Civilization Without Religion? - Russell Kirk

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
21

Russell Kirk wrote about religion in a pragmatic, ethical, and social sense because he was a political theorist and that’s the sense in which it was useful to the stuff he was saying. In the article you site he straight up says that spirituality can’t be merely summoned up when it’s expedient to do so- it has to be sincere, ingrained. I don’t think Kirk was like Strauss (was alleged to be) in that sense.
You’re right about revolutionaries. To explore this idea further (if you haven’t) check out Burke’s writings on prejudice, or Kirk’s commentary on them if you prefer that writing style. The basic idea is that the revolutionary replaces the trial and error of an entire species with the logic and reasoning of one man or a group of men. But it’s an unfair comparison- you’re right to bring up elites. The intellectual elite compares his ideas that come from his study to the conservatives’ ideas that come from tradition and/or prejudice. The liberal studied, the conservative didn’t, so the liberal is superior. Of course the mistake is that the conservative didn’t fail to study because he is stupid or because his ideas are stupid- he failed to study because one doesn’t NEED to study in order to live in a way that’s already been proscribed as best through previous generations’ efforts. A cultural elite then is one that has to work three times as hard to make sense of the world because he rejects what is common sense to everybody else. He mistakes this extra effort as a sign that he’s more reasonable, more intellectual than the rest. It’s rather like the laborer who carries a heavy load in his arms when others use a cart, because the extra sweat and effort makes him think he’s a ‘harder worker’. Never mind he got half as much done for twice as much effort, and at the end of the day his bricks end up on the same pile as everybody else’s…

  Religious critics (just say 'progressives') are in favor of the uniqueness and power of the 'individual'-  themselves and those who think exactly like them. Other sorts of individuals are invariably referred to as 'the sheep' and 'the masses' and the primary concern of the progressive is how to undermine, manipulate, and control the 'masses' for the benefit of those who make it into their 'individuals' club- by having the right ideology, ethnicity, sexuality, &c.
22

That’s all fine as long as the conservative practice of how to live match with current realities. Neither liberal or conservative is stupid and both religionists and critics are subject to fail their “realities”. Not all criticism of religion is valid, but this isn’t a get-out-of-jail card for those religious ideas that may have fit an earlier time but are no longer relevent today. Reliance on tradition sounds good - as long as it evolves with current pragmatic realities. I can’t think of too many OT “traditions” that don’t require some tweaking to be relevent today. And some of the OT traditions would be anathema if practiced even in conservative circles. Where one lands on the liberal-conservative continuum is interesting, but extreme positions either way is folly.

23 
 You seem to be equating tradition with stagnation. They aren't really the same. To illustrate the difference, let me use your example. You say a lot of OT traditions (not sure why scare quoted) need to be tweaked to be relevant today.  Well, who tweaked them? Was it a natural result of an entire population applying OT principles to a slowly changing world? If so, that's how tradition works anyway.  Or was it one guy or cadre of guys who decided they know better than everybody else and needed to start a 'revolution'?   That would be anti-traditionalist liberalism that I would generally criticize as dangerous.  Marx wasn't an idiot- in fact, he was operating at the very upper limits of what one man can be expected to accomplish. Which isn't all that different from idiocy, as it turns out. That's the essence of Kirk.
24

I suppose at some early point, that was exactly how it worked and seemingly worked well. But I think the criticism began and continues because it is no longer a slowly changing world. The world changes quite rapidly; far faster than tradition evolves to meet reality. I don’t want to do the laundry list of examples, but I’ll point out one glaring criticism that I think valid.

The world population is many times that of OT times. We will add an additional 2 billion people in the next 50-75 years. While the exact consequences are arguable, it is generally accepted that we are very unlikely to sustain such a world population. The largest christian religion continues to insist that we uphold the tradition of zero population control. Contraception is a sin against god to the point that condoms that are a large part of controlling HIV infections are forbidden lest we prevent a potential pregnancy to add to the population.

