Conservatism Revisited

BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE (339 pp.)--Russell Kirk--Henry Regnery ($4.50).

Like a lot of intellectuals who worry professionally about the state of the world, Historian Russell Kirk does not much like the shape of things. In The Conservative Mind (TIME, July 6, 1953), he made it plain that American conservatives had found a gifted and sorely needed spokesman. He is young (37), he can write hardhitting prose, he is not ashamed to range himself on the side of God, custom and character, and he believes strongly in such old-fashioned virtues as duty and responsibility. His book of essays, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, ranges in subject matter from censorship to the ugliness of British welfare-state housing, but it has a sense of unity nevertheless. Kirk has a line and it is simply this: no political nostrum can cope with the unease of modern life. Modern man must keep what is best from the past and leaven it with personal integrity and a belief in God.

Kirk is no reactionary, is in fact considerably more liberal than many self-proclaimed liberals. But he is rightly impatient with those intellectuals who assume "that we were all born yesterday, and that a vulgar pragmatism ought to supplant the bank and capital of traditional wisdom." Like most honest thinkers, he values the best of man's past and rebels against the notion "that the end of man is gratification of carnal appetite." He is convinced that the "social order now exhibits the symptoms of advanced decay" and is moving into "an Age of Gluttony." Who is to check the deterioration? Not, thinks Kirk, the materialistic liberals who, like the old Russian intellectuals, thought they were emancipated when "they were merely unbuttoned." He thinks it is a job for conservatives, and that the U.S. is the strongest bastion of conservatism left in the world.

Ideologies are anathema to Kirk, but he is also disturbed by the U.S. habits of "getting and spending." Here he becomes somewhat vague, as if he chose to ignore the fact that the good and full life can at the same time be a prosperous life. But he is most irked by the whining sort of U.S. intellectual who sets himself apart, "a species of dilettante who prides himself on being different, for no particular reason and with no particular duties." The men of this breed must find Kirk a very peculiar intellectual indeed. Can he mean it when he writes that "for the Christian, freedom is submission to the will of God"? Kirk does mean it, and this is no paradox. "We are free in proportion as we recognize our real duties and our real limitations."

Kirk is too well aware of the imperfect nature of man to suppose that the world's happiness is just around the corner. He can hardly be called an optimist, and he suffers from the built-in defect of all who distrust specific programs--he has none of his own to propose. But he has faith in the accumulated wisdom of the past, in the ultimate integrity of the individual, in a relationship between God and man that will give life a meaning it cannot otherwise have.

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