Kirk has survived in the conservative memory as something of a cult figure, and there is now a book-length study of his thought by a friend and former student, Wesley McDonald, whose Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology was ably reviewed by Scott P. Richert in the July issue.  Reading Mr. Richert’s review and, afterward, Dr. McDonald’s book, I was driven to some thoughts about Kirk himself and his legacy.

A well-educated man of courtly manners, Kirk was undoubtedly the major exponent of what came to be known in conservative-movement circles as “traditionalism,” the principal counterpart and sparring partner of its “libertarian” wing.  Traditionalism was not the best term for this persuasion, but, because Kirk himself invoked the concept of tradition so much, it stuck.  Essentially, traditionalism is identical to what is otherwise called “Burkean” or sometimes “philosophical” conservatism but which I prefer to think of as “classical conservatism,” the conservatism espoused by the enemies of the French Revolution and Enlightenment in England and Europe of the late 18th and 19th centuries and whose major exponent, in England at least, was Edmund Burke.  For Kirk, though not necessarily for other supporters of “traditionalism,” Burke was the icon that defined the persuasion, and, in The Conservative Mind, Burke is the archetypal figure.  The several other thinkers whom Kirk discusses there, none of whom shared Burke’s historical stature, appear as mere avatars of the deified Edmund.

Kirk’s classical conservatism was a welcome relief from the tedious and barren libertarianism that strutted about during and after the New Deal and has since managed to thrive as the dominant ideology in the contemporary conservative mind (as opposed to the neoconservative mind, in which democratic socialism remains the prevailing paradigm).  Recognizing only one problem (“the state”) and only one solution (“individual liberty”), libertarianism offers nothing to those concerned with the impending destruction of their civilization by forces that are largely irrelevant to its twin obsessions.  The tendency, if not the actual argument, of libertarianism in the last 50 years has been to deny that Soviet communism was ever a threat, to embrace mass immigration, to endorse global free trade, to abandon and ridicule both nation and religion, and to welcome the deliberate destruction of traditional culture and morality by whatever forces (in the state or outside it) are waging war against them.  The great value of Kirk’s “traditionalism” was to just say no to the sophomoric and dangerous libertarian poison that soon corroded and corrupted the conservative minds of late-20th-century America, at a time when few others of real conservative disposition possessed either the learning, the powers, or the courage to say it.

Yet Kirk was by no means a profound or even consistent thinker, and one virtue of Dr. McDonald’s short book, which today is probably the best short exposition of classical conservatism that I know of, is that it makes clear that Kirk often declined to pursue certain philosophical issues as deeply as he might or to develop his thought into a larger and more coherent intellectual framework.  Kirk’s thought was invaluable in offering an introduction to concepts of “order,” “authority,” and “tradition” that were alien to the classical liberal-libertarian ideologues of the day.  He laid down (if he did not develop very clearly) a concept of freedom derived from an Aristotelian view of man as a creature of society in contrast to the libertarian idea of freedom derived from a (fictitious) pre-social “state of nature.”  If human beings are naturally social, then freedom in the libertarian sense is necessarily in antagonism to the social bond and its institutional supports, and real freedom can exist only in relationships and actions that are compatible with social order.  “Ordered” or “rooted” freedom and its supports, authority, hierarchy, and community—and not Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—are the defining norms of classical conservatism.

The problem with Kirk’s traditionalism does not lie in its assumptions or even in his sometimes murky exposition of its themes but in his application of its concepts to contemporary American life and the uses that the conservative movement has made of them.  It is a problem that arises from taking Edmund Burke as the central hero of the traditionalist cause.

Burke’s standing as a conservative comes from his important role as an enemy of the French Revolution and a defender of the 18th-century British (and European) dynastic state.  It may be open to question whether that state was really worth conserving, but certainly, in comparison to the tyranny, terrorism, and chaos that Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity unleashed, it was a veritable paradise, and, since Burke himself had spent much of his earlier life as a critic of the dynastic state, he cannot be faulted for defending it against its destroyers.

What Burke offered, however, was a defense.  The order he championed existed and dominated, and his task was to build a case as to why it should be conserved.  That was not the problem that American “conservatives” faced in the period (the late 1940’s and early 50’s or later) when Kirk began to write and when the American conservative movement was formed.

As I argued in this space some months ago, the revolution took place in America well before that time—by some Old Right analyses, in the American Civil War, or, at the latest, in the New Deal-World War II eras, when a new ruling elite, the managerial class, displaced the old bourgeois elites from political and cultural hegemony.  Unlike for Edmund Burke and the defenders of the ancien régime of his time, for the American right, the problem was not defense but offense—not conservation but (at best) restoration.

That, however, was not the strategic goal of the American conservative movement as it began to congeal in the 1950’s.  The essential premise of any movement that is comfortable with the label “conservatism” is that the order it seeks to conserve is healthy and that it ought to be conserved, and that was the premise with which American conservatism started out in the 1950’s (and with which it has finished up in the first decade of the current century).  One of the main influences on it that encouraged it to accept that premise was Russell Kirk.

Reading over parts of The Conservative Mind, Kirk’s major and always his most influential work, that premise leaps out.  “In America,” Kirk wrote in 1953 (and the words remained essentially unchanged through the seventh and last edition of 1985),

the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in the history of Western civilization; the balance of interests and powers which John Adams and the Southern statesmen defended still operates, however threatened by centralization in this century; and no one advocates a radical revision of political establishments in America, despite the numerous abuses that shelter themselves behind federal and state constitutions.

Private property, Kirk assured his readers, “remains an influence of vast power in Britain and America” (and presumably, therefore, was secure), while “respect for established usage and longing for continuity are not dead among English-speaking peoples, either,” and,

Of the six premises for conservative belief which are listed in the introductory chapter of this book, then, four at least continue to animate the social impulses of a great many people in America and Britain.