This is a tradition that simply fails a certain obvious near-term reality. The world is moving swiftly, and tradition hasn’t any plausible answer. Enter the critics, and justifiably so. The charge that religious tradition leads us in the wrong direction (in this isolated example) is completely valid. Is it any wonder that individuals seek to circumvent religion to alleviate obvious problems? Tradition certainly has it’s place. It provides much needed stability. But like any two-edged sword, it also can be a rock in the road of needed social reforms.

25

OK, so you’re acknowledging how different people have different neurologies and electrochemical constitutions?

Yes. (Sublime is a noun, so subliminal is an adjective.)

Yes, but these things can be drawn, recorded, painted, written, and sculpted. They’re foundations for language.

26

I’m not sure where you found his ideas pragmatic. His idea is about culture, so his ideas are aesthetic.

In short, the culture can be renewed only if the cult is renewed; and faith in divine power cannot be summoned up merely when that is found expedient. Faith no longer works wonders among us: one has but to glance at the typical church built nowadays, ugly and shoddy, to discern how architecture no longer is nurtured by the religious imagination. It is so in nearly all the works of twentieth-century civilization: the modern mind has been secularized so thoroughly that “culture” is assumed by most people to have no connection with the love of God.

He’s literally talking about culture here, opposing the pragmatism of expediency. He even surrounds this paragraph with oppositions to usefulness and scientism.

I’d really like you to cite this because opposition to trial and error is the value of aesthetically grounded language. We don’t want people to assume the risk of misunderstandings from linguistic evolution over time which can come at the expense of people’s dignity.

Are you saying Kirk was rhetorically compromising instead of claiming his own ideas?

Again, it sounds like you’re supporting the idea of Kirk making a rhetorical compromise. I disagree with what you’re saying here because the foundation of conservatism is the conservation of innocence. It’s recognized that people aren’t obligated to assume the risk of falling through the cracks as exceptions to the rule from society learning from trial and error. Exceptions to the rule become elites because they have to in order to refine society to account for themselves.

I agree with what you said about not needing to study and common sense. It’s a shame that conservatism insists on forcing people to conform to the system because it alienates intellectuals. Some people think more because existing society isn’t perfect. They need society to be refined in order to treat them as respectful individuals.

No offense, but your labor argument actually comes off as socialist. Heck, in Canada, they have a phrase for people who think like that - Red Tories.

Again, this sounds like a rhetorical compromise. Critics of religion emphasize collectivizing people under the State instead, expecting them to engage in practical compromise in participating in public goods and social programs despite the individuality of utility preference.

“The sheep” and “masses” are terms typically used by conservatives to criticize those who succumb to Statism. What you seem to be talking about is libertinism where individuals are entitled to relish in moral and cultural relativism just to be politically correct, stepping on the rights of the politically incorrect as if they’re engaging in thoughtcrime.

27

Has anyone considered that Russell Kirk may be as full of shit as Paul R. Ehrlich was with his Population Bomb in the 1960s?

28

Why no, V. Nobody has considered that, you’re the first to think of it. That’s why Russell Kirk is taught in every American poli-sci program, is because he was part of the accepted canon until you came along to challenge it. I salute your courage.

29

The Catholic church then, for example, is anti-traditional. Catholics are more and more pro- birth control, both in theory and in practice. But the Church continues to hold this development of the tradition in check. There is nothing “natural” about this imposed stagnation; if anything, it is natural to speak out against it in order to preserve the tradition.

Also, stagnation happens. It does. Look at blues, or jazz. In the older forms, both are dead. Yet people think hip hop is radical, bad, etc. (not as much these days, but when it started most people apparently thought it the second coming of Satan or something). They’re all nostalgic for some kind of Ken Burns-style alternate reality, but such a reality never existed. Hip hop is our modern blues.

30 
 Pragmatic relative to an end- the end is talking about political theory, so he talks about religion as a social/moral phenomenon. It shouldn't be taken as a sign of what he thinks religion is. 

