# 2 - ENEMIES OF PERMANENT THINGS BY RUSSELL KIRK
JUSTICE IS TRUTH IS IN ACTION - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - THURS. 1-28-21
Russell Kirk, "Enemy of Permanent Things" Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y. 1969, N.Y. 1967
"Dante knew all the woes to which humanity is heir. Yet Dante was not an anxious man, though he lived in the time of violent disorder. He knew that the principles of order abide, and justice is more than human, and that art is the servant of enduring standards.... So the moral and cultural conservatism, the guardian of normality, declines to embrace dime-store pragmatism....
What he respects is a sound conformity to abiding principles and a healthy convention which keeps the knife from our throats.Conformity to enduring moral truths is not servile. Obedience to the enduring moral truths is not servile. Obedience to the conventions of the just civil social order is not stupid...
The twentieth century ideologue - who, as Hawthorne said of the abolitionists, brandishes his one idea like an iron flail - detests the champions of norms and conventions. To the Gnostic visionary, to the secularist worshiper of Progress and Uniformity, respect for Norms and conventions is the mark of the beast.... Lacking an apprehension of norms, there is no living in society or out of it. Lacking sound conventions, the civil social order dissolves...
The Shoulders of Giants
"We are dwarfs mounted upon the shoulders of giants... We see so far only because of the tremendous stature of those giants... If we ignore or disdain those ancestral giants who uphold us in our modern vainglory, we tumble down into the ditch of unreason... G.K. Chesterton coined the phrase "the democracy of the dead." In deciding any important moral or political question. Chesterton writes, we have the obligation to consult to considered opinions of the wise men who have proceeded us in time...
A French philosopher of our time, Gabriel Marcel, writes that the only healthy society if the society which respects tradition... We moderns, Burke continued, tend to be puffed with a little petty private rationality, thinking ourselves wiser than the prophets and the law givers, and are disposed to trade upon the trifling bank and capital of our private intelligence...
In Revolt of the Masses Ortega declared that American civilization could not long endure, were it severed from European culture.... the Roman and medieval heritage of ordered liberty, and the continuity of great "Western" literature. It is a legacy of belief, not of blood... The first article in this common patrimony, I have said, is the Christian faith, including its origins in Judah and Israel. All the important aspects of any civilization arise from its religion - even the economic system of that civilization....
The prophets of Israel, the words of Christ and His disciples, the writings of the fathers of the Church, the treatises of the Schoolmen, the discourses of the great divines of Reformation and Counter Reformation --- these are the springs of American Metaphysics and American morality, as they are European metaphysics and morality...
The second article in our common patrimony is our theory an practice of ordered liberty, and our system of laws and politics... The doctrines of natural law, the concept of polity, a just and balanced commonwealth; the principle of a government of laws, not of men; the understanding that justice means "means to each his own"; the idea of a healthful tension between the claims of order and the claims of freedom - these passed directly from Europe into American theory and institution...
The founding of the American Republic, especially the lawyers and politicians among them, took for granted this English pattern of politics modifying it only slightly to conform to colonial usage and to suit the new nation - and even then modifying it not in favor of some newfangled abstract scheme, but rather on the model on the Roman Republic...
George H. Kubeck
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