THERE IS HOPE FOR FREEDOM, JUSTICE, COMMON SENSE AND TRUTH

THERE IS HOPE FOR FREEDOM, JUSTICE, COMMON SENSE AND TRUTH

In pursuit of the truth - Http://www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com - Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019

     
Let's take a second look at a lonely voice in the wilderness in the 1950's, Russel Kirk, his mindset made possible the Ronald Reagan for Presidency. "In essence, the body of belief we call "conservatism" is an affirmation of normality in the concern of society," Russell Kirk, "The Conservative Mind." Whittaker Chambers, the author of 'Witness,' lauded Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind as "the most important book of the 20th Century".

 Let's celebrate "Permanent Things: Kirk's Centenary" by Roger Kimball in "The New Criterion" Jan. 19. "The philosopher Roger Scruton once observed that Kirk showed that conservatism is fundamentally not an economic but a cultural outlook, and that conservatism "would have no future if reduced merely to the philosophy of profit. put bluntly," Scruton said, "conservatism is not about profit but about loss: it survives and flourishes because people are in the habit of mourning their losses, and safeguarding against them."...

"But if Bill Buckley re energized the political and social fortunes of conservatism, Kirk was the person most responsible for reinvigorating the intellectual heritage of conservatism in this country. Kirk died in 1994, at seventy-five was a lonely voice in the wilderness when, in 1953, he published his magnum opus, The Conservative Mind (two years) before the inaugural issue of National  Review). ..."

"A brief introduction outlines the six touchstones of Kirk's conservative vision:"belief in a transcendent order"; "affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence"; a commitment to ordered liberty; a recognition that freedom and property are closely linked; faith in the prescription against the putative expertise of the "sophisters, calculators, and economists" that Burke memorably anathemized in Reflections on the Revolution in France; and the understanding that change is not synonymous with betterment.  (Kirk would have liked Lord Falkland's observation that "when it is not necessary to change, it is not necessary to change.") ..."

"Kirk wrote some thirty books - novels and those hot-selling ghost stories along with works of intellectual history - as well as countless magazine articles and lectures. His influence was enormous...

Kirk left behind two memoirs, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory and The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, a book he completed shortly before his death."Among those who were likely to be vexed by his meditations, Kirk notes, are enthusiasts for modernity, global village, the end of history, the gross national product, emancipation from moral inhibitions, abstract rights without concomitant duties,  what Samuel Johnson called, "the lust for innovation." ...

"Like other conservatives, Kirk affirmed that "freedom and property are closely linked." But what he said of Wilhem Roepke was also true of himself; Kirk was "no apologist for an abstract 'capitalism.'" He was no doctrinaire disciple of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Freedman, and he frequently inveighed against "our fetishes of creature comforts and material aggrandizement." Kirk rarely used the word "Progress" without a sarcasm and initial capital.

"The automobile, he wrote - and he always wrote "automobile," not "car" - was a "mechanical Jacobin." an "instrument of civic and familial undoing," difference from the guillotine, he implied, chiefly because it lacked a sharpened blade. In his view, "industrialism was harder knock to conservatism than the books of the French equalitarians."  Although Kirk was a friend and avid supporter of Ronald Reagan, he nevertheless voted for the socialist Norman Thomas in 1044 to "reward" him for his anti-imperialist

stand before Pearl Harbor...

"Although he was a fervent patriot, Kirk believed that all the wars fought by America, the Revolutionary War included, "might have been averted." I do not think he would have been pleased by a Secretary of Defense whose nickname is Mad Dog."..."Kirk was not a defeatist, a quietist, or a reactionary alienated from his country and its political struggles. He was a conservative in full, who gave priority to faith and culture while nonetheless embracing politics as necessary and, within the proper limits, good."

"Kirk did not hesitate to enunciate forbidden opinions: "There ought to be inequality of condition in the world," he wrote. "For without inequality, there is no class, without class, no manners, and no beauty; and then people sink into public and private ugliness. ... Although Kirk came late to religious belief - he was not received into the Catholic Church until 1964 - he always believed that "political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems...."  +++ George H. Kubeck +++

P.S. "Let's Celebrate Ronald Reagan in the Public Arena in Orange County at Mile Square Park."