Such passages could be extended indefinitely.

The main thrust of Kirk’s conservatism was to assure Americans that everything was really OK, that the society in which they lived and the government and dominant social and political forces that prevailed in the United States were healthy.  As Old Right journalist Garet Garrett remarked in his 1938 essay, “The Revolution Was,” “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road,” and Russell Kirk seemed to be among them.  But, as Garrett saw clearly, the truth was that “The revolution is behind them.  It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Kirk and most conservatives seemed never to have heard the songs, though I knew Russell Kirk well enough in his last years to know that he did indeed hear them and understood clearly what they meant.  Still, he shrank, for whatever reasons, from betraying what today has long since ceased to be a secret of empire: The American order is bankrupt; both political parties and the major ideological identities associated with them are part of the problem; and the regime that prevails in the triple metropole of Washington-New York-Hollywood is the enemy of the American people and of its historic social and political order.  The problem today is not how to conserve it, let alone how to persuade Americans that it ought to be conserved.  The problem today is how to persuade more Americans that it ought to be—and can be—changed.

Despite Kirk’s own awareness of the corruption of the contemporary American order and the regime that rules it, the conservative movement with which he soon allied himself (reluctantly, as Dr. McDonald points out) made use of his articulation of “traditionalism” to defuse and emasculate any inclinations to radicalism on the part of the American right.  Headquartering itself in Manhattan and whatever broom closets in Washington it could ferret itself into, the American conservative movement devoted itself to the defense of a political order in which it was already an unwelcome and embarrassing guest, and, as the New Left of the 1960’s launched its assault on the regime constructed by Franklin Roosevelt and his heirs, most conservatives could think of no response other than an angry endorsement of the regime.  The principles of authority, hierarchy, and community that Kirk’s traditionalism had embraced and developed were deployed to explain why liberal or leftist deans who had spent their careers poisoning every young mind with which they had come in contact should not be kicked down the stairs of their own office buildings and why the young Americans whose minds they had poisoned should be drafted to fight an ideological crusade that the ruling class had no intention of winning and no good reason to fight at all.

The irony of Kirk’s position is that, far more than the libertarianism that was its main rival on the right, “traditionalism” offered a full and more persuasive case against both the deracinating regime of liberalism that conservatives began to defend (whence came their alliance with the neoconservatives, who never showed any dissatisfaction with the regime at all) and the savagery of the New Left.  But most conservative writers of the time never made that case.  Instead, they rallied round the flag, defending the war in Vietnam, the draft, and the essential goodness and health of the society and government the counterculture attacked, smug in their satisfaction that everything was really OK.

Today, we know it is not OK, as we know the Supreme Court has waged a continuous war against traditional morals, culture, freedom, and order ever since Kirk assured us the federal Constitution was “enduring”; as the federal leviathan has swollen ever larger and dug itself ever more deeply into the private lives and minds of Americans; and as the institutions, traditions, and the very people of the American nation are systematically discarded and replaced by the powers that conservatism continues to defend.  Perhaps some on the American right did sense that, for all the virtues of Kirk’s classical conservatism as an alternative to libertarianism or the even more pathetic “fusionism,” it simply was not adequate to the mission that serious men of the right in the middle of the 20th-century journey should have taken up.  “If you were a marine in a landing boat,” asked Whittaker Chambers with respect to Kirk’s Conservative Mind, “would you wade up the seabeach at Tarawa for that conservative position?  And neither would I!”

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

This black “nationalist” (for want of a better word) did not hate white people, and he was hardly a radical; indeed, he went on to a distinguished career in public life.  But the question he asked never left me.

This is not a question of absolutes.  Under many circumstances, an ethnically integrated school makes a good deal of sense, but there are also times and places where it does not—in Bosnia or Ireland, to cite just two examples, where young people cannot become full members of the tribe if the enemies of the tribe are present during the cultural indoctrination into the secret tribal history, whether of Muslims or Orangemen.  Of course, the liberals who rule the world would say that Bosnia and Northern Ireland are precisely the places where ethnic and religious integration must be imposed by the wise and benevolent international community, but that is not because they love peace.  It is because they hate nations.

Every nation and ethnicity has its own story to tell, its own take on the history of the world, and it cannot really tell that story in the presence of many outsiders, especially outsiders with rival versions.  In Ireland, before the days of government schooling, Protestants went to their schools, and Catholics either had to be educated among the hedgerows or, when the nice Englishmen graciously gave their permission, in Catholic schools.  This is unacceptable to liberal universalists, who insist that there can be no justice so long as one man can regard his own culture and religion as superior to another man’s culture and religion.

The teaching of literature and history is the vital center of education, because the stories of Arthur and Alfred, Good King Hal and Bad Queen Bess have made the English English, in the same way that Greeks became Greek by hearing the tales of Achilles and Odysseus.  Now, it is true that we Americans are still hearing those tales.  As Chesterton observed, so long as there are civilized men, they will be talking of Troy.  We talk of Troy in order to become civilized, however, while they talked of Troy as part of the history that made them who they were.

The pernicious effects of the universalist point of view are not restricted to political programs for ethnic and religious integration.  Modern nation-states constructed vast systems of public education as part of their program of eliminating the competing loyalties of Church and region.  New England’s public schools aimed, first, at imposing Unitarianism; next, at forcibly converting Catholic children; and then, when their ideology took over the national government, at subverting the loyalty of recently conquered Southerners and their naive Trinitarian faith.  The great American Calvinist Robert Lewis Dabney, who recognized the true goals of the project, opposed the establishment of public schooling in Virginia in the 1870’s.  The enemy then was provincialism in all its forms—Catholic, Calvinist, Southern, or even Western.  It still is.

