Since the nation’s founding a salutary tension has informed
American political thought—a tension between the abstract,
universal truths expressed in the first part of the Declaration of
Independence and the particular, experience-based prudence of
the Constitution. The one establishes moral imperatives (and
defines a just government) while the other establishes a new order
out of the lessons of the past wedded to the cultural conventions
of the American people. While the tension itself has fostered some
of the most productive political thought in the American tradition,
the pressure to end the tension, to simplify the American
ideal, and to articulate to ourselves and a listening world a
defining principle, has led to a notable imbalance. From the right,
perhaps more than from the left, we hear that America is a nation
of ideas, by which they mean the abstract natural rights articulated
in the Declaration of Independence, and these ideas supply
the defining meaning of our collective identity, the single cord
that binds the nation together. Not an ethnos, not even a patchwork
of peoples wedded together by a common history and by the
cords of affection that come from generations of reciprocity, the
United States is an idea.
To the degree that this one side of our identity eclipses the
other, America as a nation becomes less important. The idea is
more important than the nation that it birthed and the nation
serves as a useful vehicle for establishing in practice these ideals,
first domestically and then globally. The very universality of these
principles, disconnected intellectually from a constraining context,
makes the expansion of these ideals, insofar as it is possible,
a moral imperative. This moral imperative has justified a good
many changes in our Constitution (and interpretations of our
Constitution), to say nothing of the growth of the federal government.
Equally important, the natural rights ideals of the Declaration
served as the stated reason for entering into World War I and
has, ever since, played a very important rhetorical role in our
nation’s foreign policy.
In part because of the simple clarity of the natural rights
appeal, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as
well as an enduring belief that all humans are created equal, have
become axioms in our democracy. The other side of the tension—
the one that emphasizes particular and unique cultural conventions—
does not, by contrast, reduce to self-evident propositions
and, indeed, can appear to be at odds with the universal principles
that seem so self-evident. To make matters worse, those who have
been the most ardent supporters of the more particularistic view
of American identity (such as some of the Southern States Rights
advocates) have been on the losing side of some of the nation’s
most defining struggles. The resulting trajectory of the American
right has been toward a conservation of the natural rights tradition,
and with it the appeals to an expansive freedom that
comports well with an increasingly democratic electorate. Russell
Kirk, better than any other American thinker, warned about this
danger.
The danger to conservative principles is not the preservation
of our nation’s natural rights tradition but rather the defense of
natural rights in their simple, axiomatic form, absent the complex
view of human nature in the context of a providential plan dimly
understood. But the cultural and philosophical context that has
defined, refined, and chastened the American understanding of
natural rights requires long cultivation and a willingness, rarely
evident in democracies, to think beyond slogans. Russell Kirk’s
greatest gift to American political thought is his brilliant articulation
and cultivation of a rich cultural patrimony that helps
define the meaning of our most cherished ideals from within a
context that is both historically textured and open to the transcendental.
Fifty years ago, near the middle of a century of dramatic,
often violent, change, Kirk penned America’s greatest work of
political and cultural preservation.
The great task before Kirk then, and before us now, is the
cultivation of conservative thoughts, dispositions, and, most of
all, affections in conservatives. The appeal to liberty, so central to
any construction of the American self, has, for contemporary
“conservatives,” increasingly come to mean liberation from the
past (and the prescriptive role of tradition, habits, inherited
culture) and a corresponding emphasis upon the power of human
reason. While contemporary conservatives usually possess a fear
of concentrated power, an enduring suspicion that the individual
needs some form of restraint, and even a willingness to acknowledge
a creator, their political appeals share in the utilitarian
intellectual currency of our time. They have accepted the twin
moral objectives of our age, equality and freedom, and they have
embraced an increasingly global uniformity—a standardization in
political culture and economic systems.
In short, contemporary conservatives do not possess the
dispositions or the ideas of conservatives, simply understood. Of
Kirk’s original six canons of conservative thought, none sound so
alien to contemporary ears as the second, which reads, in part:
“Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human
existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism,
and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.”1 Because this
“affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human
existence” is so uncultivated while the “uniformity, egalitarianism,
and utilitarian aims” of our own system are so unquestioned,
we are in more desperate need of The Conservative Mind today
than we were half a century ago. What was then more readily an
act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.
