# 1 - ENEMIES OF PERMANENT THINGS BY RUSSELL KIRK
JUSTICE IS TRUTH IN ACTION - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - TUES. JAN. 26, 2021
Russell Kirk, "Enemies of Permanent Things" - Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y. 1969 p. 16-24
Preface:
One of the enemies of permanent things, for example, the ten Commandments, is the Catholic-in-name-only politician. The seventh commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill."
Normative Art and Modern Vices
"I shall touch upon moral normality, although that subject is too intricate for any thorough discussion in these pages.For the most part, I am concerned here with the modern defiance of enduring standards in literature and politics... The art of the statist, determine in large part whether we become normal human beings, or are perverted into abnormal creatures...
An abnormal generation is a generation of monsters, enslaved by will and appetite...
Standardization without Standards
"A norm means an enduring standard. It is a law of nature, which we ignore at our peril...
There is law for man, and law for thing: the late Alfred Kinsey notwithstanding, the norm for the wasp and the snake is not the norm for man....
A man apprehends a norm, or fails to apprehend it; but he does not create or destroy important norms....
We have discovered that were there no norms for man, it would be necessary for us to invent some.
Men do not submit long to their own creations. Standard erected out expediency will be hurled down, soon enough, also out of expediency... 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...
Liberals, he explained, know that there exists two sides to every question, and that we ought to sheer away from prejudices, that we have no right to come to any conclusion until all the facts are available and scientific tests are applied. Morals, besides, are the product of cultural circumstances...
Persons influenced by what the late Gordon Chalmers called "disintegrated liberalism" recognize certain norms even at the moment they deny the existence of permanent standards... With a man who maintains that he can discover no real standards for moral judgment of any sort, it is impossible to argue.
To awaken an apprehension of norms was the high endeavor of Socrates and Plato; it was the constant theme of the Christian divines; ...A norm, I have made, is an enduring standard for private and public conduct. It is a canon of human nature. Real decadence consist in the movement of mankind away from the understanding of norms, and away from obedience to norms....
For the Christian, the norm is made flesh in the person of Christ. Normality is not what the average sensual man ordinarily possesses: it is what he ought to try to possess. A norm has value, but it 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.... 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 - members of the 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.
Bernard Shaw in "Back to Methusela" (1921) recognized that if religion is lacking, human society becomes intolerable: so if no norms are observed, men behave like beasts from which they are ascended. "Goodnatured unambitious men," Shaw wrote, "are cowards when they have no religion."...
To deny for the sake of denial is to live with a sour taste in one mouth. The sort of person whom Sidney Hook calls the "ritualistic liberal" is intolerant in the cause of toleration, conformist in the championship of nonconformity.... to be continued
George H. Kubeck,
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