"Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They
were all agreed that the world must be changed. `We must abolish
property,' said one. `We must abolish marriage,' said the second.
`We must abolish God,' said the third. `I wish we could abolish
work,' said the fourth. `Do not let us get beyond practical
politics,' said the first. `The first thing is to reduce men to a
common level.' `The first thing,' said the second, `is to give
freedom to the sexes.' `The first thing,' said the third, `is to
find out how to do it.' `The first step,' said the first, `is to
abolish the Bible.' `The first thing,' said the second, `is to
abolish laws.' `The first thing,' said the third, `is to abolish
mankind.'"
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Four Reformers
From
the very start of his long and illustrious career as an essayist
and social critic, Russell Kirk warned that late liberalism is
transmuting America into the egalitarian and anti-human society
relished by Robert Louis Stevenson's four reformers.
Forty-five years ago, in an article
entitled "The Dissolution of Liberalism," Kirk named this social
philosophy "brummagemism," a local vulgarization of Birmingham in
England, where during the 19th century cheap and inferior
knock-offs of finely crafted articles were manufactured. In that
article, Kirk argues that contemporary liberalism is hawking a
shoddy imitation of humanistic politics. Brummagemism "tyrannizes
over the soul of man" by imposing an "equality of condition [and]
uniformity of life and thought" through "pervasive state
regulation," says Kirk. In the meantime, utilitarianism and
pragmatism bridge the transition from the old liberalism, whose
moral vision was still deeply indebted to biblical faith, to a new
Machiavellianism "founded upon self-interest and creature
comforts."
Under the new brummagemian order, radical
moral skepticism evacuates the culture of the last remnants of
religious sentiment that inspired the concept of a free society.
The sole dogma is that a truly enlightened and progressive society
needs no dogma. The result, Kirk advises, is "a society which would
deny men the right to struggle against evil for the sake of good,
or which simply cease[s] to distinguish good and evil."
"HUMILITY IN THE WRONG PLACE"
In
his work Orthodoxy, the inimitable G. K. Chesterton mocked
this liberal version of virtue: "What we suffer from to-day is
humility in the wrong place," states Chesterton. "Modesty has moved
from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of
conviction, where it was never meant to be."
Fifteen years after Chesterton published
Orthodoxy, in the inauspicious year of 1929, a young
Walter Lippmann propounded a no less damaging assessment of
liberalism. Lippmann comments in A Preface to Morals on
the eviscerated and enfeebled morality of his contemporaries,
sounding a note that rings true for our present circumstances as
well:
If
they deal with the young they are likely to say that they know of
no compelling reason which certifies the moral code they adhere to,
and that, therefore, their own preferences when tested by the
ruthless curiosity of children, seem to have no sure foundation of
any kind. They are likely to point to the world about them, and to
ask whether modern man possesses any criterion by which he can
measure the value of his own desires, whether there is any standard
he really believes in which permits him to put a term upon that
pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement which has created so
much of the turmoil and the squalor and the explosiveness of modern
civilization.
When
a political creed is no longer capable of handing on moral
convictions to the young, it forfeits the privilege to speak for
them or to act in their behalf. And that is where liberals are
today, starting in the White House.
The
souls of our children are in jeopardy. In recent days, the
slaughter at Columbine High School has reminded the nation
joltingly of the danger of bodily harm to which to our children are
exposed even in their classrooms.
There is, however, a spiritual harm being
done to the young that is even more damaging and more pervasive.
America has become unfriendly toward and unhealthy for children. It
has been pointed out repeatedly since the killings at Columbine
High School that the two young men who bloodlessly set out to
murder their classmates and teachers were moved by a diabolic
imagination purveyed through the Internet and by shooter computer
games. The violence and vulgarity on television and video games
that even the smallest children are exposed to daily in America
would have deeply offended my parents' sensibilities when they were
raising my brother and me.
I am
not glorifying the past; I am, however, reviling the present moral
climate. Our lack of outrage at this situation and apparent
inability to go to the heart of the matter is no indication of a
praiseworthy advance in our understandings of freedom or childhood
or parenthood. Nor is it a tribute to the free market or the
democratic ideal: It is a measurement, rather, of our piteous moral
degradation as a society.
NURTURING THE MORAL IMAGINATION
In
this past year, I published with Oxford University Press a book
entitled Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories
Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination. Long ago I was convinced
by Russell Kirk in such books as Enemies of the Permanent
Things and Decadence and Renewal in the Higher
Learning that at the root of the social crisis is a lack of
attention to the nurture of the moral imagination. My own reading
to my son, Rafi, and daughter, Victoria, proved to me the
importance of a parental role in this moral pedagogy. I witnessed
firsthand how morally beneficial good stories are for young
children--and that is when we must begin their moral education,
when they are quite young.
