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[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony treats Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind as "the most important book by a postwar American conservative." (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; the fourth; and, fifth, on Hazony’s critique of Meyer here.) In particular, Hazony notes that "Kirk’s account of the Anglo-American tradition is in many respects similar" to his. They both praise Burke and the American Federalist party, although with important differences lurking in the latter to which I return below.
Now Hazony draws out four important areas of overlap between his own conservatism and Kirk's. I quote Hazony:
Kirk emphasized that, for conservatives, (i) “custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power”—although they also recognize that “prudent change is the means of social preservation.” Conservatives regard (ii) religion as indispensable, including “belief in a transcendent order” and the recognition that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” They see that (iii) “freedom and property are closely linked,” and that the attempt to eliminate “orders and classes” from society could only end in tyranny. And they view human life as (iv) a “proliferating variety and mystery” that cannot readily be reduced to universal formulas. Kirk regarded these principles as being given voice, most importantly, by Edmund Burke in Britain and by John Adams and the Federalist Party in America.
So far so good. Hazony adds that "Kirk made a magnificent start to reinvigorating the Anglo-American conservative tradition in America," (emphasis added.) This 'start' clearly implies there is unfinished business. In fact, Hazony also thinks that on two issues Kirk drove Anglo-American conservatism in the wrong direction: "The first is Kirk’s emphasis on regional traditions."
In fact, while Kirk opts for John Adams, Hazony has a clear fondness for Hamilton. This shapes a dramatically different view of the content of American nationalism they are willing to defend. Kirk sees in Hamilton an aggressive "empire-builder." I return to this below.
And the "second, more serious problem with his historiography" is to be found in Kirk's "diligent efforts to retrieve what was supposedly worthy in Southern political thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for defending chattel slavery [which] was a mistake from which American conservatism has not yet entirely recovered." What ties the two together is Kirk's unwillingness to see "some local traditions" as "morally questionable." Hazony clearly suspects Kirk is a moral relativist and because of that incapable of criticizing slavery. I return to Kirk's attitude toward slavery below.
As an aside, there is also another line of criticism of Kirk in Hazony: that is centered on Kirk's willingness to participate in fusionism, which for Hazony entails "nothing other than the view that one should be a liberal in one’s political commitments, and a Christian in private." I also return to this below.
Now, it is worth noting that one important reason Kirk admires Burke is that he understands Burke's role in the Hastings affair as a defense of Indian local customs; Hastings "had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India." In fact, throughout The Conservative Mind, Kirk is scathing of (utilitarian) liberal imperialism which imposes uniformity on subject peoples. While critical of Macaulay, he admires "Burke's reforms" because they "were intended to purge the English in India from the diseases of arbitrary power and avarice, to secure to the Indians their native laws and usages and religions." So, it is not surprising that Hazony reads Kirk as a moral relativist of sorts.
But I don't think that's the right reading of Kirk for two reasons (the second being more important than the first). First, Kirk thinks local customs ought to be defended if and only if they involve sincere, socially inherited religious creed because the contents of which are principles of political and social order (see (i-ii) in the passage quoted from Hazony above). But he also thinks Christianity is the superior religion. I quote a passage in which Kirk attributes this precise view to Burke (without dissenting from it): "Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers." So the problem with civilizational, imperial liberalism (of the sort familiar from J.S. Mill) is that it lacks understanding of a proper political art of ruling according to Kirk. Violently suppressing existing religion just opens the door to a kind of social nihilism. Kirk's stance is not an expression of moral relativism, but of political prudence.
As an aside, while Kirk is a firm critic of liberal and other homogenizing imperialisms (including "the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy"), and thinks that "generally imperial expansion is full of risks for any conservative society" it is sometimes defensible. In context he is, for example, not uncritical of Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, while the whole book is a frontal attack on really existing home-grown American imperialism, I read The Conservative Mind as a call for a reformed more prudent imperialism. About that some other time.
If he understands Christianity as the highest religion, then Kirk is not a moral relativist. The key teaching of Christianity is for Kirk the existence and ineliminable fact of original sin. It’s probably the most important concept in The Conservative Mind. As Kirk puts it, in the context of discussing Irving Babbitt’s views, “The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.” And before you stop reading here, there is something important worth salvaging from this position.
While Hazony is not adverse to using 'sin' and its cognates, 'original sin' is not part of Hazony's moral vocabulary in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery whereas it is the key organizing principle to Kirk's social philosophy. For, one of the crescendos of The Conservative Mind is Kirk's admiration for Nathanial Hawthorne's "chief accomplishment: impressing the idea of sin upon a nation which would like to forget it." In fact from a political perspective, we also find in this account one of Kirk's most important commitments. He praises Hawthorne's realization "that projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; that the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us; that the fanatic improver of mankind through artificial alteration is, very commonly, in truth a destroyer of souls." (emphasis added.)*
Kirk's focus on original sin also qualifies to what degree he thinks one should be a Christian merely in private. As the previous paragraph suggests he very much believes that the devil within must be tamed by all social institutions working in tandem. And while this is compatible with a privatized Christianity, it does not require it and probably works better with a more robust public Christianity according to Kirk. Kirk is an admirer of various forms of Catholic social theory and a critic of certain strands of individualizing Protestantism. One may see in Shklar’s liberalism of fear a liberal attempt to struggle with Kirk’s diagnosis.
