SOURCE: Cheney, Brainard. “The Conservative Course by Celestial Navigation.” Sewanee Review 62, no. 1 (winter 1954): 151-59.

[In the following review, Cheney reviews The Conservative Mind and takes serious issue with arguments advanced by John Crowe Ransom in his own review of the work published a few months earlier in The Kenyon Review.]

As our renowned ship, Materialism, nears the Rock of atomic explosion and the Suck of Russian sovietization, athwart the passage to Utopia, all aboard are appalled. In the choppy waters, her timbers creak with growing stress. There are noisy and frightened exclamations among the passengers. The men on the bridge look grim and belligerent in their effort to look confident. There is a hasty and confused search going on in the chart room.

Any one coming forward with a new course for evading the perils of our Scylla and Charybdis at this hour risks the charge of temerity, especially when his map has the look of a Mercator rather than a Lambert or polar projection. Mr. Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, nevertheless, has done something of the sort—although he identifies lodestars, rather than the buoys and reefs one would expect to find marked for so close a passage.

At the outset, Mr. Kirk sets forth his compass readings in six canons of conservatism: (1) belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead; (2) affection for the variety and mystery of traditional life: (3) conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes and that the only true equality is moral equality; (4) persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected; (5) belief that tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse; (6) recognition that change and reform are not identical and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.

For more exact meaning, he opposes to his points five of radicalism or liberalism: (1) the perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society; (2) contempt for tradition; (3) political leveling; (4) economic leveling; (5) a detestation of Burke's view of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn.

Mr. Kirk describes his work as a “prolonged essay in definition.” Some thirty-odd statesmen and political theorists figure in his presentation, as distinguished examples of the conservative mind. He begins with the French Revolution, as the occasion first confronting conservatives with the need for definition against a modern world. With Edmund Burke as their first and foremost spokesman, he seeks to trace the development of conservative thought from that event to the present. He confines himself to Britain and America, as the nations in Western society with the best conserved polities, and to Britons and Americans, with the exception of de Tocqueville and Santayana, as his contributors to conservative thinking.

Among the Americans, the company incudes most of the members of the Adams family, beginning with old John, Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, Orestes Brownson, Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, to name the more outstanding ones.

I would not seriously quarrel with his partiality to the Adamses; what he has to say about them is relevant and they undoubtedly contributed to conservatism. But since he opens the way with his surprise over our Constitution's getting written with John Adams absent from the country at the time (and Jefferson, too) and intimates that Adams's influence was so great that his views prevailed in his absence, I find excuse to put in a word about a favorite hero of my own. Perhaps Mr. Kirk could not have been expected to know about John Rutledge of South Carolina and his influence on the American Constitution, since Rutledge was of the doing, not of the writing order—as the voluminous Adamses were—and little has been written about him, besides Richard Barry's biography in 1942. Yet it was no less discriminating a judge than de Tocqueville himself (according to Barry) who pronounced him to be the “father of the Constitution.” Certainly his was a conservative mind and talent to conjure with, and I believe he was well worthy of Burke's company.

Only incidentally and discontinuously does Kirk recount the history that brings British and American society to its present day and to what he calls “the recrudescence of conservatism.” And his analyses of the process are secondary to his examination of the defining statements of his examples. This procedure makes for repetition, but his definition gains by this fullness and it has especial importance for politics and thought in this country, because, as he observes, there has been a great confusion in the United States over what conservatism is. Mr. John Crowe Ransom, reviewing Kirk's book in The Kenyon Review, treats of this by recognizing two brands of conservatism. He calls one “campaigning conservatism” and describes it as having only “pragmatic doctrine,” while Kirk's view of conservatism, he says, is “total,” or possessed of both pragmatic and “theological doctrine.”

But this is not altogether new to our country. The total view of conservatism in American thought and history has received earlier consideration in a penetrating analysis by Ralph Gabriel (The Course of American Democratic Thought, 1940) that represented early American democracy as a balance between the concepts of the free individual and the fundamental law. A balance which Mr. Gabriel revealed to have been upset following the Civil War, to our profound distress. This came about through a progressive enervation and decay of this fundamental law, which had operated outside the political framework. Gabriel's fundamental law accords with Mr. Kirk's view of the prescriptive, moral and religious elements in conservatism. There is, however, an important difference in their point of viewing.