Thus, in Tending the Heart of
Virtue, I try to show how the best stories, whether the fairy
tales of the brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen or the fantasies of
George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle, communicate
faith, morality, and civic virtue. Yet vast numbers of America's
children never experience their felicitous influence at home or in
school.
Cecilia Kirk Nelson comments on her
father's regular practice of bedtime reading to his four daughters
in an essay entitled "A Literary Patrimony." She writes:
By
sparking my imagination through fairy tales, and by providing
perspective and reason through historical novels, my father
imparted a legacy to me. For through the printed word, the wisdom
of generations transcends the "provincialism of time" and speaks to
us across the ages and oceans.... Children's literature especially
has a universal appeal and...can transmit an imaginative, normative
consciousness.
To
ponder the crisis of modern education was for Russell Kirk to
describe our failure to transmit a religious and moral patrimony to
the young. Here he stood in the company of G. K. Chesterton. At the
turn of the 20th century, in What's Wrong With the World,
Chesterton warned of the dim prospects for freedom and morality in
light of that failure. In that book, he speaks of "an ancestral
responsibility...of affirming the truth of human tradition and
handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice." And he
asserts:
[There] is the one eternal education; to
be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a
child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on
every side; and the only excuse for them is...that their modern
philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot
convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn. This, of
course, is connected with the decay of democracy.
Americans are not only failing to pass on
to their children a strong and abiding sense of what is good,
beautiful, and true, but they are letting enter into their minds
and their hearts, their ears and their eyes, every variety of smut
and ugliness and deceiving phantasmagoria. This is the symptom of a
grave crisis of conviction, a profound confusion of morals.
In
The Idea of a Christian Society, published nearly 60 years
ago, T. S. Eliot assesses with startling prescience our present
condition--and he lays the blame firmly on the liberal
philosophy:
We
are living at present in a kind of doldrums between opposing winds
of doctrine, in a period in which one political philosophy
[liberalism] has lost its cogency for behavior, though it is still
the only one in which public speech can be framed. This is very bad
for the English language: it is this disorder (for which we are to
blame) and not individual insincerity, which is responsible for the
hollowness of many political and ecclesiastical utterances.
Eliot argues that modern liberalism
vacates the societies it husbands of the very beliefs that made
liberalism such a viable and powerful force in history. Liberalism
discards "as superfluous or obsolete" vital "elements in historical
Christianity" upon which it based its anthropology and doctrine of
liberty. It confounds these vital elements "with practices and
abuses which are legitimate objects of attack."
The
outcome is that our deepest convictions about the dignity of the
human person and the transcendental nature of freedom are ripped
from their religious sources and lose legitimization. An empty and
fruitless shell is left that may be filled with whatever dogma or
ideology is favored at the moment.
THE GROWING INSTITUTIONAL DANGER
In
the meantime, a network of institutions is evolving in Western
democratic societies that threatens to destroy the core of what it
means to be a religious person and a believer in divine and human
freedom. These institutions claim to be neutral about faith and
about God, but they are in reality non-Christian and growing
increasingly anti-Christian and atheistic.
Christians--and others who adhere to
historic faiths--have little choice but to participate in some of
these institutions. Yet this participation subverts belief in
religious truth and obedience to religious authority. Eliot warns:
"And as for the Christian who is not conscious of his dilemma--and
he is in the majority--he is becoming more and more
de-Christianized by all sorts of unconscious pressure: paganism
holds the valuable advertising space."
Under the conditions Eliot describes, what
can we do? We belong to a stream of history and tradition whose
headwaters draw deeply from biblical faith. This is our fact, our
situation, and our location. This stream is the living and
life-giving tradition of our social world.
I
agree with Russell Kirk when he says in a lecture delivered at The
Heritage Foundation that, even in secularized America, nearly
everyone who lives long in it, "though he be Jew or Moslem or
agnostic, conforms in a large degree to American folkways and
customs and conventions that are" deeply, historically influenced
by Christianity. If it is our intent merely to jump out of the
stream, that is one thing. The possibilities and consequences of
such an action might be examined on some other occasion.
But
if, even in these radically disjunctive times, our hope is for
renewal of the social order, then we must begin with our particular
location in time and history. If the stream in which we swim has
become toxic, we must find ways to name and extract the toxins.
THE VITAL NEXUS: RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND
MORALITY
One
answer to what can be done lies in the restorative role that
religious persons of literature and letters can play in such an
environment. We have seen it at work in citations from Kirk,
Chesterton, and Eliot. In his well-known essay "Religion and
Literature," Eliot locates the vital cultural nexus of religion,
literature, and morality:
The
common ground between religion and fiction is behavior. Our
religion imposes our ethics, our judgment and criticism of
ourselves and our behavior toward our fellow men. The fiction that
we read affects our behavior toward our fellow men, affects our
patterns of ourselves.