The second canon begins with an affirmation, but one that
stands in contrast to the others, for Kirk did not write that
conservatives believe in (or even affirm) the variety and mystery
of human existence, but rather that they have an affection for
variety and mystery—conservatism is less ideology than aesthetics,
less about beliefs than the imagination that orders those
beliefs.2 Kirk understood this affection to be life-affirming,
emerging out of an inherited and powerful vision about human
nature and divine purpose, about life as it comes to us rather than
the life that we might engineer. It is the love of a creature for the
creation in which he participates and in the context of which he
gets his purpose, his reason for being. It is the joy of the spiritual
outdoors—boundless, beautiful, and incomprehensible—rather
than the delusion of a materialist paradise where the creature has
become creator of a rather pinched world.
Humans are complex, possessing natures that are alike across
cultures and time, but shaped into unique persons. Each distinct,
but none independent, these humans participate in a single story,
a providential plan, while finding their roles in the smaller stories
which they help write. They belong to a closed universe, with fixed
universal ideals like beauty and truth, and yet they are free agents
who live for themselves and act according to their own choices.
They have dominion over the earth, and the things of the earth,
but the earth is not their home. Kirk’s anthropology depends on
understanding both the universality of human nature and the
variety of human culture.
If, as so many moderns affirm, we come to know what is most
essential about humans by abstracting humans from any tainting
or complicating social or political context and thereby isolating
their desires and fears, then a rational, constructivist approach to
building both social and political institutions is quite plausible and
attractive. Humans, thus abstracted from their context, become
more or less interchangeable, making possible a prescription for
the best social and political institutions that is tailored to this
stripped down human and universally applicable. But Kirk and the
conservatives reject this reductive and rationalist construction of
human nature. Humans are social. This is not merely a tendency
toward being with one’s own kind; it is rather the means of
individual development of one’s humanity. It might be more
precise to think of humans as cultural beings rather than simply
social beings, for it is not the working together toward common
or communal ends or the pleasure of social intercourse that
makes us distinctively humans. We are who we are as individuals
(as humans) because of the cultural forms we inherit. We learn a
language that structures our perceptions of our world and make
possible deliberation about the Good. We inherit customs, rituals,
and institutions that express symbolically the meaning for our
individual and collective lives. It is not the natural man where one
finds human meaning or human purpose—meaning and purpose
are felt by the individual through his participation in a living
culture. While the cultures vary and the customs, rituals, institutions,
laws, and goods differ, it is through a particular culture that
any human has access to the defining and universal characteristics
of human nature. Unlike other animals, humans must express the
meaning of their existence even as they struggle to understand the
role they should play in the drama of existence. All humans do this
through particular, concrete cultural forms since there is no
“natural” or instinctual way to answer these basic human needs.
It need not follow, however, that a culture cannot be universal.
If one stresses a set of universal principles, like natural rights,
equality before the law, or any set of abstract principles that one
proposes to be universally true, then one might hope to establish
universal acceptance of the principles as well as the political and
social institutions that foster or express these principles. Perhaps
then we could live in a global village. But for Kirk and the
conservatives the problems with this are many. First, while
humans live under a universal or natural law, they recognize it
dimly through very limited and necessarily particular experience.
Any abstracting of these principles, shorn of their cultural context,
leaves a very thin normative residue—too thin a foundation
upon which to establish a universal culture. Second, even the
truth that a culture universalizes has its articulation in a culturally
encrusted idiom, blending the normative insight inextricably with
the particular experience of a living culture. Third, and most
important, humans gain their orientation, develop distinctive
personalities, and understand their lives to have temporal and
transcendent meaning, by participating in a rooted community
where they understand themselves to be part of a larger and yet
tangible story.