Mr. Gabriel looked back upon the good old day of conservative balance in American democracy and found in it a criticism of its contemporary sentimental corruption, but he did not pursue the origin of the earlier polarity, nor the source of the fundamental law beyond the limits of its American fragment. Mr. Kirk has taken a larger community within Western Christendom to survey, over a somewhat wider range of history. And with Edmund Burke as his exemplar, he discovers at the outset—and a vital discovery it is—that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.”

I was asked, in preparing my piece on this book, to give some attention to previous reviewing that has been done. I have run down all of such comment that I could learn about, except that of Commonweal, the proper issue of which I could not lay hand on. Mr. Kirk's efforts meet with little real sympathy and less understanding in the five reviews I have inspected. Three of them openly disapprove of his chosen course and the other two, although giving him categorical approval, show little awareness that he has chosen it. It is his insistence that conservatism include belief in a divinely sanctioned society that all five of the reviewers either tacitly reject or actively take issue with. Mr. August Hecksher, in the Herald-Tribune Magazine, dismisses it with, “Neither of these [belief in divine sanction and fixed orders] fits into the American pattern.” Mr. Francis Biddle, in the New Republic, complains, “The assertion that conservatives believe that divine guidance must rule civilized society implies that liberals are excluded from sharing such a faith and … that God is on their [the conservatives'] side, without [their] taking the trouble to discover whether they are on His.” But only a paragraph or two later, he is saying that faith “has no place in a democratic state” and makes it quite clear that he wants no part of the Christian religion for the liberals—he just doesn't want the conservatives to be Christians, either.

Mr. Ralph Gilbert Ross, in the Partisan Review, says finally, in exasperation, “Religion for Mr. Kirk is somehow always mixed in the Liberal-Conservative controversy and is explicitly part of the Conservative canon.” And he exclaims, “Does he mean that Liberals cannot be religious and that religionists cannot be liberals?” I would suppose that for any Christian reading this, Mr. Ross's use of the word religionist here would be enough to suggest his attitude toward Christianity, but I can assure you that throughout his review he makes it very clear that he would not taint the liberals with Christianity.

Mr. Ransom, to be sure, has a clearer view of what conservatism is and why, and he is more discriminating. He is my old master and there is no man whose abilities I more respect. It is with reluctance and some timidity that I take issue with his criticism. Yet his assumption that a divine sanction for society means a divine sanction for a conservative's partisan politics seems to me unwarranted. Frankly, I am ignorant of Burke's Reflections, except for a few excerpts, and I am, I am sure, not as familiar with his time and place as is Mr. Ransom. Burke may have taken his belief in the divine sanction of society pretty partisanly at times, though Mr. Kirk does not indicate this in his review of Burke's work, nor does Mr. Ransom specifically charge it. I am quite familiar with the believer's disposition to claim God for his side, whatever his side may be. This human frailty, nevertheless, does not invalidate the soundness of man's assuming God's sanction for the society in which he lives—it is my point that only his belief or conclusion that God does not sanction the society in which he lives, that God has cursed it, warrants his holding a contrary view. And that Christian orthodoxy that Mr. Ransom once urged “to restore to God the thunder” requires such a view of a Christian in a Christian society. And his conclusion, “On the whole, it would seem risky to invoke theological sanctions for one's politics: only a little less risky in Burke's time than in Mr. Kirk's and ours”—I am persuaded to believe, is an essentially distorted view of the conservative position and of history, and it seems to me that, in the context he gives it, it serves to place him in the same partisan camp with the Utopian materialists—despite his having once championed more orthodoxy in Christian practice.

For the fact remains that, if anybody made a belief in a divine sanction of society the exclusive possession of the conservatives, it was not Burke, but the liberals who did so! And they did so by their disbelief. There had been no question of society's divine sanction in Western Christendom until the time of the Rationalists. If Mr. Kirk's critics should cite the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I would agree that a belief in the divine sanction of society was implicitly at issue in them, to be sure, but I doubt whether even the Catholics realized it then. And the fact that the Protestants claimed God's sanction as well as the Catholics and that a lot of blood was spilled on both sides by obviously ungodly men did not—nor does it now—vitiate the soundness of a belief in divine sanction for society. Indeed, soundness is not the word to characterize such a belief in any Christian community: it is an absolute need. It may be, as the historian Arnold Toynbee contends, that temporal power corrupted the Western Christian Church back in the eleventh century, sowing the seed of the wars of the Reformation; and it seems even more likely that the efforts of both Catholic and Protestant warring factions to force their views on the subjects in any territory they happened to capture was profoundly harmful to the Christian faith in Europe. Still the removal of society to a secular basis (and, shall we say, a scientific sanction?) surely has not proved to be the solution.