We
are living at a moment in the history of Western culture when "the
common code of morality" founded in biblical religion is being
"detached from its theological background" as well as being leached
from the soil of the common life by the acid rain of modern
secularism, Eliot continues. But at precisely such times of
pollution and deprivation, "`morals' are open to being altered by
literature," he adds.
This
may be for well or for ill. For the ground of our common life may
devolve into the swamp and muck of the diabolic imagination, or we
may experience refreshment and renewal at the enlivening stream of
the moral imagination. Unhappily, Eliot concludes, "modern
literature is corrupted by...secularism, [so] that it is simply
unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of the primacy of
the supernatural." A new literary imagination that is open to
religious faith needs to be birthed.
I
wonder whether, if Eliot were alive today, he would be willing to
broaden his description of the realm in which either a moral or a
diabolic imagination comes into being. Would he, in the scope of
his analysis, include also the visual images and spoken words that
saturate our popular culture through television, the cinema, video
games, and the Internet?
He
certainly was alert to the often hidden yet powerful influence that
ordinary recreational reading may exercise on human believing and
doing. He observes in "Religion and Literature":
I
incline to the shocking conclusion that it is just the literature
that we read for amusement, or purely for pleasure, that may have
the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is
literature we read with the least effort that can have the easiest
and most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the
influence of popular novelists, and of popular playwrights of
contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely.
If
we expand this to include the electronic and other entertainment
and advertising media, we gain an appreciation of just how powerful
and pervasive the forces are that work upon the imaginations of
modern people. In times of decadence, the religious person of
letters may be better equipped than the moral philosopher to make
the moral difference, not by a dogged defense of dogma--though an
intelligent defense of dogma by theologians and clergy is
needed--but by influencing behavior through new creations of the
moral imagination.
When
the common base of morality is eroded, that which is favorable or
objectionable changes with the mood of the generation--nay, the
decade even. Those who enshrine a false view of progress may regard
this state of affairs with satisfaction; they may even declare it
to be evidence of thehighest expression of human freedom.
"Whereas," says Eliot, "it is only evidence of what unsubstantial
foundations people's moral judgments have."
The
religious man or women of letters may help ordinary humanity to
grasp more surely the quiddity of things and their true relations
in a common life, founded upon the solid ground of religious and
moral existence. In our time, that activity of authorship ought not
to be limited to the printed word either. For millennia, poets and
playwrights have composed for dramatic performance. Today and
tomorrow, they must author poetry and prose that can also be
translated into the images and spoken words of computer technology,
without making an idol or obsession of that invention. George Lucas
is showing us the power of this medium in his Star Wars
trilogies.
"The
author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as
human beings, whether he knows it or not," writes Eliot,
and
we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or
not. I suppose that everything we eat has some effect upon us other
than merely the pleasure of taste and mastication; it affects us
during the process of assimilation and digestion; and I believe
that exactly the same is true of anything we read.
But
Eliot himself knew that reading is not all of it. He did, after
all, in his later years turn almost exclusively to writing
plays.
RECOVERING AND RENEWING MORALITY
Thus, it is the great challenge, the high
calling, of religiously minded men and women of letters to recover
and renew true and substantial morality through imaginative
writing, whether in the form of the essay or narrative and poetry.
And just as important, those in positions to encourage and support
this cultural activity must awaken to the need of it. In these
times, politics alone will not do, for politics has lost its moral
compass. It is like old blind King Lear lost and deranged in the
desolate places.
Russell Kirk often said, "Nothing is but
thinking makes it so." He easily could have added, "Nothing is but
imagining makes it so." The 20th century Russian religious
philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev was bold to say, "God created the
world by imagination." Kirk believed, just as certainly as did
Eliot, that the symbols and images of imagination are at least as
real as the ideas and concepts of the intellect.
Twenty years ago, in Decadence and
Renewal in the Higher Education, Russell Kirk addressed this
subject of the image and the age. There he observes:
When the images of reality have fallen to
grossness, why wonder that the notorious Identity Crisis afflicts
every corner of society, fastening upon even the more promising
natures? Who am I--only a cypher? Do I belong to anything enduring,
or signify anything more than a perishable and precarious body? How
do I fit into this sensual egalitarian world? Why wonder that some
turn to fantastic and perhaps fatal imagery of narcotic, for some
the moments' relief from the pain of being human.
Yet
it is "the image...that can raise us on high, as did Dante's high
dream" or draw "us into the abyss," Kirk continues. "It is [the]
matter of the truth or falsity of images" that ought to be
concerning us most in this age when the written word is being
overshadowed by visual imagery that pours in upon us from radio and
television, signs on the highway and advertisements in slick
magazines, the cinema and videos, and on the Internet.
THE AGE OF SENTIMENTS
More
recently, in an essay entitled "The Age of Sentiments," Kirk
advanced further his thoughts on the crisis of the moral
imagination. In this intriguing essay, he argues that the Age of
Discussion, which grew from the Enlightenment and earmarked
modernity, is all but over. We are entering a new era in
civilization, Kirk advises, where sentiments rule--indeed, we are
entering the Age of Sentiments. And this momentous shift in mind
and sensibility requires new cultural strategies for the nurture of
the moral imagination.
Kirk
is forthright about the course of events: The Age of Discussion,
with its near divinization in
certain places of analytical and discursive reason, was not all
that it claimed to be. If it began with such hardy souls as Addison
and Steele, Pope and Dryden, Hume and Smith, and, of course, Edmund
Burke, it collapsed into palsied and impoverished Benthamite
utilitarianism, Millsian egalitarianism, and Deweyite pragmatism.
That is why Kirk does not lament its passing too much. He
confesses:
I
suppose I made it clear that I am dragged kicking and screaming
into the Age of Sentiments. It is painful enough to be governed by
other people's reasoning, without being governed by their
sentiments. Yet it should not be thought that I bow down in worship
before the late Age of Discussion. For the most part the Age of
Discussion was an age of shams and posturing.
Kirk
decides to make the best of the situation, and even in his late
years his optimism about our humanity did not flag. So he sets out
to understand the Age of Sentiments in order to refurbish a moral
imagination that might transform and redeem the time. He defines
sentiment as a human response to the world that rests somewhere
between thought and feeling. But it is not mere feeling. And it is
more than just sensation or emotion. "While it contains too much
feeling to be merely thought," it does participate in thought and
"has a large influence over the will."
Kirk
reminds his readers that for "David Hume and Adam Smith, sentiments
exert greater power, and indeed [are] better guides than
reason--though Hume remarks in his Principles of Morals that
sentiment and reason usually coincide." Kirk concludes, "I suppose
we may say that for Hume and Smith a sound sentiment is a moving
conviction."
That
is an important consideration and a valuable clue to solving the
puzzle of an Age of Sentiments. Russell Kirk understood that
sentiments and imagination are quite closely related and that the
quality of the images that memory stores strongly influences how
sentiment moves people, whether to elevate or degrade life.
Throughout his mature years, and
increasingly so, Kirk would remind his readers and listeners of his
philosophical mentor T. S. Eliot. For Eliot also identified this
shift in our civilization from an Age of Discussion to an Age of
Sentiments. Eliot understood that, in the transition, there is
great danger of decline as well as the pregnant possibility for
grace and redemption.
Eliot was himself among the first of the
post-modernists, but with a religious turn. He showed in The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Wasteland, and the
Four Quartets that our civilization is broken and that its
shards and fragments are scattered along the paths we walk. Some of
our contemporaries stumble over a single shard and take it for the
whole. Others sift nervously through the fragments hoping that this
or that one might bring peace or pleasure. Still others endeavor to
persuade us that what is broken can be put back together, like
Humpty Dumpty, just as it was before.
A NEW MOSAIC OF LIFE
Eliot insisted that we see ourselves as
pilgrims in the ruins and practitioners of the moral imagination.
Then it may be possible to piece together successfully these shards
and fragments into a new meaningful mosaic of life. The future is
not mere fate--not if the God of biblical faith is real. For if He
is real, then human freedom also is real, and an undetermined
future waits to be brought into existence through human and divine
willing and doing.
This
conviction, however, that God is real, and so human freedom is
also, comes to be in the hearts and minds of human beings not
because it is practical or socially useful to hold such a
belief--though that too may be--but because the light of religious
and moral imagination shows that it is true about existence. The
worst thing "of all," wrote Eliot, "is to advocate Christianity,
not because it is true, but because it might be beneficial." Kirk
added:
No
man sincerely goes down on his knees to the divine because he has
been told that such rituals lead to the beneficial consequences of
tolerably honest behavior and commerce. People will conform their
actions to the precepts of religion only when they earnestly
believe the doctrines of the religion to be true.
The
new Gnostics and prophets of a post-modern order in which God is no
longer needed or wanted detest such religious speech. They would
have the public believe that this talk is either dangerous or
fantastic, or both. At every opportunity, they interpose their
arbitrary prohibitions against it.
Yet
they needn't prevail. Let those who are willing labor to bring into
existence a new religious humanism expressed through works of
imagination--of poetry, art, and letters. Russell Kirk spoke with
optimism:
The
restoration of true learning, human and scientific; the reform of
many public policies; the renewal of our awareness of transcendent
order, and the presence of the Other; the brightening of the
corners where we find ourselves--such approaches are open to those
among the rising generation who look for purpose in life.
Vigen Guroian, Ph.D., is a professor
of theology and ethics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland,
and a member of the faculty of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology
at St. Mary's Seminary and University. This lecture was delivered
on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the death of Russell
Kirk.