On this subject Kirk’s thinking borrows heavily from Edmund
Burke. Too rich with subtleties to explore adequately in the space
allowed us here, we might understand the sinews of Kirk’s thought
by examining briefly a few texts to which Kirk returned often to
express his meanings. One is apt to find in Kirk’s writings,
sometimes without much elaboration or even attribution,
affirmations of the “little platoons”—a reference to a passage in
the Reflections where Burke wrote: “To be attached to the
subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the
first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the
first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love of our
country and to mankind.”3 Burke emphasized here at least two
things. First, that affections or love, so important to a healthy
society and polity, issues from belonging, from being attached or
bound to, a small part (or subdivision) of society. A certain kind
of love comes from being thus bound—it is the love of duty, the
sense that the real, flawed people with whom one has continuous
dealings, are yours. These affections are not fleeting since they
are not products of preferences or agreement but spring from
the continuous reminders that these people have shaped one’s
self. For all the distinctiveness of individual personality, living
in the little platoons of society reminds the individual that he is
not who he is by his own effort—that he owes his being, his
tastes, affections, and his very personality to a complex social
organism.
Second, Burke stressed that the love we have for more
abstract entities like nation and humankind are properly cultivated
through local affections. It is love of a real neighbor, with
all his flaws and peculiarities, that makes it possible for one to love
one’s neighbor (understood abstractly) as one’s self. It is affection
for one’s community that makes it possible to love one’s nation,
recognizing by participation in the part that it, in turn, participates
in a greater whole. For Kirk, it is important to keep before
us the understanding that it is THROUGH the part that we can
understand and feel affection for the whole. Those who seek to
reverse it, by proclaiming that they are citizens of the world, love
an abstraction without feeling any kinship with the particular
human standing next to them. To love mankind abstractly makes
individual humans expendable. But more to the point here, to live
among the peculiar people of one’s own platoon, to grow by
imperceptible degrees to have affections for those one may not
like, is to cultivate a love of variety and difference and a particular
kind of tolerance that springs from the real connectedness
between real but unlike people. By contrast, to cultivate a love for
an abstract concept of humans, human potential, and human
community, is to breed intolerance for those who fit not the
mould. To love the particular person, with his many idiosyncrasies,
breeds less of a desire for wholesale change while to love the
abstract “man” necessitates that transformation of real people to
fit the ideal.
Of course these little platoons, to say nothing of the larger
cultures of which they are a part, differ in important ways from
other platoons, other cultures. In one sense, then, they are not
natural. Each one is rooted in experiences, different in important
respects from others, going back generations. Out of those
experiences people have attempted to satisfy human desires and
to secure natural rights through human “contrivance.” Government
is just such a contrivance as are the many institutions,
habits, and prejudices that give a particular coloring to a culture.
Their artificiality is hardly a deficiency. These cultural artifacts
adorn a people—the best cultures craft artifices that make
themselves more beautiful, that inspire virtue, that encourage
gentleness and fair dealing toward their fellows. The naked self,
the person utterly bereft of the customs and prejudices that
govern exchanges between people, is a sorry animal indeed—
small, selfish, and crude. Burke, while railing against the revolutionary
forces then burying the chivalric code, wrote, famously
that “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the
superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral
imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies
as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature,
and to raise it to a dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded
as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated.”4
The section in which this passage is located is complicated and
rhetorically sophisticated, deserving an analysis extending many
pages. What is important here is Burke’s understanding of human
nature and human dignity. Human nature needs covering. The
“decent drapery of life” is not, however, just for hiding, though it
does that, but for elevating us. Our traditions, our prejudices—
our culture—give a dignity to us that we cannot have in a state of
nature or through the ideas of a single individual. Institutions, and
the habits and ideas they cultivate, shape us into the little platoons
and give us purposes higher than ourselves.
The higher purposes toward which these cultural forms point
partake in both the variety and the mystery for which Kirk
expressed such affection. One catches a glimpse of this point in
a passage from Burke that Kirk quoted at length. I’ve provided
a bit more of the passage than did Kirk to establish better the
context.
Society is indeed a contract…. It is to be looked on with other
reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient
only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable
nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art;
a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of
such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it
becomes 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. Each contract of each particular state is but
a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking
the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and
invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the
inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures,
each in their appointed place.5
Here is Burke’s universalism and his particularlism wedded.
