Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for.

In  the opening pages of The Politics of Prudence, Dr. Kirk offers prescient comments from 1993, the year the book was published. He asks in Chapter I, “The Errors of Ideology,” whether “yet  more forms of ideology will be concocted during the twenty-first century”(4). “How long can we survive as a free nation when the word ideology, with its corrupting power, is mistaken for a guardian of ordered liberty?”

A year of so past, the  Wall Street Journal’s “Opinion” section published  a short article by Roger Koppl and Abigail Devereaux:  “Biden Establishes a Ministry of Truth.” The Department of Homeland Security in an attempt to combat “dis-information”or “fake news,” has formed a Disinformation Governance Board, to counter dis- or mis-information related to homeland security. It’s framed to appear unobjectionable.

So, a bureaucracy within a bureaucracy with “truth” experts; Homeland Security also creating a “crisis monitor with the dial permanently set to ‘existential threat.’”

A phrase now bandied about with some liberality, “existential threat.”

One might also turn to chapter XV in The Politics of Prudence, “The Behemoth State:  Centralization.” Apart from the tongue-in-cheek references to federally mandated water sprinklers in hotel bedrooms, which if back-dated would cost owners $1,500.00 per room, Dr. Kirk opines that his point is less the lack of prudence rather than the “expense of the act now on the statute books, but rather the political consequence of decreeing that the federal government (which does not mean central) shall prescribe and regulate all sorts of concerns previously left to the police powers of the several states and local agencies or left to the sensible management of individuals, households, and firms. As it is, more and more discretion of choice is removed from private citizens” (224).

Behold the Sprinkler Act, Behold Behemoth, and a grim tendency neutralizing all but one central seat of administration.

At what taxpayer cost the newish ministry of truth?

We have, however, Dr. Kirk’s defense of prudential politics against the machinations of the ideologue who would, according to Dr. Kirk, think of politics as transformative. The ideologue is merciless, and rather than promoting enduring order, justice and freedom “ideology is the politics of passionate unreason”(9).

“The woods are full of these creatures.”

Turn we now to additional troubles in our time.

A few years back our South Carolina Supreme Court rendered opinion number 27693. Michael Vernon Beaty, the appellant, was convicted of murdering his girl friend and sentenced to life. The Court affirmed his sentence but critiqued the trial judge’s “use of certain terms.”

In his remarks, the judge explained trial procedure and the role of the jury. The judge said a trial is the search for truth to make sure justice is done. Jurors reason from the facts and deliberate to render a “true and just verdict.”

Beaty objected to “the search for  the truth,” “true facts,” and ”true and just verdict.” The South Carolina Supreme Court argued that a trial  judge should “refrain from informing the jury that its role is to search for the truth, or to find the true facts, or to render a true and just verdict.”

The Court did not find grounds for reversal but the trial judge’s comments were not “happy.” Trial judges have been instructed to omit “unhappy” language.

Surely it’s tyranny of a certain kind. Lacking prudence, those Supreme Court judges bandied semantics willy-nilly rather than the longer views of custom and convention, or for that matter prudent law if not an enduring  order. As for the justices’ comments, well, one should be “unhappy.”

It does bring to mind the 1965 United States Supreme Court decision and Justice William O. Douglas’ statement that a general right to privacy is in the penumbras surrounding the guarantees of the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments.  While not expressly stated in the amendments, at issue is the argument that “penumbra” makes an unenumerated existence necessary without which the amendments’ guarantees are not fully meaningful but by “emanations” that help give them spirit and opinion.

It’s unclear what Dr. Kirk may have thought about such liberating enumerations, but it’s doubtful he would have admired the adroitness of the legal landscape that exists only in gaseous space. My sense is that Dr. Kirk would recognize that penumbras and emanations, even from the time of Plotinus, create nothing more than gray areas where logic and principle falter.

Commenting on the Bicentenary of the Constitution, Dr. Kirk notes that such should have been the “celebration of the triumph of the conservative mind in America but such brilliance is largely unknown in America today.  The result has become uncertainty not only to constitutional provisions but also to common law provisions” (36).