Be that as it may, at this point one may grant that I have provided considerable reason to allow that Kirk was no moral relativist. But in a way, one may think, this makes Kirk's obtuseness on slavery worse. So, Hazony is right to reject Kirk.
Before I continue: a reminder to the reader unfamiliar with my writings that I view myself as on-looker in the debates among conservatives. My own interest in these is primarily understanding and also a curiosity if anything can be learned from conservative self-reflection and understanding. I am not an impartial spectator, but I am also not an advocate for conservatism. Okay, having said that, there is something in Kirk worth paying attention to especially, alas, in the bits that are most egregious to our moral sensibility.
Now, it is true that Kirk claims that "we shall try to keep clear here of that partisan controversy over slavery." And he does so because he is eager to discuss "those conservative ideas which Randolph and Calhoun enunciated." One may well think that Hazony is right that such bracketing is a moral disaster and, when it comes to Randolph and Calhoun, impossible, if only because Randolph and Calhoun themselves tend to bring the issues together.
As it happens, Kirk is rather critical of Randolph and Calhoun and their support for slavery. He writes, "the slavery controversy confuses and blurs any analysis of political principle in the South: the historian can hardly discern where, for instance, real love for state sovereignty leaves off and interested pleading for slave property commences. Both Randolph and Calhoun deliberately entangled the debate on tariffs (at bottom a question of whether the industrial or the agricultural interest should predominate in America), and the debate on local liberties, with the debate on slavery; for thus they were able to rally to their camp a great body of slave-holders who otherwise might have been indifferent to the issues at stake." So, he recognizes that his own bracketing is not the political strategy pursued by Randolph and Calhoun.
Now, a skeptic of my interpretation might suggest that while Kirk clearly admires local liberties, it is not obvious he rejects slavery. But he goes on to claim explicitly: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." This is not a local relativist speaking, or a friend of slavery. In fact, later, when discussing John Quincy Adams (of whom Kirk has no particular fondness), he adds that "he was right in detesting slavery."
Kirk also recognizes that Randolph and Calhoun were at least in part motivated to defend slavery (although Kirk also thinks that Calhoun was aware of the dangers of slavery). But Kirk thinks "one may lift" their ideas "of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day." That is, Kirk explicitly allows that the origin of some conservative ideas is highly immoral, but (with a nod to the genetic fallacy) that that they can do good work in a different context.
This is a highly unpopular position today. In our political culture tracing contemporary views to bad previous political positions (slavery, eugenics, imperialism, racism, etc.) has become a sure route to disqualifying the opposition. And again, I don't mean to defend Kirk's blinders. He seems to lack warmth for the plight of the slaves, and is not much perturbed by racism. But if you are all in on original sin it is no surprise to find bits of wisdom alongside awful commitments—and I have some sympathy toward this methodological stance.
Kirk also clearly detests Northern abolitionism as species of fanaticism. He seems to be attracted to views he associates with President Franklin Pierce that hoped that slavery would wither away by itself. But that's because Kirk thinks the civil war was an outright disaster, and that it set up the subsequent disasters of failed reconstruction and what he considers the stupidity of Jim Crow. I wouldn’t want to endorse this position; but not seeing the civil war as a disaster is also problematic. (Of course, on my view the disaster should have been avoided by getting rid of slavery beforehand!) So, Kirk understands himself as objecting to the means (war) not the goal (getting rid of slavery).
Underlying Kirk's position is a decoupling of the institution of slavery from mercantile war-mongering nationalist-imperialism. By contrast a liberal would see in slavery and imperialism the same side of a mercantile coin. Slavery is clearly a transient institution for Kirk (and, again, this position also seems informed by a reprehensible lack of warmth toward the plight of slaves), but for him nationalist imperialism is a permanent temptation for democracies in which our nature is not properly tamed. In fact, Kirk understands the opportunities for a revived conservatism as a response to the revulsion engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he sees the atom bomb as a possible trigger for much needed moral awakening.
Kirk diagnoses war as the opportunity for destructive hubris and nemesis as much as it is the site of the growth of central planning and uniform, leveling standardization. For Kirk Hiroshima is the natural outgrowth of the valorizing of war. (Kirk is not a pacifist; he accepts the need of war for defensive ends.) For Kirk, slavery is, thus, not America's original sin; rather it is the (Hamiltonian) embrace of expansive genocidal militarism centered on an an imperial president.** Hazony, by contrast, while a critic of foreign military intervention, is a friend of (Hamiltonian) economic nationalism and a strong presidency.
On Kirk's view this Hamiltonian position cannot avoid permanent war, which Kirk views as destructive to any higher culture (recall (iv)) worth having. To what degree he is right about this I leave for another time. But since we’re in an age of aggressive and destructive left and right-wing Hamiltonianism, this strain in Kirk seems worth excavating, especially for those who wish to tame our capacity toward evil.
Let me close with some blog house-keeping. As hinted in yesterday’s post, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. Apologies for that in advance.
*This also helps explain Kirk's preference for Adams and his rejection of Hamilton.
**Kirk is never more eloquent than when he quotes Burke's second letter of the Regicide Peace in which Burke links a certain kind of statism to militarism. Having said that, he expresses little interest in American, pre-settler indigenous native cultures.
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