First, the social contract concerns not just the protection of
individual rights but is an expression of a partnership among
generations of a living culture. Among the peoples of the world
there are many contracts and the nature of each contract, the look
of their partnership, differs according to the peculiar circumstances
and experiences of a given people. Because the specific
contract reflects distinctive and unreproduceable characteristics
of a culture, any attempt to impose the specific forms of that
contract on another culture would be, well, unnatural. However,
“each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great
primeval contract of eternal society.” Just as there is no understanding
of the precise nature of the contract governing one’s own
culture since the culture lives for many generations and faces
many unforeseeable circumstances, so there is no full human
comprehension of the eternal contract, the providential plan by
which God links the visible and invisible world. By means of our
moral imagination, which helps us understand in some limited
fashion the whole of which we physically perceive a part, we
recognize that the diverse stories of human history constitute, by
means mysterious, a single story called History.
For Kirk the mystery of human existence is connected to his
faith in Providence. We are struck by our very existence, by the
fact of finite humans reaching out toward the infinite. The very
scope of one’s own culture, the complexity of one’s own time, even
the deep unfathomability of one’s own soul, leave one finally
perplexed about the nature of the immediate story in which one
plays a part. We cannot understand fully (and only partially with
great effort) how the choices of distant ancestors shaped the kind
of people we’ve become and the culture we embrace. But we
embrace it, with its dark and mysterious origins and its tortuous
progress, as ours. And when we are at our best we feel as though
we have received a gracious gift of culture without knowing
precisely who to thank. So much more is the sense of thanksgiving
for the sensitive soul, like Russell Kirk, who recognizes that
beyond these particulars which he can experience directly, there
is an even greater grace dispensed by a God who turns staggering
diversity toward a common divine purpose. How could he who
believes such a thing not express affection for the “proliferating
variety and mystery of human existence?”
II.
Because Kirk’s conservatism was reactionary, because the contours
of his affirmations took shape out of confrontation with
innovations and ideologies with which he contended, a proper
examination requires a study of his aversions. Indeed, his second
canon of conservative thought includes an affirmation (variety
and mystery) followed by an aversion: “as opposed to the narrowing
uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical
systems.” To understand better the contrast we might note a
persistent dualism in Kirk’s work between complexity (which
breeds diversity) and simplicity (which breeds standardization).
These contrasting imaginations are most evident with foundational
subjects like human nature. For Kirk humans are made in
God’s image and are therefore good, while nonetheless suffering
from a primordial fall that separated them from their God and
planted evil in their hearts. As fallen creatures of great ingenuity,
humans need the structure of a strong social and political order
to instill habits and prejudices that inspire virtues. Moreover, as
social and cultural beings, humans need the community, the city,
the regime to actualize their moral and rational possibilities. For
Kirk, following Aristotle, the community, the culture, is prior to
the individual.
By contrast, most modern anthropologies are distinguished
by a reductive clarity. Modern social contract theorists, for
instance, sought the unalloyed individual as he would appear
absent any institutions, and for the benefit of this individual—his
wants, his fears, and his rights—they would construct a political
system. This system has no higher purpose than the needs, so
constructed, of the people. If human needs there are that cannot
be deduced from this hypothetical individual in a state of nature,
they have no status in modern political systems. Of course, most
conspicuously, modern systems begin with the individual qua
individual. Beginning with this abstracted person, modern ideologues
could readily discover “rights” belonging to the individual
(anywhere and anytime) found in a state of nature but mostly
abused through history by real political systems.
Kirk’s Burkean emphasis upon the person in context rather
than the abstract individual made him concerned with the casual
use of the language of natural rights. Kirk readily acknowledged
that humans have natural rights so long as these applied to real
humans, in the context of a rich moral economy in which rights (as
well as liberties) find their particular expression consistent with
circumstances. Kirk wrote that “natural rights do not exist independent
of circumstances; what may be a right on one occasion
and for one man, may be unjust folly for another man at a different
time.”6 What protections humans get from violations of the moral
order come through institutions that have evolved over long
periods. Indeed, Kirk noted approvingly Burke’s belief that
“natural right is human custom conforming to divine intent.”7
Such a claim has no place in modern definitions of natural right
because it relies on something as non-rational as custom, which
is not organized around an abstract ideal.