Maurice Barrès, a younger French contemporary of Dabney, wrote a brilliant case study of liberal education’s campaign against provincialism—and its deadly consequences—in his novel Les déracinés.  Barrès, although born in Charmes and educated at the lycée in Nancy, had gone to Paris, where he became an individualist and aesthete in the circle of Leconte de Lisle, writing books (in the 1890’s) with such titles as Un homme libre and L’individualiste.  He ended his life as the great exponent of French nationalism, indeed as the founder of the modern French nationalism that is conservative and patriotic instead of Jacobin.  What happened?

What happened is that the imaginative and erudite author went back to his native Lorraine, where he sat among the melancholy ruins of an ancient chateau and reflected on the deeds of so many unknown men of earlier times.  The bones of these men, dead and gone, were not the bones of strangers: They were his own people of Lorraine.  The fruits of these reflections were a renewed sense of French patriotism and a deepened affection for the native soil of Lorraine.

In Les déracinés (1897), Barrès chronicled the adventures of a group of boys at his own lycée in Nancy.  Their philosophy teacher, brilliant and ruthless, instills in them vast, almost Napoleonic ambitions to put their talents into the service of the ongoing revolutionary liberal tradition.  What happens to the boys in Paris is the subject of the novel.  Some become dissolute; others are reduced to poverty; but all begin to collaborate on a journal of the progressive type.  In the end, two of them murder a woman for her money, and the principal hero achieves the success of which he had dreamed.  Returning to Nancy to be feted, his philosophy teacher pronounces the final verdict: “I used to admire your talent, . . . but what I especially admire is that you are at this point liberated from every intonation and, more generally, of every peculiarity of Lorraine.”

As the years went on, Barrès waxed mystical on the significance of his native land (and of others’).  His extraordinary book La colline inspirée tells the story of a hill in Lorraine that had been sacred to Celts and Germans and became a great monastic center in the duchy of Burgundy, and he lauds the great ladies of Lorraine: Mary Stuart (her mother was Mary of Guise, and the Guises were of Lorraine), Marie-Antoinette, and Jeanne Darc.  He thus claimed three great national martyrs for Lorraine, including the refounder of France.

Maurice Barrès became a French nationalist only by becoming a Lorraine provincialist.  What is ironic is that, while there is today a France, and a Germany, and even a Belgium and a Netherlands, there is no country of Lorraine.  With the benefit of hindsight, we can argue that France and Germany were destined to be, while Lorraine was doomed not to be—but then how would we explain Belgium and Switzerland?

Lorraine—or, as it was then called, Lotharingia—had been in the portion given the Emperor Lothair, grandson of Charlemagne, by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, stretching from the Netherlands down to Aachen and east to Cologne.  Lothair also received Provence and much of Switzerland and Northern Italy.  His son, King Lothair, was given the northern part, which took its name from him.  Lothair had no male heirs by his wife, and Pope Nicholas I had ruled against Lothair’s divorce and false marriage to his concubine, by whom he did have a son.  After his death, his possessions were divided between Frankish and German rulers, though Otto the Great subsequently controlled most of it.

Eventually, Lorraine was split between Upper (i.e., Southern) and Lower (Northern) Lorraine.  Lower Lorraine disappears from history, but upper Lorraine was not entirely extinguished until the late 18th century.  In the 14th and 15th centuries, the dukes of Burgundy reassembled many parts of the old kingdom—the Low Countries and Franche-Comté, but also part of Germany all the way to Cologne—into a powerful state that defied the kings of France.  The stumbling block was Lorraine itself, a vital corridor connecting the Low Countries with Burgundy proper.  Duke Charles the Bold died trying to hold Lorraine, which passed (along with Burgundy eventually) into the control of France, while the Low Countries passed to his grandson (by his daughter Mary) Emperor Charles V, the most powerful ruler of the 16th century.

The failure of both Lothair and Charles the Bold to produce male heirs may be a sufficient explanation for the collapse of Lotharingia and, later, of Burgundy.  However, it is also true that both countries were multiethnic and polyglot, and neither succeeded in generating the sense of national identity that was beginning to unite the French and the Germans.  Neither produced a national poet or a national myth, and, after the Reformation, there was little to connect the Protestants of Holland and Germany with the Catholics of Burgundy.  An imaginative genius like Barrès could find the threads connecting Joan of Arc to Charles V.  Ordinary people could not.

Today, we are fighting the same battle that Dabney and Barrès fought, only on a more limited field, because the enemy has occupied all our fortresses and redoubts, leaving us only the hedgerows to dispute.  That field is multiculturalism, whose purpose is the destruction of all cultures.

Most people of conservative inclination seem to know what multiculturalism is and why it is evil, but what is the alternative?  If the barbaric term multiculturalism refers to programs aimed at educating children away from the dominant culture of their society by indoctrinating them into the glories of alternative cultures, then uniculturalism (dreadful word!) would be the teaching of one culture, presumably the dominant one.  This is, in fact, what we used to call humane letters or “the humanities,” the literature, history, and philosophy of the peoples (Greek, Roman, European) who laid the foundations of our civilization.

The multicultural struggle is not the abstract argument over “values” engaged in by semiliterate neoconservatives.  The struggle is over the national identity of the American people, and a conservative side, if conservative voices are to be heard at all, must declare against all abstract definitions of America, whether Marxist or democratic capitalist.  There is not much that can be made out of American or English folk culture, when the folk cuisine is taco pie and Pepsi (good Americans drink Coke) and the folk music is either rap or the androgynous drug-moans of “alternative” music (anything, even punk or heavy metal, is preferable), but we still have some dim memories of Shakespeare and Homer that can be revived, and there is a growing “back to the classics” movement among both Calvinist and Catholic families.

The restoration of a humanities curriculum based on the ancient classics, English literature, and European and American history would not create an American nation in the sense that Ireland, 50 years ago, was a nation, but it might—along with the dominant Christian religion—serve as a cement to hold together something of our identity as a people.

