...Kirk was born 100 years ago and died in 1994. He would not be pleased with the current scene. Many conservatives, McClay says, have become ideologues dogmatically wedded to abstract principles. They ignore or oppose the particularities of history, tradition, faith, and community that constitute American society. Kirk, by contrast, was a sworn enemy of ideology. “It may well be, then,” McClay says, “that the transformation of a feckless, life-denying, and inhumane culture into something more consonant with our human endowment is the principal task facing conservatives and conservatism.” Easier said than done.
If the mission of conservatism is cultural rather than political, if its task is to preserve and where possible rediscover the masterworks, ideas, values, and ways of Western civilization, then Kirk offers guidance. His conservatism was never limited to a single party or tax cut. But it also has been limited in its appeal, competing for decades with other varieties of conservatism that are friendlier to classical liberalism, markets, foreign intervention, and executive power.
What Kirk offers conservatives is a point of view. He lends us a perspective by which to identify and defend the “permanent things” against those who seek to tear them asunder. He gifts us with a patrimony that begins with Edmund Burke and continues through to the “new humanist” critics of the 1920s and to the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot. Humane, literate, spiritual, elegiac, poetic, somewhat nostalgic, and constantly attuned to human weakness, Kirk’s prose evokes feelings of reverence, awe, and mutual loyalty.
Yet Kirk had trouble defining the standpoint he did so much to formulate. “Conservatives,” Kirk writes, “distrust what Burke called ‘abstractions’ — that is, absolute political dogmas divorced from practical experience and particular circumstances.” Still, he says, conservative thought exhibits some general characteristics. The number, order, and description of these principles varied in Kirk’s remarkable output. Certain themes persisted.
Kirk says in the Concise Guide that conservatives believe: in a moral law “ordained of God”; in “variety and diversity” of economic stations and social types and roles; in equality of rights but not conditions; in private property; in decentralization and diffusion of power; in the wisdom of tradition; in civil society and voluntary associations; in skepticism toward foreign entanglement; in something like original sin or unchanging human nature; and in gradual reform of an otherwise stable order.
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