In the Anglo-American context the most vigorous simplifiers
were the Utilitarians who, at least, displayed the virtue of rigorous
consistency. Discarding all thoughts of a non-material world, of
providence, of spiritual needs, the Benthamites could employ an
analytical madness, reducing human life to a series of pleasurable
or painful events. Because humans are more or less alike, excepting
the distortions of an inherited superstition, the Utilitarians
could design, by the dictates of reason, a society and polity best
equipped to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. They made a
fetish out of utility, out of function, discarding as rubbish all
adornments that served no “rational” purpose, all technologies
and ways of living they deemed inefficient. Kirk captured the
utilitarian spirit, and the danger of its apparently benign affections
when he wrote that “the Benthamites despised gothic
irregularity and variety; they yearned after the utilitarian squares
and boulevards of social planning. The Utilitarians projected long
and costly vistas; but at the end of every avenue, the Romantics
spied the gallows.”8
Note Kirk’s emphasis upon what these social planners “despised”
and what they “yearned after.” Theirs is a world modeled
after a machine rather than a living organism. Machines are
products of human ingenuity, requiring continuous tinkering, but
possessing no mystery and pointing to nothing greater, to no
higher ideal than production and efficiency. By contrast these
planners despise that which eludes complete human comprehension,
that which produces wanton variety at the expense of a
controlled efficiency, and that which suggests a higher ideal than
sterile pleasure. Kirk contrasted the planned community, the
creation of public space as the planner would have it, with the
uncontrolled variety that issues from piecemeal change where
people seek to make something new without destroying completely
the old. The spirit of the planners leads to “the gallows”
because their abstract ideal tolerates no diversity and cannot
make sense of the complexity of the human soul.
If a crude Benthamism is more or less dead, Kirk would argue
that the utilitarian spirit lives on, often in more sophisticated
garb. It has become part of the fabric of our culture. But the great
danger to the American order is democracy, which threatens to
undo the complex cultural and political mechanism designed to
safeguard both order and liberty. Indeed, the American story fits
too neatly the modern process of moving from complexity (which
fosters variety) to simplicity (which fosters standardization and
uniformity), in ideas and ideals, in institutional forms, and in
political process. Kirk noted the pervasive fear among the nation’s
founders of democracy, the dangerous impulses of which they
sought to check. None were so concerned as the fearful and
deeply conservative Fisher Ames. Kirk summarized Ames’ political
thought by emphasizing that the proper object of government
is “the protection of property and the tranquility of society.
Democracy fails on both these essentials; for democracy—pure
democracy, toward which he perceived America slipping—is
founded upon the quicksand of idyllic fancy.”9 Ames, Kirk emphasized,
feared the desire for simplicity that he associated with
democracy. Kirk agreed with Ames that simplicity in politics is
despotism.
American leaders during the age of the nation’s founding
represented a good many views, including those deeply influenced
by Enlightenment dreams and those, like Ames’, which reacted to
almost all innovation with dyspeptic consistency. But the institutional
order this generation fathered was, to Kirk’s mind, a
remarkable accommodation of novel circumstances to both ancient
wisdom and American experiences. And if this generation
produced a “conservative” political order it also produced America’s
paradigmatic conservative, John Adams. It is hardly surprising,
therefore, that the Adams that emerges from the pages of The
Conservative Mind is much like Burke—indeed, Kirk sometimes
found Burke’s words the best means of expressing Adams’ ideas.
But their differences were also important: “Where Burke talked
of prejudice, prescription, and natural rights, Adams attacked the
doctrine of perfectibility and the idea of a unitary state.”10 The
American national experiment very much depended on crafting
and maintaining political and institutional complexity (focusing
on checks and balances especially) while fighting the social
tendency toward equality and uniformity.