Like America, medieval Burgundy was never a nation even in the most rudimentary sense, only a federation of principalities.  The same could be said of 16th-century France, but the Bourbon rulers of France succeeded in constructing a unified state out of such disparate elements as Brittany, Provence, and Lorraine.  The only serious threat to this process was not posed by the “Frondeurs” who, in the minority of Louis XIV, attempted to reassert local and provincial authority, but by the religious division between Catholics and Protestants.  Much has been written about the wisdom of Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes, granting religious privileges to the Protestants, and it was probably a necessary move at the time.  In the long run, however, France had to be one or the other, Catholic or Protestant.  For proof, only look at the trouble caused by the Calvinizing Jansenists who remained within the Church.

For good and ill, France became not only a nation but “la grande nation” in a way that the United States can never be.  At best, we could have hoped to be something like the Holy Roman Empire in the 18th century.  Although it was divided by religion (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist), the imperial core was German but with significant populations of Slavs, Magyars, and Italians.  Despite the variety of dialects and faiths, Catholic Germanic Vienna defined the culture of the empire.  Even when Hungarians were finally admitted to partnership in the “dual monarchy,” they were (at least in the cultural sense) a distinctly junior partner.  Vienna, from the time of Haydn to the time of Krauss and Strauss, was a cultural capital enriched by the contributions of Czechs and Hungarians, Jews and Croats, but bound together by the Church and the emperor.

It is too late to revive, much less save, the old republic founded by the men of Virginia, New York, New England, and the Carolinas.  They have gone, and the land has forgotten them.  Their monuments and their memories are being desecrated by the vandals who have supplanted them.  We do well to honor them and to denounce all those who defame them, but they and their world have vanished forever.  If I could legislate the future development of America, it would be in the direction of a Habsburgian federation in which an Anglo-American Christian core defined a culture that made room for the contributions of the Central and Southern Europeans, Mexicans and Africans who have come—and continue to come—to live here.  But this is probably as vain a dream as the dream of saving the Old Republic.  So long as there is some remote possibility, if not of winning, then at least of saving something in our defeat, we should fight on for our cultural legacy.

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Fighting Among the Hedgerows
by Thomas Fleming

Reracination.

VIEWS

Blindsided By Education’s Leftists
by B.K. Eakman
Republicans assure their own marginalization.

There’s No Place Like Home
by Michael McMahon
Simon says, “Go to school.”

NEWS

Many Children Left Behind
by William Lutz
Reexamining the Texas success story.

The Untold Story Behind The Passion of the Christ
by Alberto Carosa
In defense of Mel Gibson.

REVIEWS

Thomas Fleming and Mother Teresa: Undoubted Motives in the Morality of Everyday Life
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem

Thomas Fleming: The Morality of Everyday Life:
 Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition

plus

Thomas Fleming on Eugenio Corti’s The Last Soldiers of the King

Sean P. Dailey on Joseph Pearce’s The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde

James O. Tate on Richard B. Parker’s Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History

Paul Gottfried on Stanley G. Payne’s The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism

Laurence Vance on Mark Thornton’s and Robert B. Ekelund’s Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From England: The Muslim Conquest of Britain
by Christie Davies

Letter From London: The New White Moors
by Derek Turner

VITAL SIGNS

CHRISTIANITY: Omnigendered Christianity
by Mark D. Tooley

WAR: Iraq: Whither the United States?
by Doug Bandow

COLUMNS

SINS OF OMISSION
by Roger D. McGrath

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

IN THE DARK
Fahrenheit 9/11
by George McCartney

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

THE BEST REVENGE
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
The Ballad of the Death-Row Lover by William Baer
Song of the Well-worn Hoe by Ruth Moose       

ON THE COVER

Cover by Scott P. Richert and Melanie Anderson. 
Inside illustrations by Joy McCarnan (unless noted).

Much of the document deals with the failures of the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies to anticipate and thwart the devastating attacks launched on September 11, 2001.  Some of the criticisms (the lack of communication between key agencies, the absence of effective screening mechanisms at the borders, and the missing of key clues) are warranted.  Others are classic exercises in 20-20 hindsight.

The commission also addresses a few larger issues, and most of its judgments are balanced rather than inflammatory.  For example, the report examines a series of contacts between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda operatives.  In marked contrast to the hysterical exaggerations of neoconservative war hawks, however, the commissioners note that those contacts were sporadic and that Saddam Hussein’s regime rebuffed Osama bin Laden’s request for space to establish training camps as well as assistance in acquiring weapons.  The members of the commission conclude that there is

no evidence that these or earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship.  Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qae-da in developing or carrying out attacks against the United States.

Although the commission studiously avoids discussing the merits of the Iraq war (to avoid controversy and to make it possible to have a unanimous report), those conclusions may make the Bush administration uneasy.  After all, the President and his advisors cited two major reasons for attacking Iraq: the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction and the alleged connections between Baghdad and Al Qaeda.  The first allegation was discredited long ago, and now the commission has effectively discredited the second.

Another pertinent issue is the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda.  That relationship seems more substantive and intriguing than the minimal one between Iraq and the terrorist group.  Senior Al Qaeda operatives traveled to Iran for training in explosives in the early 1990’s, and the commission cites evidence that both Iran and Al Qaeda may have been involved in the Khobar Towers attack.  There also is evidence that Iranian officials allowed at least eight, and perhaps as many as ten, of the September 11 hijackers to transit their country from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia.  The report stresses, however, that there is no evidence that Tehran knew about the terrorist plot, much less had anything to do with it.  Predictably, neoconservatives ignore that caveat and cite the report as justification for a policy to topple the fundamentalist Islamic regime.

More important than the issues the report addresses are the issues it skirts.  The failure to discuss the Bush administration’s argument that the Iraq war was a crucial part of the War on Terror is an obvious omission, but there are others.  Although the commission properly chastises both the Bush and Clinton administrations for not taking the Al Qae-da threat seriously enough, there is little discussion about what either administration was doing instead of focusing on Bin Laden.

