Book Review: Prospects for Conservatives by Russell Kirk. Regnery-Gateway, Washington, D.C. 289 pp. $11.95.
When someone tells me that he is a conservative, I want to know what it is that he wishes to conserve. And I ask the question with a certain intention to harass, for I have always had trouble understanding how the beliefs which most Americans understand to be implied by the word conservative could reasonably merit that term. I was therefore delighted to discover, seven or eight years ago, the existence of the traditionalist conservative movement, of which Russell Kirk is a well-known spokesman, and to find it at war, at least part of the time, with those for whom the word conservatism means an ideology composed of free-market economics, nearly idolatrous nationalism, and a very 19th-century notion of progressa definition which makes necessary the clumsy and somewhat redundant term traditionalist conservative.
If we ask Russell Kirk what it is that he wishes to conserve, this is his reply: The conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. Well, that makes nearly all of us conservatives, I imagine, and makes the prospects for conservatives the prospects, period. But Dr. Kirk is quite insistent that conservatism is a very distinct thing and its adherents a sturdy remnant, and when we look to this book for some insight as to what makes it distinct, we find that it has much in common with tendencies among the more likable elements of the left.
I say this because Prospects for Conservatives stresses, in the secular realm, only one thing which seems to me seriously objectionable to the personalist, agrarian and environmentalist left: a sense of the fitness of class as a natural ordering of society. Unfortunately, religion and related matters such as sexual morality also fix a vast and probably unbridgable gap between Christian conservative and pseudo-pagan Green. Still, I find some hope in the resemblances I see between the erratically and selectively traditionalist left and Russell Kirks brand of conservatism: the concern for community, for place, for order; the bias against the machine, the giant corporation and the giant state; the conviction that the severing of the person from nature will end in disaster; the desire, in general, to conserve, to re-establish the permanent things which have been displaced by industrialism.
Kirk's criticism of the present disorder is at its best in the two chapters of this book entitled The Question of Social Boredom and The Question of Wants. In these we get a denunciation of the self-indulgent nihilism produced, it seems, by most industrial societiesthose of the West, at any ratewhich is admirable for accuracy of vision and quality of invective. Im especially taken with Kirks use of the term proletarian; he means by it not, vaguely, a blue-collar worker but
a rootless man, a social atom, without traditions, without enduring convictions, without true home, without true family, without community, ignorant of the past and careless of future generations....incapable of love but eager to hate....
This helps us to understand why civilization seems menaced as much by the lawyer and the university professor as by the street criminal, and why so many of our political factions think like mobs.
Other chapters are less satisfying. The Question of Social Justice is mainly a defense of property rights and an argument against forced egalitarianism, valid enough as far as it goes, but I notice in it the very thing of which conservatives are most often accused: a lack of interest in the condition of the poor. There is, in passing, a word in favor of charity, but one will find here no sense at all of the sheer hardness of poverty, and nothing of any duty of the commonwealth toward the poor. Even the talk of property rights neglects what any conservative ought to be terribly alarmed about: the accelerating tendency away from widespread ownership of productive property, that is, toward proletarianization in its most straightforward sense. The drift of our economic life now seems toward the strangling of small and personal enterprise by the competitive pressure of huge capital, with that which is not strangled surviving by becoming huge and strangling others. We are building a machine for producing the proletarians whose condition Dr. Kirk so eloquently deplores, and yet he hardly seems to notice.
There is increasing agreement on both sides of our accustomed political divisions that our society is tending toward the triumph of anti-human forces. We see emerging a huge, efficient, cold, and ruthless society in which the vocations traditionally respected in Western societythose of the farmer, the housewife, the craftsman, the shopkeeper, the consecratedare despised or at best considered quaint antiques, their practitioners to be replaced by the hollow men (and now women) who thrive in huge bureaucracies and corporations. Those who believe this direction to be toward the better are also reaching across those walls, as princes of commerce aid and abet the old Marxist agenda for the destruction of the family and the dismantling of sexual morality. I hope that we will see a closing of the gap between traditionalists of left and right (and it seems to me that the single biggest step would be the recognition by the left that sexual license and its guarantor, abortion, serve the interests of everything they hate). It is at least as likely that we will see an alliance, if not a union, of liberals and conservatives who are already one in their materialism, love of pleasure, and hostility to the Christian conception of man and society.
This latter prospect brings me to another question: what does it mean to believe oneself to be a conservative in a society which grows daily more attached, and more consciously and deliberately attached, to practices and principles utterly irreconcilable with those one wishes to conserve? How direct must opposition to the prevailing tendencies of ones culture become, how many of society's assumptions may one reject, before one becomes, intellectually at least, a revolutionary?
MH
