What Conservatives Want

...The conservative is not against social change ??indeed he believes in it...

...contributor to "Commentary" "Commonweal" ONE AFTER the other, during the late Twenties, most serious American writers saw the Gorgon's head of Marxism-Leninism and were turned, not into stone, but into something quite different from the radicals and Socialists they had been...

...At the same time, all over Russia, the peasants and villagers demanded the reconstruction of churches and the restoration of religious worship, which alone could give meaning to their lives...

...On the whole, A Program for Conservatives justifies its title, despite Dr...

...Yet, in the next chapter he cites as a horrible example Sweden, into whose mixed economy a great deal of socialism has certainly crept, but which is not totalitarian or likely to be, despite the rising curves of suicide and abortion which suggest that all is not well with Sweden's progress along the Middle Way...

...Thus, it can be argued that the establishment of the TVA served to interrupt, correct and balance an ominous trend toward concentration of power in the hands of exploitative public-utility holding companies and their Washington lobby, that the decentralized operation of the TVA helped to correct the trend toward concentration of Federal power, and that TVA funds and personnel have been employed to strengthen family-farm agriculture and small industry...

...But, on the whole, the intellectual climate of the period was Socialist or liberal in politics, agnostic as to religion, and collectivist or Keynesian in economics...

...He has no intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics...

...Kirk's deliberate avoidance of the specific political issues and personalities which might have helped to flesh the rhetoric of his generalizations...

...He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love...

...It took two world wars to change that climate, give us the beginnings of a conservative press in magazines like the Freeman, and provide a receptive audience for conservative scholars like Russell Kirk...

...The latter was a liberal during the past two decades because his idol, the intellectual, was a liberal...

...Other unanswered questions are: How does the conservative reconcile himself to the prescriptive rights of property and class which for centuries on end, in Asia and in the Middle East, have condemned the mass of mankind to a sordid and loveless animalism...

...And, as before, he has interested and annoyed his critics sufficiently so that they will not be satisfied until he writes another book...

...Kirk's treatment of "creeping socialism" is also less than adequate...

...In "The Problem of the Heart," he tilts respectfully with David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd, whose dissolving verbal categories and optimistic solutions he finds as unsatisfactory as did this writer...

...There is such a thing as 'creeping socialism,' "he writes, "and the worst of it is that socialism never ceases to creep until it becomes totalitarianism, nor can it in its nature...

...And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death...

...John Dewey was its philosopher, Thorstein Veblen its sociologist, and the Nation and New Republic its press...

...But Gandhi's spinning wheel, metaphorically speaking, was interred with his bones, and few people besides Dr...

...Kirk is particularly discontented with Mr...

...Kirk's position might well turn out to be when and if he is persuaded to get down to cases...

...Kirk discusses the problems of the mind, the heart, social boredom, community, social justice, wants, order, power, loyalty and tradition...

...Here, for example, is a passage in which Dr...

...and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Loves lies corrupt...

...or success...

...Here and elsewhere, as Dr...

...Riesman's version of Edward Bellamy's brummagem paradise: a society in which his "autonomous persons" train the mass-men in the arts of leisure and "consumer-ship...

...There were notable exceptions, of course, such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and others of the Southern agrarian group, who were conservatives early as well as late...

...In that sense, of course, our own kaleidoscopic technological civilization, in which "creative obsolescence" is the god of many of the same conservative, materialist businessmen who subsidize Joe McCarthy, is not conservative at all...

...Socialization may result in a net increase of power in the hands of a ruling oligarchy, which is the true index of totalitarian drift...

...Kirk presents the essence of his philosophical position: "At the back of every discussion of the good society lies the question, What is the object of human life...

...Because it evades the question of ends, Marxism provides no criteria for the evaluation of means...

...This he has elected not to do in the present book...

...Riesman's "other-directed person," Dr...

...How, save by organizing and implementing the hatred of the oppressed, is it possible to bring about the minimum of admittedly necessary change required to institute a regime of love, duty and justice, based on widely distributed economic and political power...

...Now and then, a few economists have spoken of the desirability of a "maintenance economy," but in our time the only forthright voices that have challenged the valueless acceleration of the modern socio-technological process have been those of Gandhi and Karl Friedrich Juenger...

...Kirk's new book, he tells us, was written partly to answer critics who had complained that his The Conservative Mind did not set forth systematically the conservative position...

...or power...

...The true conservative, he says, will demand a franker and more uncompromising attack upon the fundamental contemporary problems of scale, pace of change, class structure and distribution of power...

...or possessions...

...Just what political or social magic can the conservative invoke that will set limits or apply brakes to a runaway technology...

...He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows...

...What he has done is to give us the most systematic, eloquent and persuasive general statement of the conservative position that has yet appeared in print...

...Kirk points out later, totalitarian societies soon find themselves deficient in the means required for the pursuit of the only ends they recognize, which are perpetual "progress" and open-ended expansion...

...or longevity...

...but now, being still without norms of his own, he is trying, rather ineffectually, to make himself over into a conservative...

...Recently, when the Malenkov junta lowered the prices of consumer goods and relaxed MVD controls, the chief result was an increase in drunkenness and crime...

...But it may also have precisely the opposite effect...

...Kirk points out, is none other than Ortega y Gasset's mass-man, who is also identical with the "egghead" of the current argot...

...or enjoyment...

...he merely insists that it be achieved gradually, with as little disturbance of established institutions and mores as possible...

...The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition...

...He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love...

...Kirk admits, he raises far more questions than he attempts to answer...

...Not that the rhetoric isn't good: actually, it is better in this book than the eloquent and persuasive tributes to Edmund Burke, John Quincy Adams and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century statesmen that won deserved praise for the earlier volume...

...In successive chapters, Dr...

...As a result of this neglect, as Dr...

...With respect to a good many specific issues and problems, the views of many Social Democrats are today not far from what Dr...

...With Dante,he looks upward from this place of slime, this world of gorgons and chimeras, toward the light which gives Love to this poor earth and all the stars...

...Kirk appear to have read Juenger's brilliant little book, The Failure of Technology...

...He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love...