The Clinton administration certainly was not inactive on the foreign-policy front during the mid and late 1990’s.  That was the period in which the United States invaded and occupied Haiti, intervened in the Bosnian civil war, enforced draconian sanctions against Iraq and periodically bombed that country, and wrested Serbia’s province of Kosovo away from Belgrade’s jurisdiction through a NATO air war.  Not one of those interventions was relevant to America’s security interests.  But our attention and resources were focused on those matters instead of the very real threat that was emerging.  The Bush administration’s obsession with ousting Saddam Hussein (which predated the September 11 attacks) reflected similar myopia.

An even more serious deficiency is the commission’s tepid treatment of the crucial issue of how U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East creates resentment that strengthens the forces of radical Islamic terrorism.  In fairness, the report presents a more sophisticated treatment than the Bush administration’s argument that the terrorists hate America because of her commitment to freedom and other noble values.  (One wag has aptly described this as the “they hate us because we’re beautiful” thesis.)  Instead, the commission acknowledges that there is a great deal of anger in the Muslim world at U.S. policies.

But the commission’s prescriptions are either contradictory or anemic.  An example of the former is the call for a greater commitment to democracy and freedom in the Middle East juxtaposed with proposals for close cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—two of the least democratic governments in the region.  An example of the latter is the admission that U.S. support of Israel antagonizes large swaths of Muslim opinion without an accompanying call for any meaningful change in U.S. policy toward Israel.

Instead of addressing such sensitive matters, the commission merely calls for a greater effort at public diplomacy to win the hearts and minds of Muslims.  That approach woefully misconstrues the problem.  The reservoir of hatred in the Middle East toward the United States that has been building for decades is not the result of a failure of Muslims to understand U.S. policy.  They understand it all too well.  And they are not going to be won over by a slick, Madison Avenue p.r. campaign.  The problem is the content of U.S. foreign policy, not its packaging.

By failing to address these and other vital issues, the 9-11 Commission has missed an historic opportunity.  It chose to play it safe and issue a bland, comfortable report that focuses on secondary matters.  Instead of going for the jugular of Washington’s misguided and dangerous policy in the Middle East, the commission showed that it had an instinct only for the capillaries.  That likely suits the Bush administration and the war-hawk faction just fine.

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Summer camp as it used to be—lakeside in the mountains, with enforced training in swimming, boating, shooting, equestrianship, tennis, fishing, hiking, wilderness survival, and singing silly songs around the campfire—was as American as Huckleberry Finn and Nick Adams, though both escaped its disciplining formalities by lighting out on their own for the territory ahead.  I was spared them myself, being given the run of a 200-acre Green Mountains farm instead.  Nevertheless, the idea of the summer camp of yore yielding place to an intellectual boot camp for neutered nerds from the suburbs is, to me, as shocking as the spectacle of a lovely agricultural valley turned into a silicon one.  This newest Upward Bound program for what its patrons themselves would call the “overprivileged” is simply another training course for the Long Island Olympics.  Is there no satisfaction in life for the elite (or aspirants to it) beyond cutthroat meritocratic competition for place, preference, and riches?  Are the most intelligent human beings really no more than disembodied minds at work according to cybernetic principles?  Was the motto of the ancients, Mens sanis in corpore sano, a menacing prophecy of Naziism or a formula for developing the good, the balanced citizen?  Has the unbought grace of life become totally eclipsed in our time?  Is American society rotting from the head down, like a fish?  When a civilization no longer can produce wholly formed men and women at the top but only troglodytes, no matter how “intelligent,” it is doomed.

We call it “higher education,” but the thing is scarcely that.  Rather, like the elementary and secondary education that precedes it, it is fake education, developed from positively anti-educational principles.  The purpose of post-secondary education was never to outfit a class of narrow-minded sharklings with all the tricks necessary to seize and devour what they consider their just deserts but to graduate cultivated Christian men and women, bred to social deference and the habit of command: fit to accept their place in an established upper class, in the absence of which civilization devolves into society in the merely anthropological sense.  If there were nothing more to a civilized person than a high IQ, developed technical skills, and a ruthless competitive instinct, civilization would be a cheap commodity indeed, rather than the precious and perishable thing that it is.  That, however, is—whether fortunately or unfortunately—not the case.

The Spanish-American War was the direct (though infinitely more successful) forebear of the calamitous Iraqi war now being fought.  Yet, while the war in the Philippines produced atrocities far exceeding those of Abu Ghraib, the Cuban campaign had its gallant aspect, provided in considerable part by Theodore Roosevelt’s volunteer Rough Rider regiment—which, so far as I am able to recall, has no parallel in subsequent American warfare.  The Rough Riders included recruits from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and clubs such as the Knickerbocker of New York and the Somerset of Boston.  (Hamilton Fish, Jr., the ex-captain of the Columbia crew, was among the first casualties on the slog from Daiquirí over to Kettle Hill.)  It included as well hunters, ex-sheriffs, cowboys, mining prospectors, and mountain men from the Western territories—uncouth frontiersman who had hardly suspicioned the existence of anything like a Fish, a Page, or a Channing.  Roosevelt was initially pleased by the refusal of the bluebloods to lord it over their social inferiors by demanding commissions for themselves, being content instead to serve under whatever roughneck they were assigned to; after the regiment had returned stateside and been mustered out, he was delighted to be able to claim that not a single man had backed out after volunteering for service nor failed to do his entire duty.  As for himself, Roosevelt explains in The Rough Riders,

During the year preceding the  outbreak of the Spanish War, I was assistant secretary of the Navy.  While my party was in opposition, I had preached, with all the fervor and zeal I possessed, our duty to intervene in Cuba and to take this opportunity of driving the Spaniard from the Western World.  Now that my party had come to power, I felt it incumbent on me, by word and deed, to do all I could to secure the carrying out of the policy in which I so heartily believed; and from the beginning I had determined that, if a war came, somehow or other, I was going to the front.