The reader can, however, turn to Chapter II of The Politics of Prudence and note Dr. Kirk’s belief that human nature is constant, and moral truths are permanent and not the consequence of some emanation. Our morals are prescriptive, which argues that it’s perilous to argue that we are unlikely to make any new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. The prudent conservative doubts whether the mystical emanations and penumbras of progressivism will hurry us toward some kind of “dubious Terrestrial Paradise” (25).

What’s left in the Constitutional scope of protection is penumbral uncertainty as the source of legal authority;  judicial activism has become the emanating yardstick. Dr. Kirk often asserted that human law should be a copy of eternal law so far as we can understand eternal law.  How else to promote our welfare and prevent confusion and disaster, ignorance and selfishness?

Turn we now to other troubles in our time.

The late Laurence Tribe is the author of The Invisible Constitution, which I suspect would be suspect by Dr. Kirk.

Professor Tribe’s argument is constitutional invisibility, an unwritten text which  accompanies the parchment. It takes some pondering which leaves us to wonder about the invisible component as if there were some kind of radiation seeping from the “textual” version, dark matter from a universe with an unusual spectrum, nola bene.

Dr. Kirk’s conservative” argument would be that the book is a stacked deck, false arguments parading as logic.

I once asked a class of good students whether the phrase “We the People” meant  a “classless society.” A good many thought that such was the proper vision for a just society. I asked whether such was “in” the Constitution? Many students thought such language was in the “text” while others thought that even if it wasn’t it should be “doctrine.” Such detachment  from  the Founders over time offers nothing more nothing less than stumbling blocks since the meaning from the “text:” proper “resides only in much that one cannot perceive from it.”  Who then has the legal authority to  “see” this invisible constitution?

Dr. Kirk decries in Chapter XVIII, “Popular Government and Intemperate Minds,” the increasing secularism in the educational wasteland  and the judicial  wasteland; he  quotes T. S. Eliot, always a favorite: “Unless can find a pattern in which all problems of life can have their place, we are only likely to go on complicating chaos…. We shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. As political philosophy derives  its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality” (273).

How then to defeat intemperate minds in this time of troubles?

Witty candidates for public office are beginning to  emerge with slogans promoting their “brand” like Holy Writ. Whether any will possess prudent wisdom would be a God-send. And would that person profess first principles that would refute perverted modern politics? Kirk concludes his first chapter with the hope that “this book of mine may be of help to those of the rising generation who have the courage to oppose ideological zealots” (14).

Turn we now to other troubles.

Error abounds but “the most prominent” place is where today’s young people are “wretchedly educated.” Dr. Kirk develops this thesis in Chapter XVI, “Cultivating Educational Wastelands.”

I received a call from a small college. Would I have an interest in teaching “Introduction to World Literature”? It became a burden.  One topic was “tragedy.”  The text was Shakespeare’s Othello. I placed in front of the class the “fact” that Othello was a Moor, Turkish, Muslim, and described in detail the amicable relations between Queen Elizabeth and the Ottoman Sultan Murad III.

I labored to help the students understand classical definitions of tragedy and the English literary imagination of the time. If there were any controversy, it would be an understanding on the part of English Christians—such as Elizabeth’s Protestant leanings—thinking of Muslims as absent of faith. The difficulty lies in attempting to transpose  Elizabethan times into modern times.

I received diatribe essays haphazardly tossed on my classroom desk: “Shakespeare is a racist” was popular, followed by editorial paragraphs that Black Lives Matter. My “favorite” was a ribald discussion of a scene in which Cassio and Desdemona spend “time” sweatily wrapped in black silk sheets. The student’s analysis did not lack erotic explicitness but was nowhere to be found in the text.

The consensus was censorship. Shakespeare should be canceled and the best way to teach Othello would be to challenge the “whiteness” aimed at people of color.

I ventured to the English Department chairperson and explained the issue while asking for advice. I was told that my  “job” was to validate the students’ “interpretations.”

I offered the caveat that my health was declining. I departed.

Dr. Kirk in 1993 held out the possibility “of an Augustan age,” but skeptically, and that “Marxist education notions and methods have been exposed” for their  fallacies—except in the United Sates, perhaps” (249):  “perhaps” dripping at the end of that sentence.

I recall reading Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconsciousness and his thesis, Chapter One, “On Interpretation”:  “The methodological interest of Christian historicism and the theological origin… [of] the Christian philosophy of history which emerges full blown in Augustine’s City of God can no longer be particularly binding on us…. The only effective liberation from such constraints [buttressed by Marxism] is to create a new vanguard of interpretations.”

