Enemies of the Permanent Things

Enemies of Permanent Things - 1
cinops be gone Thursday, April 10, 2008
Dr. Russell Kirk is the author of the above book, published in 1969 by Arlington House, New Rachelle, New York. His analysis will help us understand a series of letters on The War against Traditional America and why Catholics and other Christians need to vote out of office Catholics-in-name-only politicians.
“This is a book about modern vices – that is modern flaws – and about norms, the standards by which we live…. For the most part, I am concerned with the modern defiance of enduring standards in literature and politics….my primary purpose is diagnostic…. 16
“When the moral imagination in enriched, a people find themselves capable of great things; when it is impoverished, they cannot act effectively even for their own survival, no matter how immense their material resources…. 17
“A norm means an enduring standard. It is a law of nature, which we ignore at our peril…. A man apprehends a norm, or fails to apprehend it; but he does not create or destroy important norms…. 17
“Standards erected out of expediency will be hurled down, soon enough, also out of expediency…. For half a century, we have been experiencing the consequences of moral and social neoterism: so, like the generation of Socrates and Thucydides in the fifth century, we begin to perceive that somehow we have acted on false assumptions. No, norms cannot be invented. All that we can do is to reawaken our consciousness to the existence of norms; to confess that there are enduring standards superior to our petty private stock of rationality…. 17
“With a man who maintains that he can discover no real standards for moral judgment of any sort, it is impossible to argue. Even Samuel Johnson, when told of a gentleman who maintained that virtue and vice are indistinguishable, observing, “Why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.”… 19
“To awaken an apprehension of norms was the high endeavor of Socrates and Plato; it was a constant theme of the Christian divines; it weighed on the minds of the rationalists of the 18th century and the positivists of the 19th….
“Our first task here is the restoration of a proper vocabulary.
“A norm, I have said, is an enduring standard for private and public conduct. It is a canon of human nature. Real progress consists in the movement of mankind towards an understanding of norms, and toward conformity to norms.
Real decadence consists in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from the obedience to norms…. 20
“A norm has value, but has more than value. A norm endures in its own right, whether or not it gives pleasure to particular individuals. A norm is the standard against which any alleged value must be measured objectively.
“So much, just now, for definition. I am embarked upon a labor thoroughly conservative and thoroughly unpopular, the unabashed defender of traditional norms, and the unregenerate champion of prescriptive institutions – though they may have gained some ground in recent years – remain members of a Remnant. To be conservative is to be a conservator – a guardian of old truths and old rights. This rarely has been a popular office – not with the leaders of the crowd. 21
“George Bernard Shaw In Back to Methuselah (1912), Shaw recognized that if religion is lacking, human society becomes intolerable; for if no norms are observed, men behave like beasts from which they are ascended.”… 22
George H. Kubeck, Duplicate and or translate into Spanish and Vietnamese.