Mr. Toynbee has suggested that the Wars of the Reformation may have been the initiatory event in a “time of troubles” (that is, a beginning of decay) for Western Christendom. In Protestant England and America, such a conclusion would surely have been ridiculed as absurd forty years ago, or, with most people, perhaps, even twenty-five years ago. But Mr. Toynbee himself is an Englishman and a member of the Church of England, and he speaks of the French Revolution as the second outbreak, and the Hundred Years War as the first. A great many more people are prepared to entertain his suggestion today. And the Hundred Years War, whatever else it was, was the first breach of orthodoxy in Western Christendom, and produced a situation with respect to Christian belief that has progressively modified it for a great segment of professing Christians, and a great many more who don't profess any positive religion.

We may not even think of our society today as Western Christendom; yet it was founded on Christian principles and any fundamental conservatism must go back to these principles for a true tradition. This is peculiarly important for American experience, to the end of clearing up our confusion over conservatism. We must pursue our origins, not merely to the Rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but beyond, beyond the Reformation itself, if we are to find the source of Gabriel's fundamental law, if we are to find the main stem of tradition. Mr. Ransom's observation that Burke “departed from Locke in maintaining that, at least in the politics of this ancient and happy England, it was better to consult prejudice than reason,” is exact and of great significance in characterizing Burke's conservatism. And any “total conservatism” in our society must depart from Locke, in the view of contemporary philosophic criticism, which attributes to Locke a leading role in the “Modern Error.” I refer to the conclusion of F. S. C. Northrup of Yale and his group of philosophers that Locke made the essential confusion in interpreting the new physical discoveries of Galileo and Newton that has undermined the idea of society as an organism, advanced the proposition of government by contract, the Protestant atomic conception of the human soul, and the equalitarian theories of the French Revolution.

Locke was Thomas Jefferson's great inspiration. The opening of our Declaration of Independence is a Lockean paraphrase, and Locke's views have had more unqualified influence in this land than anywhere else in the world. The extreme and extravagant individualism that has found expression in America is traceable, intellectually, to John Locke.

I spoke a moment ago of the greater acceptability now of the notion that the Wars of the Reformation may have been the beginning of our time of troubles. The improved climate of opinion for this acceptability is evident in this country in a new trend toward orthodoxy among Protestant churches. And I believe this to be the most significant symptom of the conservative trend of the times of which Mr. Kirk speaks, though he does not mention it, since it is above the angle of his attack. There is a widespread movement toward traditional ritualism and symbolism: a rash of crosses has sprung up on steeples and fronts of churches, along with vested preachers and choirs inside among denominations who twenty-five years ago would have prohibited such a display; and there are candle-lit, cross-hung altars in the chapels. Among others the ceremony of communion has taken on some of the traditional ritual of the mass. At the level of Protestant theology, the conservatives are in the ascendancy and there is a rather widespread trend toward a stricter construction of the Scriptures. The reinvigorated Fundamentalist movement is, in its fashion, a move toward orthodoxy, and even the renewed attacks of two or three Protestant denominations on the Catholics are symptomatic of the current.

Yet even without any direct mention of this, Mr. Kirk, I think, has succeeded brilliantly in bringing conservatism in Britain and America to definition. I feel, insofar as I am qualified to judge, that his choice of its spokesmen has been discriminating. I hold to my judgment even in the face of the exceptions that Mr. Ross, Mr. Biddle and Mr. Gordon Keith Chalmers take. Mr. Chalmers demurs to Coleridge and, I believe, T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More, while Mr. Ross would insist on including T. H. Green, Bradley and Bosanquet. I will not here go into the respective qualifications of any of the men suggested, but I repeat that Mr. Chalmers and Mr. Ross and Mr. Biddle are in error—fundamental error in their contention about conservatism. And I should say that by implication at least, Mr. Ransom subscribes to this error.

Their error, I think, stems from a mistaken notion about Mr. Kirk's whole intention; about, indeed, the orientation of conservatism in Western Christian society. The charted course Mr. Kirk is bringing to the officers and passengers aboard the ship that I mentioned in introducing this piece does not mark safe passage between Scylla and Charybdis. Mr. Kirk is convinced (as are the host of prophets at his back) that Materialism cannot make the pass—he believes that the Rock and the Suck were manufactured by the builders of the ship—that the Rock and the Suck ever and ineluctably bar her passage to Utopia.

Mr. Kirk wants to head in another direction.

To reduce, in elementary fashion, Mr. Kirk's conservatism to its ultimate aim, I will say that it does not aim at providing you a way to make a million dollars. Materially, it merely aims at ameliorating your lot, as you travel through this uncertain country—at securing you against its phenomenal delusions. The end of life, in the view of this conservatism, is not money-making—though it would secure you in your right to do so—the end of life, in the view of this conservatism, is death. And death is its climax, too; a good death, its triumph; a bad one, its tragedy.

I think Mr. Kirk's conception of conservatism is comprehensive and profound. It is when he tries to relate it to the modern world and its present predicament that he gets into trouble. It is, to be sure, an incredibly difficult task: it is like setting up a church in a house of prostitution. And he dresses conservatism in some strange vestments. For example, I find disturbing such remarks as: “The principal interests of true conservatism and old-style libertarian democracy now approach identity.” And again, “During the remaining half of the present century the principal endeavor of intelligent conservatives is likely to be resistance to the idea of a planned society, through restoration of an order which will make the planned society unnecessary and impracticable.”

Especially is his attack on planning unqualified by any recognition of the state of private monopoly that exists in the American world of business, or the inadequacy of the older order of public regulation. Moreover, his references to private property never reveal any awareness of the subtler problems of property ownership. Property and freedom are inseparably connected, to be sure; but what is property in this modern morass of abstraction? Is, say, a piece of paper evidencing a share in an investor's trust, property? and what are one's conservative responsibilities with respect to it? One cannot invoke one's experience in getting this property and maintaining it—as one might look over his acres, his animals and his barns to remember times of drouth and flood, of want and plenty, and enjoy the tender liberty of a movement and ease, hard-earned and contingent. How can one love a paper certificate as God's gift or make a sacrament of its care, or feel responsibility as a tenant of the Almighty? A certificate-holder may fearfully hope that the man who got his money will not go south with it, will not make the mistake of investing it in an enterprise that for any reason fails to make an adequate profit. But he can have little interest in the fortunes of the men and women engaged in any of the unknown enterprises that he collects from. He is told, not about enterprises, but the distribution of losses and gains, the statistics of profit. I consider the abstraction and division of the conditions of property ownership to be one of the most difficult problems for the conservative in this day. Indeed, our general effort to enjoy the privileges and powers of property, without its responsibilities, constitutes a major social evil of our age. And the responsibilities of property are an inescapable presupposition of the freedom it can assure.

It is a responsibility that scarcely any one considers in this day of general dispossession and that most people are not even aware of. I feel very deeply on this subject, and I have said that if the traditional thinking people of the South can, in any capacity, bring a saving grace to this country, it will be because of some residual sense of property responsibility bequeathed them by an ancestry burdened with the anguish of bond slavery.

Yet perhaps Mr. Kirk sufficiently qualifies his earlier call to property and his opposition to public planning in his indorsement of economist Peter Drucker's and Professor Frank Tennenbaum's proposals for assuring a “strict surveillance of the leviathan business and the leviathan union.” And his inventory of what “social institutions the United States have to conserve” is encouraging: “the best written constitution in the world, the safest division of powers, the widest diffusion of property, the strongest sense of common interest, the most prosperous economy, an elevated moral and intellectual tradition and a spirit of resolute self-reliance unequalled in modern times.”

In The Conservative Mind, Mr. Kirk makes a monumental contribution toward clarifying the position of the conservatives in modern society, he presents them with a challenging cause, and he lists impressive social and political resources for them. Moreover, in doing this, he analyzes the errors of Sansculottism and her progeny with penetration and excoriates their evils with eloquence. Yet his celestial readings for the course of escape for our imperilled ship lack one significant star. Mr. Biddle speaks plaintively of our need of symbols. I agree with Mr. Biddle about virtually nothing else, and he got his definition of a symbol backwards, but in this he strikes at something of profound significance. Of profound significance and vital importance, despite the sentimental illustration he gives of a limited one, in the recent English coronation.

There are, there have been great symbols in our Western society. But symbols are not to be manufactured synthetically. They are created out of experience, long experience that is at once common and unique, experience that unites the individual with his fellow man, his race—and more. I repeat, there are powerful symbols in the Western Christian tradition. We have heard of them, their power. The cross that inspired crusades, the Eucharistic wafer of wheat that dispelled in men the death that is the fear of death. Created out of experience, I say—the experience required is faith.