Imagine Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, or Douglas Feith forming a regiment and taking it to the Iraqi front!  Or a modern-day Harvard or Columbia graduate volunteering for service with it.  Really, it is unimaginable.  Probably fewer than ten percent of American males with college degrees have ever handled a firearm.  America in 1898 was still a whole society, raising up whole men.  The difference between then and now is, to some degree, the difference between summer camp and college camp.

I have written sometime within the last year that I had always been a defender of the gentleman’s C until George W. Bush entered the White House.  Since then, I have reflected that, had Bush graduated from Yale with an A-plus average, he would have been no less dangerous as president (and even quite possibly more so) than he has proved himself in fact to be.  TR, in spite of his intellectual brilliance and his greatness as a man, as president was almost as wrongheaded as W., overall.  And it is worth noting, moreover, that there is no reason to believe that Roosevelt’s formidable intellect, encyclopedic learning, and literary ability are relatable to the report cards he received from Harvard.

I am speaking here of a college education, not a postgraduate or professional one.  Obviously, it is the duty, as well as the business, of law, medical, business, mining, agricultural schools, and the like to accept the best applicants, give them the most rigorous training, and graduate competent and responsible professionals.  (Although lawyers, in particular, should be humanists as well; while Americans of a certain age can recall their general internist having played the cello and collected works of art, and the music for their Sunday church service being tastefully selected by a Wall Street banker.)  As for the humanities, postgraduate work in history, literature, languages, and the sciences ought, of course, to be conducted according to the standards of professional scholarship.  But, as to undergraduate education?  To hell with the grade-grubbers! Admissions departments should be firmly directed to discriminate unapologetically and refer them directly to the professional schools.  Where the colleges are concerned—the Ivy League colleges in particular—the inflexible rule should be: Only dilettantes need apply.

Because it is from dilettantism that civilization arises and on which it depends.  Civilization, in the highest sense, is play; and civilized play is play in the highest sense of the word, as art is play.  I do not say that the creation of civilization, and of art, is not the result of rigorous and exacting labor, involving blood, sweat, and skill as well as genius; but that the end of art and civilization is itself not rigorous.  (Aquinas beautifully defined art as “reason in making,” which is exactly opposite in concept and purpose of making for a reason.)  Artists, philosophers, and scholars, before the age of mass education, were a minute minority of the human race.  That they are a much larger minority today goes far to explain the vulgar decrepitude of modern times.  Whether or not everyone in a modern democracy can be famous for 15 minutes, the chances of anyone becoming a great creative artist for a lifetime are infinitesimal, on the order of dying in a plane crash or being struck by lightning.  The overwhelming majority of those people who have an interest in art and learning at all are destined to be patrons of these things, not creators of them.  That is to say, they will spend their lives in contemplation of them.  And, while it is certainly possible to help a student to appreciate a Mozart sonata, a poem by John Donne, or a painting by Velásquez, it is the height of philistinism to grade him on the quality of his appreciation.  Worse, it is the height of fatuity.  Worse yet, it is, in one sense, entirely unrelated and, in another, completely antagonistic to the enjoyment of art.  It is possible to listen to a Bach fugue, comprehending the structure of the piece in its every measure, and yet not be moved by it—which is to say, not to enjoy it.  (The student who can do so nevertheless grades A-plus.)  Conversely, it is possible to be moved by the whole without having attained to a technical comprehension of the sum of its parts.  What sense does it make for the academic instructor to insist that I am not enjoying Bach’s composition for the “correct” reasons?  The fact remains that I feel the piece for something the composer put into it and that, since what Bach put into his fugue is Bach, I cannot go wrong in appreciating his work in any one of its aspects, at any level.  (And why should I pay much heed to Professor Julius J. Julliard’s remonstrances or care that he grades me C or C-minus?)  The broader and fundamental objection to the competitive approach to a liberal-arts education really comes down to this: that the competitively precise assessment of the liberal-arts student is as much beside the point as the scientific evaluation of him as a gentleman would be.  And the purpose of a college education should be—as once it was—to produce gentleman and ladies, not meritocratically distinguishable specialists of whom the world has an enormous surfeit already, together with a dearth of ladies and gentlemen.  The issue, I suppose, can be put as follows: What level of academic accomplishment suffices for the civilized generalist?  The answer is probably in the C to C-plus range.

When I was preparing to apply to colleges in the mid-1960’s, the ideal—fixed beyond the most cogent object or rational argument—was “the well-rounded student.”  (Though I was told of one admissions director at a prestigious New England college making mild fun of the applicant who “was so well-rounded he rolled away into a corner and was forgotten,” it seemed this gentleman pretty much rolled along with his counterparts at other schools where the actual application of admissions criteria was concerned.)  Since I have always detested this shallow positivistic ideal, together with most well-rounded people themselves, I should emphasize that well-roundedness is not what I have in mind.  The notion that the model college acceptant should boast an A-plus or (as perfection is denoted these days) four-point average; have been elected class president and made captain of his high-school football team; served as editor of the school paper and shone as matinée idol of the Glee Club; spent his summers working with Habitat for Humanity or in his hometown ghetto and volunteered as poll-watcher on Election Day; and so on, and so forth is no more than a preposterous caricature of the prevailing liberal bourgeois mind.  So far from directing young people toward reality, such absurdly artificial activities lead them away from it and into the fatuous mental morass of modernism.  Young ladies and gentlemen ought to be introduced at the earliest possible age to the genteel pursuits of literature, the fine arts, history, and the natural sciences.  Beyond that, and rigorous religious training, they need to be taught according to the formula of Jeff Cooper, and, before him,the court of ancient Persia: “to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”  None of these accomplishments is likely to be gained at college camp, for the obvious reason that neither camp nor college values such things.