Following Burke and John Adams, Kirk argued that:
Man being complex, his government cannot be simple. The
humanitarian theorists who contrive projects of ingenious simplicity
must arrive, before long, at the crowning simplicity of
despotism. They begin with a licentious individualism, every
man deprived of ancient sanctions and thrown upon his own
moral resources; and when this state of things turns out intolerable,
as it must, then they are driven to a ponderous and intolerant
collectivism; central direction endeavors to compensate for the
follies of reckless moral and economic atomism. Revolutionary
idealists of this stamp are faithful to simplicity, though to
nothing else in heaven or earth. They cannot abide any medium
between absolute freedom and absolute consolidation.11
To the great credit of those who wrote the Constitution (a group
that, conspicuously, included neither Jefferson or Adams), the
United States possessed a government design that reflected a
belief in the complexity of human nature, that supplied ingenious
checks on all sources of power, that included no brief for radical
equality or individualism, and aimed at protecting the ordered
liberty of the American people. Such a Constitution, Kirk argued,
“has been the most successful conservative device in the history
of the world.”12 Nonetheless, the United States was conspicuous
by its relative absence of restrictive social classes, by its expansive
suffrage, and by circumstances that encouraged an expansive view
of both equality and individualism. How, in these circumstances,
to guard against the tendency toward simplicity?
For Adams, probably more than for most of the other
conservatives who populate Kirk’s book, one of the safeguards of
a republican form of government is the cultivation of virtue in its
citizens. Kirk leaves largely unexplored this component of Adams’
thought. Whatever else it includes, the cultivation of virtue
requires social and local institutions that foster a recognition of
interdependence, a devotion to inherited forms, a sense of honor
that makes one responsible to the opinion of one’s community,
and a desire to defer to those whose knowledge, experience, and
character better fit them for political leadership.
Probably more important to Kirk, since he devotes more
space to it, is Adams’ emphasis on “prescriptive liberties.” Adams
championed liberties rather than Liberty. Recognizing the “diversity
of human character [and] variety of human action”13 Adams
rejected a liberty that applies to the individual abstractly, emphasizing
instead that liberty “is made of particular local and personal
liberties.” Pushing further in his analysis of Adams, Kirk argued
that the “prerequisite of just government…is recognition of local
liberties and interests and diversities and their safeguarding in the
state.”14 These liberties, these particular and rooted (and therefore
bound) liberties, are the real goals of a political system and
it is “political complexity which shelters liberty.” Moreover, an
emphasis upon local liberties, rather than inalienable rights,
forms part of the political complexity that prevents the tyranny so
much associated by the founders with the idea of “democracy.” At
its genesis, and for more than a generation, the United States had
resisted the temptation toward an unmixed government, which
Adams believed would lead to despotism. But from the beginning,
and ever since, the greatest danger to both liberty and order has
been the attraction of democracy shorn of the checks and
balances of a republican form of government.
For Alexis de Tocqueville no checks can prevent the American
democracy from forming a unitary power more ominous than
anything found in Adams’ nightmares. He dismissed the checks in
which others put such stock, claiming that no meaningful difference
separates representative and direct democracy.15 If
Tocqueville was right, the American republic was, at heart, a
democracy. But the unitary or singular quality of this democracy
springs from the mild totalitarianism of a ubiquitous social order.
The society had become unitary in this democracy, subsuming the
political order. He wrote, for instance, that
Society acts by itself and on itself. Power exists only within its
bosom; almost no one is encountered who dares to conceive and
above all to express the idea of seeking it elsewhere. The people
participate in drafting of laws by the choice of the legislators, in
their application, by the election of the agents of the executive
power; one can say that they govern themselves…. The people
reign over the American political world as does God over the
universe. They are the cause and the end of all things; everything
comes out of them and everything is absorbed into them.16
Later, at the beginning of the chapter “On the Omnipotence of the
Majority in the United States and Its Effects” he declared: “It is
the very essence of democratic governments that the empire of
the majority is absolute; for in democracies, outside the majority
there is nothing that resists it.”17
Whatever Ames and Adams might have meant by the unitary
state, one senses that they never thought to push their analysis to
such a Procrustean conclusion. Of course Tocqueville’s classic,
Democracy in America, is too rich a work to know only one
interpretation, and indeed Kirk read perhaps more hope into
Tocqueville’s book than others might. But a few key arguments
about both democracy as such and democracy in America are
important relative to the fears expressed by Ames, Adams, and
Kirk about the elimination of political and social complexity and
the rise of a simplified order that fostered materialism, centralization,
and standardization.18
The “generative fact” that shaped all social (and thereby
political) relations in America, Tocqueville declared in a rather
bold opening paragraph, was “equality of conditions.”19 The
decisive change in history, looked at from a certain political
perspective, is the rejection of inherent and meaningful inequalities.