Christian historicism, which by definition is eschatological and fulfilling itself in the future, is too dogmatic to be binding upon us. The aim is effective liberation from that view of historicism and a  “a new vanguard of interpretations.”

Historicism advocated by Jameson  purports  intellectual freedom but is more likely the single greatest threat to intellectual freedom. This new vanguard of historicism rejects political philosophy, which stands by  principles of permanent significance, if not transcendental.

Leo Strauss makes the following argument in the opening pages of On Tyranny:  [M]odern political science is so lacking in understanding of the most massive political phenomena, that it cannot even recognize the worst tyrannies for what they are“ (x). I hasten to caution by citing Strauss in a smallish essay on Kirk. I suspect that both would agree that the modern, if not post-modern arena of politics, is “innocent of philosophy.”

Dr. Kirk believed himself “to being one of the few survivors of the original intrepid band of Neoconservatives,” who in the early nineteen-fifties had declared their “belief in the Permanent things” (172). The “terms ‘New Conservative’ and ‘Neo-Conservative’” began to appear in various media. It implied something reactionary but only in the sense of reviving conservative doctrines throughout the land.  He adds in Chapter XII, “The  Neoconservatives:  An Endangered Species,” that such became a dread label and that he, among others, merely styled  themselves as “conservatives being well aware that that conservatism is nothing new; others of our kind preferred to bear no dog tag” (173).

With good reason, since the Neo-Cons “have sabotaged [traditional] conservatism” from within and exploited it for their own selfish purposes” (177). They are, after all, liberals who have turned their coats, opportunistic seekers after power and the main chance, and surely no sacred band.

Dr. Kirk expressed worry  that the lack of wisdom had led Neo-Conservatives to an infatuation with ideology. He goes on to paraphrase Irving Kristol on the subject of ideology. Mr. Kristol, and others, wished to adopt an ideology of their own “against Marxist and other totalitarian ideologies.” To which Dr. Kirk responded that such ideology, “is the substitution  of political slogans for real political thought.” He goes on to quote the venerable Dr. Gerhart Niemeyer and his group of essays, Aftersight and Foresight, which includes his essay “Ideas Have Also Roots,” where he rebuffs Mr. Kristol for his advocacy of “‘Republican ideology’” and argues that ideology “is not confined to communists and fascists…. We, too have our share of it, and it shows in our policies. All modern ideologies have the same irrational root: the permeation of politics with millenarian ideas of pseudo-religious character” (181).

Turn we then to January 6, 2021, when the United States Capitol was attacked.

To use a word like “tyranny” is not to argue that such will come from without, but from a disinclination to “see ourselves as we are, and an unwillingness to confess our sins.” Quoting Bernard Eddings Bell, Dr. Kirk notes “the chief threat to America comes from within America.” Traditional  conservatism must be distinguished from “men and women whose immediate interest is in practical politics of a conservative cast“ (191). He “hopes,” however, “ that such may offer, possibly some “feeble defense” (192).

It’s a fine chapter with an argument that our inherited culture is involved in grim difficulties, including cultural decadence, which includes decadence of philosophical inquiry, which has led to a naive understanding of the human condition.

Dr. Kirk does not use the word “tyranny” lightly, but there are synonyms such as “intemperate minds.” In his concluding chapter, he offers a narrative of a lecture at the University of Oklahoma, where he “heretically denied [the] dogma of ideological Democratism.”

It takes courage to speak one’s mind, but there is incitement to violence which was established in Brandenburg v. Ohio. What has followed in this time of troubles disregards the conservative notion that freedom of expression is a virtue, which refutes the notion that we are free to do whatever we wish as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.

Dr. Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. The free-speech absolutism in the public square is at odds with common law and day-to-day general practice. Free speech is not a sword.

In the final chapter to The Politics of Prudence, his eloquent epilogue, Dr. Kirk urges the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. He passed from this world into the eternal order on April 29, 1994, with the hope that wise human counsel would emerge in the years following. It’s a faith worth fighting for.

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The featured image is “The Drowned Fisherman” (1896) Michael Peter Ancher, and is in the public domain, by courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.