There is a major and fundamental objection to be made to this alternative ideal, and with no reason to believe that a satisfactory answer to be made to it exists.  The problem, of course, has to do with competition and success in later life.  If grade-grubbing and academic achievement alone are recognized by the professional schools and rewarded by business and professional offers, then educated gentlemen must lose out competitively, not as individuals only but as a class, to the intellectual robber barons of the aspiring meritocracy.  The civilized minority thus faces a choice: whether to become the enemy or to be displaced by him.  The choice, to be certain, is a terrible one.  It is not more terrible, however, than the billions of individual choices, some large, some small, faced by hundreds of millions of Christians—day in and day out, year after year, for the past two millennia—who, by some miracle of God, have not yet been displaced from Western civilization.

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Too bad that, since 1966, they are no longer adding titles to the Index of Prohibited Books.  My more than ten years as diocesan censor librorum—was it this past distinction that gained me the happy task of writing this review?—would lead me to grant Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition an imprimatur after a few nugatory adjustments, but what a book such as this really needs is a condemnation.  Let me explain.  A place on the Inquisition’s Index would recommend this text to three groups of potential readers.  The first are readers who already are in sympathy with the author’s sound principles.  They would compare him to the soon-to-be-Blessed (imagine the Church of the 22nd century giving this honor to Dr. Fleming!  Stranger things have happened since Pentecost A.D. 33) Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, whose Five Wounds of Holy Church, a work of similar courage and good sense, was later removed from the list of offending texts.  The second are those liberals who would in principle support the diffusion of any work that was the victim of censorship.  (They might even get The Morality of Everyday Life in major bookstore windows, with reviews in America.)  The third group needs most of all to read this book.  They are well-meaning old movement conservatives and neoconservatives, the folks who read publications that depend for matters of social ethics on authors whose works figure on the Index, like Locke, Hume, Comte, Acton, and Mill.  So, if you read National Review without being outraged, or First Things, or even Latin Mass, then get your confessor to let you read The Morality of Everyday Life.

The penitential context for reading this work is most apposite to Dr. Fleming’s main thesis, since he calls for a return to premodern casuistry in the evaluation of the morality of human acts, a casuistry whose apogee, after centuries of development, was the 18th-century Theologia Moralis of St. Alphonsus Liguori, whose method he judges “a mature and humane approach to moral problems that has never been equaled.”  This book of informal essays, written in a style that is accessible to the casual reader while remaining intellectually sumptuous, has, as its main thesis, that genuine moral reasoning

is based on two principles: first, that there are general and universally applicable moral laws governing human conduct; second, that these laws may not be applied simplistically and uniformly to the great variety of human circumstances and situations.

The subtitle, Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, however, should make clear that this set of essays is not merely a serene, positive exposition of this thesis but, more importantly, a rhetorical refutation of the opposing rationalist ethics that both dogged post-Cartesian “mere conservatism” and willingly accompanied post-Kantian revolutionary voluntarism, while having perhaps the most plausible success with their milder ally, Anglo-American utilitarian empiricism.  Dr. Fleming shows a wide acquaintance with the principal texts of this modern philosophical tradition in ethics, yet his greatest strength lies in his domination of classical and vernacular literature in finding the loci most adapted to his arguments.  Add to this a keen eye for the realities of ordinary family and professional life and the surrealities of contemporary social and political relations, and you have the concrete synthesis (almost a redundancy!) that I have just described as intellectually sumptuous, and I mean after the manner of one of the better Sunday brunches (or dinners, if you prefer) available in your area.  You will gladly graze on the well-presented fare served up—and with a smile this time, I promise—by the good chef-maître of Rockford.

The prospective reader should not, however, expect a kind of ironic Chestertonian romp, triumphant and carefree.  Dr. Fleming has two characteristic modes of expression: the practical and the poignant.  The former is predominant, and rightly so in a work promoting classical casuistry.  The essay chapters “Too Much Reality” and “Growing Up Unabsurd” will convince any Chronicles reader that the magazine should feature a regular Dear Tommy column—if I may risk the crimen laesae maiestatis in so naming it—answering casus conscientiae.  The poignant mode, though, takes you by surprise, and there are passages in the essays “Problems of Perspective” and “The Myth of Individualism,” and the “coda” in “Goodbye, Old Rights of Man,” which will make you weep, or want to.

If there is a statement among these closely consequential and yet self-contained essays that presents the most fundamental moral perspective for the resolution of cases of conscience, it is the following:

For non-liberals—that is, nearly everyone in the history of the human race—there is simply no dilemma.  Family relations take precedence over any claim from any stranger no matter how good or holy, and Christians are under no less obligation than nonbelievers.  “If anyone does not take care of his own,” says St. Paul (1 Tim. 5:8), “and especially of his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

From this perspective, you can make all the proper judgments about the claims of government, employment, friendship, and philanthropy and descry as well the proper realm of heroism, which consists not so much in leaving behind this most particular of contexts as it does in sacrificing all to preserve it.

Perhaps the most practically trenchant and applicable analysis offered among those found on literally every page in the book is the brief treatment of “the pornography of compassion.”  The insight offered here, if applied to one’s use of the media of communication, could alone provide the lion’s share of the moral ascesis needed for persevering in the good nowadays, dealing as it does with what is most peculiar to precisely contemporary moral dilemmas.  In this, as in practically everything else, Dr. Fleming shows himself to be a disciple of Aristotle, who is the single most often cited author in these essays.  The author for whom one suspects Dr. Fleming has the most affection and respect, however, is Samuel Johnson.  The contrast of his moral attitude with Voltaire’s, which Dr. Fleming so revealingly expounds, has made me resolve to take up Boswell again for my benefit.

