Wolfe on Kirk

This essay by Alan Wolfe disparaging conservative hero Russell Kirk has drawn praise and scorn around the web. I won't get too much into it, since outside of the first 30 or so pages of Kirk's biography of Edmund Burke which I checked out from the library recently, I'm not familiar with his work. There are a few glaring idiocies, however, that even an unstudied political layman like myself can ridule.

What a stupid, stupid criticism. The entire Nazi program, from the idealization of blond, blue-eyed Aryans to exterminating Jews and the disabled, was an attempt to perfect the human race. It would be "odd" to choose to discuss the Nazis' desire to rule all of Europe as the master race, but only if you don't care about discerning and defeating bad ideology. The Nazi's didn't stand for "killing the Jews." That was just the worst of the heinous practices flowing from a truly vicious ideology of racial superiority. At the root of that ideology was the notion that human perfection was attainable through the elimination of the inferior. Had the Nazis had their way, Jews, slavs and the lame would have been just the first martyrs to that lie.

So though one may of course argue (wrongly) that simply believing humanity can be perfected is not so awful a thing, it was the cardinal sin of Nazis and Marxists alike in that it served as a justification for the spilling of blood and oppression of spirit those ideologies brought about. This is obviously Kirk's point, and though, as I said before, I've not read much Kirk, Wolfe's obtuseness on this, along with the rest of what follows, is enough to make one view Wolfe's essay with suspicion.

Absolutely false. That Wolfe says this with a straight face and goes on to blather on for seven paragraphs about which religion Kirk could have/should have favored (without mentioning that Kirk was an adult convert to Catholicism!) is embarrassing. For a prominent American intellectual, Wolfe is clearly in over his head.

First of all, though it's not the case that any old religion will do (there are some really heinous religions out there that are incapable of forming the basis of a well-ordered society), it is the case that a society that does not have a common religious identity ends up with some form of civic religion, and that never ends well. Either the state will start to act like the god we've made it into with disastrous if not horrifying results, or the political body will dissolve and collapse upon itself. A state is not something to live or die for - community, family and religion are.

Second, Wolfe's depiction of Catholicism as ideological and therefore antithetical to Kirk's idea of conservatism conflates theology with political philosophy, a mistake I'm betting Kirk would not make. More basic than that, Wolfe never describes what exactly defined Kirk's conservatism. In one section, he opposes it to Kirk's idea of liberalism, but we get no description of what this thing is that Kirk defended. Wolfe describes Kirk's opinion that religion is the foundation of a good society, but that's not a political philosophy. Now, from the little I know about Kirk, I'd say he advocated adhering to our traditions, looking to them first when in need of wisdom, departing from them only when they were shown to be inadequate in the face of the challenges of the time and even then seeking to preserve those things that are good within them. That's a fine thing, and in fact seems to me to be the best way to organize a society, as opposed to the liberal tendency towards sweeping transformation which solves few problems and creates as many. Am I right about that? You will never know by reading Wolfe's essay, which let's remember, purports to be a critique of Kirk's political conservatism.

That's the problem: the essay is one long substanceless cheap shot. Nowhere does Wolfe quote Kirk at length and none of his ideas are treated with any depth. Wolfe's style of argument is: Kirk liked X; there are bad things about X; so Kirk is a fool. For example, read Wolfe, and all you'll know about Kirk's ideas on the Constitution is that he considered it a pillar of our society and that most of the framers were Christian. Wolfe deftly weaves those two facts into four paragraphs of ridicule.

And as if all this wasn't enough, after heaping 6500 words of meritless scorn on Kirk's grave, Wolfe hawks a loogy on it, by implying - and I'm not making this up - that Kirk was into pornography.

I simply can't fathom what Wolfe was trying to do with this hatchet job. Perhaps The New Republic is trying to flex its liberal creds by taking on a conservative icon, throwing red meat to liberals to remind them that the hawkish TNR differs from the allegedly Republican party in many ways. This article fails even at that; it's cheapness is so overt that even the commentors at liberal Matthew Yglesias's weblog are almost uniformly defending Kirk.

UPDATE: A somewhat relevant excerpt from Fr. Neuhaus' "The Public Square" column in the May 2007 issue of First Things: