Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics by Russell Kirk, 303 pages
In
this work, Kirk argues that without a clear, agreed upon standard of
morality, all morality, thus reduced to a matter of opinion, ultimately
becomes the captive of ideology. Ironically, the pursuit of radical
individualism, where "every man alone thinks he hath got / To be a
phoenix, and that then can be / None of that kind, of which he is, but
he" produces hollow men who, lacking an anchor in a real interior life,
are fully other-directed, blown about by the winds of fashion.
Unfortunately,
merely agreeing on certain norms for pragmatic reasons will not
suffice, since no such agreement can survive any but the most trivial
disagreement. Nor can consensus be achieved by unaided reason, which
was the project of the Enlightenment. Kirk locates the foundation of
civilization in tradition, and the wellspring of tradition in the moral
imagination, best represented in his own time by fabulists such as
Tolkien, Lewis, and Bradbury. The foes of the moral imagination are
those ideologues who regard the wisdom of the past as an oppressive
burden which must be overcome if some utopian future is to be realized,
and those technocrats who regard humans as things to be measured,
catalogued, and managed. To the latter, Kirk objects that it is
precisely in a time of greater social sophistication and complexity that
knowledge of human things - humane learning - the humanities - is most
needed in our leaders. To the former, he survived to see its greatest
earthly representative undone by such proponents of the moral
imagination as Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Wojtyla. To those, more
respectable if not numerous now than in his own time, who reject all
forms of order and authority as inherently unjust, Kirk repeats that to
believe that human life has value is to believe it has meaning, and to
believe in meaning is to believe in order.
One might expect a book entitled Enemies of the Permanent Things to be primarily negative, but it is far more an effort at reclamation than a jeremiad.
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