The belief inherent among democrats of equality has roots,
no doubt, in the social contract theorists who stipulated that in
nature all humans have equal rights and that no person may
rightfully rule another without the consent of the person being
ruled. In part, at least, Tocqueville meant to suggest that equality
of conditions entail the right to self-rule. A belief in equality thus
understood separates people who in earlier societies had intimate
but hierarchical relationships involving ruling and being ruled,
placing them together on an equal plane but having no obligations
except those duly agreed upon. This social condition of equality
leads to the other great principle of democracy, sovereignty of the
people.
Given a belief in abstract equality, no person can accept as
natural the rule of another. However, as an equal part of the
“people” one recognizes in the majority a legitimate exercise of
power since one is obeying one’s self. Recognizing the limitations
necessarily imposed on an individual to understand complex
public matters, one is bound to trust public opinion as the surest
guide. In a democracy, Tocqueville argued, there is no challenging
of public opinion, which operates as an invisible but unchallengeable
power in support of the regime. “As long as the majority is
doubtful,” Tocqueville wrote, “one speaks; but when it has irrevocably
pronounced, everyone becomes silent and friends and
enemies alike then seem to hitch themselves to its wagon.”20
The irresistible strength of the majority springs from the
social power consequent of a belief in equality of condition. The
consequences are many and complicated, but they include the
tendency of an individual to see in the operation of the government
his own will writ large and to, as a result, tolerate no
independent entity. The people can tolerate a great many institutions
that appear independent so long as the people have, in a
sense, granted it the appearance of independence.21 But a democracy
cannot allow the ancient liberties of church or guild or any
institutions that might have known, in an age of inequality, their
own sphere. The trajectory of democracies is, therefore, toward
ever greater centralization and standardization. A democracy
eliminates variety in thought, sentiment, and action, though it
does so without the external force of ancient tyrannies. The force
that gives a democracy complete power is internal—social.
The equality and individualism of the democratic age bring
psychic costs. Identity is a more tenuous matter in a society
without fixed relationships and inherited roles. One is equal with
one’s fellow, and one is like one’s fellow, but who precisely is the
person in the mirror and what does his life mean? The anxiety of
this life is heightened by a tendency in democracy to stress the
material world and to reject the traditions, rituals, ceremonies
that once expressed symbolically one’s relationship with realms
visible and invisible. Cut off from traditions, and from any sense
that the past has a purchase on one’s life or its meaning, the
individual becomes preoccupied with success in the present.
Material success is the only tangible marker of success in an age
of equality, making one’s participation in the competitive market
central to one’s sense of identity and purpose. The mysterious
incorporation of the living, dead, and unborn before an allpowerful
God had dissolved into atomistic pursuits for material
goods that, like the owner, will turn to dust.
Kirk read in Tocqueville his own hopeful aspirations. “By
force of ideas democracy may be arrested in its descent toward
despotism,” wrote Kirk.22 If he saw in Tocqueville a tidal wave of
history that would necessarily sweep away the old order and with
it the sort of human who populated that order, Kirk chose not to
accept this part of his thinking. Instead, Kirk stressed the role of
religion in mitigating the materialism of the democratic regime,
the importance of laws and customs to limit the power of the
people, and constitutions to help protect local liberties. But in one
matter Kirk and Tocqueville clearly concurred, the threat of a
democratic regime is not its weakness, but its power. The great
challenge for the democratic age was to supply a check on the only
recognized sovereign, the people.
But with regard to the affections that Kirk associated with
genuine conservatism, Tocqueville’s analysis poses even greater
challenges than the ones already discussed. Tocqueville argued
that democracies produce a taste for “general” or abstract ideas.
