrote Kirk in The Conservative Mind, "but the species is wise." We have inherited from the past "the instruments which the wisdom of the species employs to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites."