What is ideology? Can a conservative be an "ideologue?"

Kyle Cupp asked me to comment about my mentor Russell Kirk's view of ideology. My comments are below, at Cupp's blog, and at Vox Nova.

You can see that there is quite a lively debate about it. My comments are as follows:


Russell Kirk led a debate among conservatives of whether being conservative is an "ism" or an ideology. His friend, Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-90), the last stubborn subject and living defender of the Hapsburg monarchy in America, disagreed with him. Kuehnelt-Leddihn laughed the afternoon I conversed with him at Kirk's home, Piety Hill in central Michigan, and said that Kirk had an ideology but didn't know it. Kirk despised ideology; Kuehnelt-Leddihn despised most of them.

What Kirk really meant is if an intellectual abstraction such as economic determinism, racial supremacy, or Marxism hammers all the world's discordant facts into a straight steel rail, the mystery, softness, asymmetry, tradition, history, poetry, and family relations which make life worth living must be railroaded, bypassed, or ignored to make way for the simple dogma of the intellectual abstraction embraced as a quasi-religion.

Call it an ideology if you like, but Kirk believed that the purpose of the conservative in the modern world is remind the herd in the cloudy whirl that some things don't change, that some truths cannot be explained using the all-encompassing logic of the latest intellectual fashion, and that the sky is not going to fall unless we are saved by politicians promising us more government for our own good. Politics and politicians won't save what we love, but what we love, that is, the Permanent Things of literature, poetry, tradition, art, history, family, and so on, might save us, or at least comfort us as we prepare to meet our Maker and save our grandchildren or stepchildren.

Kirk lived his creed. Like Allen Tate, he saw the triumph of intellectual abstraction (from fascism to communism) over common sense, traditional religion, poetry, music, architecture, practical sensibility, political economy, history, and mystery as a threat to civilization. Kirk is blasted by philosophers of the right and left because he truly believed that a sword hanging over the mantle, a fire, a drink, a painting, an old chair, and a good story of moral imagination were better than all the volumes of philosophy, good and bad, ever written. As D.H. Lawrence said of Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Authors lie, but a good story tells the truth."

I must agree, though many people of more philosophical and less mystical mind than mine will find the Kirk view dissatisfying if not horrible. To you I raise a glass and recite a line of Homer.

Remembering Kirk's The Roots of American Order, he responded in writing to one conservative critic who didn't think it was Catholic enough. Kirk noted that the critic only wished that America were more Catholic than it is, but America is what it is- a country whose cultural roots in the 17th and 18th centuries were largely Protestant. Kirk's speculative statement of what if America had been more like Maryland and less like New England was meant to refute the view, common among 19th-century Protestant commentators, that Catholicism was incapable of creating a modern, healthy, and prosperous civilization. Kirk had too much humility to think he had a crystal ball, but he didn't believe one needed to live in a Protestant country to be free and happy.

Kirk's lifetime achievement cannot be denied, that is, the retracing of the steps and paths of conservative thinking in the Anglo-American tradition. Conservative thinking is not anti-thetical to Western thinking or American thinking. Conservatives have always been part of the dialogue of the West. There are threads of what we modern Americans might call "conservative" thought going back to Moses, Aristotle, Cicero, and Blackstone, and from this same body of literature comes liberal and some radical thought. Nonetheless, conservative thought is indigenous to the West and to America and should not be crowded out of the academy and exiled to think-tanks.

Because Kirk and Kuehnelt-Leddihn could not agree on whether conservative thought is an ideology, I won't weigh in too much about it. I will say this: whenever "conservative" thought became crusted, rigid, harsh, merciless, intolerant, and insistent upon political dominance to procure its ends, Kirk believed that it ceased to be conservative."


I'll add sour, dour, cynical, self-serving, arrogant, deterministic, resentful, and self-pitying to the list in the paragraph above. Those of us who believe the world has a transcendent order created by a good God need not fear the tumults of politics, the fall of empires, the wrath of college professors, the herd falling off the cliff like the swine of Mark 9, or even the swords of mad ideologues such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We conservatives should be the happy battlers, not the curmudgeons. Here is my first post in 2005.