Aristocratic societies, with their endless variety, produced, he
argued, a distrust of general statements, finding so many particular
exceptions. But in a democratic age, with its first abstract and
universal claim to equality, the mind finds general propositions a
very appealing way of understanding the world. “All the truths
applicable to himself,” Tocqueville noted of the democratic man,
“appear to him to apply equally and in the same manner to each
of his fellow citizens and to those like him.” Moreover, “having
contracted the habit of general ideas in the one study with which
he most occupies himself and which most interests him, he carries
this same habit over to all others, and thus the need to discover
common rules of all things, to enclose many objects within the
same form, and to explain a collection of facts by a single cause
becomes an ardent and often blind passion of the human mind.”23
An attraction to the simple and universal truth is symptomatic
of our own age, of those on the left, right, or center. If Tocqueville
is to be believed, this fact it is not simply a matter of belief, but of
what people desire to believe—what ideas attract them. An older
order relished the variety of human cultures and of individual
human personality, a disposition made possible by an unequal
social order which fostered complex human relationships that
entailed power, affection, duty, and areas of liberty. Now that
order is effaced by a contractual order, which begins with the
equality of conditions so central to Tocqueville’s analysis.
There is hope. This is the great lesson of Kirk’s book and his
life. Every analysis of decay he penned came coupled with signs
of renewal and hope. The Conservative Mind is the story of
conservative sentiments and ideas surviving withering assaults
from nearly every modern intellectual army. Tocqueville has long
since passed, but conservative ideas still check the worst elements
of democracy. The advocates of one form or another of naturalism
have attacked religious sentiment in America, but the nation
has not lost entirely its recognition that the visible world participates
in a larger reality. Kirk would tell us today that love of
variety and mystery still enlivens the souls and minds of an
important few.
But we might legitimately ask whether self-proclaimed conservatives
have affection for the variety and mystery of human
existence or even if we have in public circulation the appropriate
vocabulary for conceptualizing the social and cultural conditions
for distinctive human personality. Too often the public conversation
about universal truths divides along rather sterile ideological
lines—between those who universalize a set of abstract “natural
rights” and those who find humans in an open-ended universe
without any providential purpose. Russell Kirk gave us a way of
understanding the particular and the universal that maintains the
tension. However, the great warning implied in Kirk’s argument
is that this is not really a battle of ideas, understood abstractly, but
a battle of sentiments or affections. During the past 50 years we
have cultivated many passions and have encouraged many loves,
but we have not developed an “affection for the proliferating
variety and mystery of human existence.” Kirk’s book reminds us
that we ought to not only be fighting over ideas but we ought to
be shaping hearts.
Ted V. McAllister
Pepperdine University
NOTES
- All references to Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind
come from the Seventh Revised Edition (Washington, D.C.:
Regnery, 1995) 8. - Any extensive discussion of Kirk’s book, and his ideas,
requires some discussion of his use of the word “imagination,”
which stands in some tension with his more reified label “mind.”
Among other sources, Kirk drew his understanding of this useful
word from Irving Babbitt (see his Democracy and Leadership
[Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979]). Imagination is a human way
of understanding just as is reason. Especially important, humans
make sense of the whole, which they experience indirectly, in
relation to the part, through the faculty of imagination. The whole
is invisible to one’s reason alone since reason is bound to existing
things. With regard to the arguments I’m making in this essay
about the relationship between the partial and the whole, the
particular and the universal, one must understand the way Kirk
used “imagination” to bridge the gap. - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987) 41. - Ibid., 67.
- Ibid., 85; Kirk, Conservative Mind, 17.
- Ibid., 54.
- Ibid., 50.
- Ibid., 124.
- Ibid., 82–83.
- Ibid., 88.
- Ibid., 102.
- Ibid., 110.
- Ibid., 104.
- Ibid.
- See, for instance, Tocqueville’s comparison of ancient and
modern democracies in Democracy in America translated and
edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000) 201. - Ibid., 55.
- Ibid., 235.
- See Kirk, Conservative Mind, 212.
- Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 3.
- Ibid., 243.
- See, for instance, Tocqueville’s discussion of the National
Bank, Ibid., 170. - Kirk, Conservative Mind, 218. Kirk clearly stressed
Tocqueville’s call for a new political science that could “instruct
democracy” (see Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 7). - Tocqueville, Democracy, 413.