Here, I hope, is an accidental boon of this work: to get the reader to go back and read the literature he has been lacking or has forgotten.  Like a kind of latter-day St. Isidore of Seville, Dr. Fleming (we keep canonizing him by analogy) has extracted the essential nectar from so many stories and provided us with a florilegium in essay form that provides a model of the intelligent use of literary authorities.  The ensemble of concrete example and literary precedent is a fine and attractive argument a posteriori ex usu for a robust classical education.  One can see clearly how, even in the absence of a formal moral theory, rightly determined literary culture can provide a man with the necessary matter for sound practical judgment.

Yet alas, Dr. Fleming’s strongest point also reveals a defect, albeit a venial one.  Although he is a master of letters, he is still a student of theology.  There are a few errors in the work, which a censura praevia would have excised.  One is his description of the differences between Saint Peter and Saint Paul regarding the observances of the Mosaic law.  A closer reading of the case as it develops in Acts and in the epistles will show that the case is not just as Dr. Fleming describes it, but far more nuanced, evidence in itself of an original Apostolic casuistry.

Another error that is more to the point regards the characterization of Saint Alphonsus’ moral teaching as “probabilism.”  Quite precisely, his theory is called “aequiprobabilism.”  This school of casuistry holds that the opinion favoring liberty over law may be followed if it is intrinsically probable, all things being equal.  This last condition means that, in cases where there is question of the cessation of a law that has already been in force, the opinion favors the law even if the other opinion has probability, but, when there is question of the law having yet come into force, the opinion favors liberty.  The simple probabilist holds that any truly probable opinion may be followed, even if an opposing opinion may be more probable.  An aequiprobabilist holds the same view but gives greater weight to laws already presumably in force.  In casuistic practice, however, these views are merely useful for persuading the penitent, because the confessor may not impose his theory’s resolution of the moral case in question on the penitent, if there exists another view not condemned by authority.  In reality, the only two systems of moral evaluation condemned have been rigorism (as in the case of the Jansenists) and laxism (as in the case of some Jesuits), so all the others are practically probable and certainly licit.  The Q.E.D. is that the probabilist view wins out, if the penitent wants it to and the confessor keeps within the bounds of his authority.  The Thomist Dominic Pruemmer explains in his classic Vademecum:

If one prescinds from rigorism and laxism, each of the systems described is tolerated by the Church, and so the confessor has no right to impose his system on the penitent, or strictly require anything of the penitent which he is not bound to do according to the approach of another legitimate system.  Thus the confessor may prudently counsel safer or more probable opinions, but he cannot strictly impose them (that is, in preference to merely probable ones).  In practice let him choose those opinions which, considering all the circumstances, he foresees will produce the best fruit for the spiritual health of the penitent.

Thus, Dr. Fleming’s intuition is fundamentally sound: Probabilism, which favors liberty because of a respect for circumstances, is the default system of classical Roman Catholic casuistry.  Even so, it is not Roman Catholic casuistry he is promoting but rather a return to any casuistic system at all (including Talmudic or Caroline) within the traditions that have made up our society, for such systems by their very nature harmonize with life as it is actually lived and use morality to preserve and strengthen rather than to break down and overturn ties of blood and soil and common endeavor.  Apart from those few things one may never do under any circumstances—such as blaspheme, murder the innocent, commit unnatural acts, or steal from a man poorer than oneself—it is almost impossible to indicate specific acts that must always be done regardless of circumstances.  For this reason, then, there must be casuistry, since the possibilities for doing good are literally infinite.

For every manual of casuistry, there needs to be a speculative presentation of general principles.  Otherwise, the ethics inculcated may be merely a kind of positivistic integralism, a “this is the way its always been, so don’t ask questions” attitude, unable to defend itself from the critical and revolutionary spirit.  This companion volume to The Morality of Everyday Life has yet to be written, but here the reviewer dares to present a suggestion as to what its overarching, unifying insight should be.  The exposition of nominalism in the sixth chapter points in the direction of the deepest level of moral reasoning.  Whereas Dr. Fleming’s interpretation and application of the genesis of the notion of individualism is not one to which I would subscribe, this is the one place in the book where he brushes up against the larger philosophical issue underlying any account of the morality of human acts and transcending any given instance of moral reasoning.

In his Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, book 12, lesson 5, St. Thomas Aquinas makes the following observation:

The opinion of Plato in positing eternal substances is of no worth . . . for we cannot explain permanent movement by making up some eternal separated substances . . . For the Forms posit nothing other than separated universals, but universals as such cannot move another, for every active or moving principle is something singular.

To his grandmother trying to make him eat his greens by saying, “Remember the starving children in Ethiopia,” we can imagine a little Thomas Fleming responding as did an old acquaintance of mine when asked the same imperative-masked-as-question.  “Name one,” he said.  Morality is in the end about cause and effect, indeed about the “road which must take many a twist and turn” on the way to final causes and ultimate perfections.  “The good cannot be found in mathematical entities,” said Saint Thomas, because they are mere universals that cannot exist as they are defined.  And yet it is the good that must move us, and, unless the good is a concrete good and not an abstraction, it cannot effectively move us.  This holds true whether we are receiving or bestowing a good.  Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (here comes the third hagiographical parallel), whose one-person-at-a-time ethic so closely resembles Thomas Fleming’s, had this to say, much in the line of the overly clever turnip-green hater:

Sometime when I encounter parents, I tell myself if [sic] it is possible that these parents worry about those who are hungry in Africa, in India or in other countries.  It is possible that they dream of ending the hunger felt by any human being.  However they live unaware of their own children, of having that poverty and that hunger of heart in their very own homes.  Moreover, they themselves are the ones who cause that hunger and that poverty.

One last question: Does Daddy really love faraway Fatima and Hajar as much as he does Jenna and Barbara?  We hope not, but I wish Dr. Fleming would send the White House a complimentary copy of his book very soon.  The Index is passé, but there is still the PATRIOT Act.

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.