I don't have the texts in front of me, but you'd want Kirk's  "The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot", or Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France". Sorry I can't give you page numbers atm.  And it's not about present trial and error for the most part, that's what makes revolutionaries so dumb.  Ideology tries to throw us back into a 'trial and error' state about basic things like family life, property rights and so on, where most of the error has already been worked out and the common man ought to rely on prejudice. I like that you went right to language though, because a common language is a type of prejudicial thinking that works pretty similar to the traditionalism of Burke.

Now that you bring it up, my take on Kirk is that he saw his mission as being to re-invigorate ideas that were already a part of our culture but had been dismissed/suppressed by intellectual elitism. I think the most original idea he had was “You guys really ought to take Edmund Burke seriously, you know.”

I really feel like we just said the same thing back to each other there. Cultural elites are 'deviants' in one sense or another that have to work twice as hard as the rest of us to get along, and so they try to re-construct society to be more comfortable for them personally.  Which has the consequence of casting the rest of us back into a 'trial and error' state about basic things in life that there's no need to re-challenge. Yes? I'm in an incestuous relationship with my sister.  I can't abide the stress and work of keeping it secret from a society that doesn't approve, so I do everything in my power (banding together with others) to change society and make incest acceptable.  If I win, I become somewhat more comfortable in society, in exchange for said society having to completely go back to the drawing board about what a family is and how it should function, casting us all back into a 'trial and error' state.  That paradigm applies across progressivism. Marx is best understood as a man with a desperate fear of having to work for a living. 

 I don't think conservatism properly understood need force people to conform to the system. Most people will do that on their own (that's why there is a system in a free society).  Rather, what's important is that the people who don't wish to conform to the system don't rise up and try to overthrow the system to make their lives marginally more comfortable at the expense of the rest of us.   It's true what you said- these people need society to treat them with respect.  So then, conservatism doesn't alienate intellectuals, in alienates the egotistical.

No offense taken, my philosophy professors in college WERE confirmed socialists, every one of them. I’m not, but I’m bound to talk and act like one from time to time.

What about libertarian critics of religion?

Ya, that’s a good point about conservatives using ‘sheep’ and ‘masses’ language. I’d like to say that they’re just adopting the mannerisms of the intellectual elite with is completely dominated by the left, and that such talk is inherent to progressivism and merely incidental to conservatism. But maybe that’s just my bias.

31 
A thousand year-old institution can't really be 'anti traditional' as a rule or it wouldn't be recognizable from start to finish, I should think.  But yeah, they were certainly acting in a non-traditional way at key moments like the Great Schism and Vatican II, and having a hierarchy that lends itself to top-down decision-making certainly sets them up to behave in an anti-traditional way.  And you hit on an important point that McIntyre talks about- self-criticism is an aspect of any robust tradition.  Yes, it's a part of Catholic tradition to question/try to change Catholic traditions, and a part of Catholic tradition to silence those questions and resist that change. This is true of any other robust tradition as well.  It would be a big mistake to say "It's anti-traditional to change X because traditions can't change" or "It's anti traditional to not change X because traditions evolve over time."  Whether or not X should be changed is only answerable through reference to the peculiarities of X and the tradition it's embedded in, not a mere reference to what 'being traditional' is.
32

Well yeah, saying “anti-traditional” was me trying to stir things up a bit. But my point stands, that it’s not so easy to determine what is or isn’t traditional, what is or isn’t radical. I don’t think you can just look at the surface of things.

33

Ucci, so you’re another that’s read MacIntyre. I know Xunzian and Only_Humean are also fans. I wonder how many others are. I have mixed feelings, personally. I wonder if someone is interested in starting a thread about him. I’d participate, as time permits.

34

So in your opinion the unexamined life is worth living and life examination is a waste of time? We should stick with the traditional religion we are born into?

What’s wrong with a pluralism that draws a line when “other sorts of individuals” violate human rights?

35

Please try to be constructive. Do you have a problem with Kirk’s thesis on its merits?

