The Christian Humanism of Russell Kirk

When Russell Kirk (1918–1994) published his magnum opus, The Conservative Mind, in May 1953, the entire landscape of the English-speaking world changed. Though originally a dissertation entitled The Conservatives' Rout, Kirk's book gave voice to myriad thinkers and thoughts previously uncoalesced but swirling—sometimes anxiously and sometimes violently and, most often, just confusedly—in the powerful desire to be something more than merely anti-Communist. Did America, and by extension Anglo- and Western civilization actually stand for something? It is one thing to resist and to criticize, but it is an altogether different thing to promote and to build.

Scrupulously careful to avoid creating yet one more new ideology in a world awash in them, Kirk claimed that true conservativism, while standing for much, represented a non-, anti-, and ante-ideo-logical position. Conservativism, instead, was the "negation of ideology," being neither left nor right, but pro-humane while ideologies, one and all, were anti-humane. Conservatism, as such, transcended the political divisions and squabblings of the ideologues of the left and the right.

Six Canons of Conservative Thought

Kirk asserted that six main ideas, or "canons," helped explain conservatism, but they didn't delimit or define conservatism in any absolute sense. A canon, rather, expressed something dogmatically—a good but little truth. The canons, therefore, could be mixed and matched and, sometimes, even dismissed and ignored. Kirk's canons proved to be something fundamentally different from, say, Mussolini's formulation of fascism, or Marx's six points of Communism, or the twelve-step program to fight addiction. In essence, Kirk's canons far more represented the canons of, say, the Council of Trent, ready to be formulated as a decree, not necessarily the only truth, but a truth within and around a million other truths. Kirk's six also reflected the common law tradition of the English-speaking world, promoting the universal truths of human dignity while recognizing the culturally and temporally specific circumstances of a particular manifestation of a universal truth. A jury is a perfect example. Everywhere and always, it must have twelve members from the community, but any one composition of a jury is never—under any circumstances—repeated. Thus, there is the universal, and there is the particular.

During his own lifetime, Kirk even attempted to change the number of canons. From time to time, he would espouse the six canons as found in The Conservative Mind. At other times, he listed four, five, and, toward the end of his life, even ten. In the 1953 edition and in all subsequent six and half editions of the book, The Conservative Mind listed these six, though the wording of each changed dramatically between 1953 and 1986 (when the revised seventh and final version appeared). First, that a god or God (or natural law or "divine intent" or Providence) rules over time and space "as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead." As a corollary, one must—as Irving Babbitt did—recognize that no single issue in this world can be separated from all other issues. "Political problems," Kirk wrote, "are religious and moral problems" and demand an ethic and morality that transcends time, place, and culture. Second, that each person, as St. John Paul the Great would later put it, is an unrepeatable center of dignity and liberty. Or, as Kirk put it, one must love "the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems." Each person matters, therefore, and God makes nothing in vain.

Third, a recognition—especially taking into account the first two canons—that each human person, in talent and motivation, is radically different from every other human person. We share equality in the sight of God and before the law. Otherwise, though, we should recognize that what makes us human is what makes us individually gifted. One is a teacher, another a counselor, another a cellist, another a dancer. Our excellences fundamentally distinguish us...