36

No. You should really be careful with words like “prejudice” and “deviant”. It’s more sensitive than that.

For example, consider the recent Sandy Hook shooting. Religious critics for gun control have said that intelligent white males should be profiled in advance and qualified as autistic freaks. When white males are suspicious of government corruption and say we need guns to protect ourselves from corruption, they’re labeled as absurdly paranoid as if the government could never engage in abuse of process (as if it hasn’t already). They refuse to recognize the necessity of religion to cultivate social fabric, but say instead that it’s not necessary, and that experimental pragmatism and consumerism get the job done instead.

Trial and error never covers anything and everything. There will always be deviants because utility preferences are always diverse beyond demographics.

This is exactly what religious critics say about intelligent white males. Literally, it says they need to check their egos as if they have to be sacrificed for the sake of feminist and multiculturalist social progress. Guns need to be controlled so they don’t “try to overthrow the system to make their lives marginally more comfortable at the expense of the rest of us”. Everyone conforms to the system. Intelligent white males need to learn this as much as everyone.

I don’t think it has to do with your college professors. I think it has to do with your parents teaching you work ethic. The problem is how family values have been deconstructed from workaholism.

Libertarians don’t understand how property rights depend on properness. Without properness, property right advocates get labeled as dogmatic, arrogant, and unyielding. They get labeled as fascists who are dictating the definition of words upon others just because they say so. People will say privacy is irrelevant, and difficult individuals need to endure being sacrificed once, or else twice for not being appreciative for not being sacrificed worse.

Again, religion is needed for the sake of language.

Whether it’s your bias or not, it’s important to make language reliable to avoid hypocrisy.

37

Absolutely.

OK; this is a special link that you are making, however.

I say this because the primary functional conjugative rendering of Sublime in English is as an adjective, not as a noun, and as a noun it simply refers to the state or form of itself as an adjective.
As an adjective Sublime refers to inspiring awe, or being supreme; lofted above all else.
Subliminal, on the other hand, is a word crafted in the 19th century for psychological terminology and was done so to refer to those things below one’s conscious awareness.
Due to the nature of how the latter was rather overtly drafted quite after the former, they are not inherently lexically related aside from their latin root extractions, of which the former is not entirely known due to being a hybrid mix of French-Latin, while the latter was English created using Latin prefixes and suffixes.
So, though they’re possibly related in Latin root, they are not actually related in lexical meaning as no culture has yet married the two word’s concepts into a shared implication whereby the Sublime is that which is lifted up and lofted high, inspiring awe, and is therefore beyond a given limit of human conception, and subliminal refers to the limit by which the sublime rests beyond.

Now, I haven’t a problem with special definition, clearly, but it should be made more explicitly aware when it deviates from the standard uses.

I don’t really have any issue with your ideal here, as you are outlining a mindset instatement; declaring the state of that intangible - which is what given indoctrinations are ascribed and expected to do.
I’ll stop at the threshold, however, as my interest is the human body and not the other side of the veil; but I follow your tangent.

The intangible is always one of the many roots of language.
But I have a sense that we mean different things by that sentiment, for I still cannot conceive of the “sublime” as being something which always exists.
It’s more a concept of a state of a thing potentially being the case, as an indefinite.

However, if I take what appears to be your way of using Sublime and Subliminal, then I think what you are stating is akin to someone outlining how gods always exist always beyond a veil of intangibility and subtlety, and we focus upon the gods and not their intangibleness, and that they influence language by the power of awe in which focusing upon the gods beyond the intangible veil causes.

38

I just think Kirk is wrong. He sounds authoritative but what does he really know about the future of religion and civilization? We could be just fine if our ancients religions went into the dustbin of history … as outdated modes of social bonding. Are we humans really that dependent upon tribes of cults to get along? If we gave up our tribalism would we really fall apart … yes we are evolving … so maybe not.

39

Yes felix, my views on philosophy can be summarized in one sentence that makes me sound like an idiot. Spot on. Any other questions?

40

I think what Kirk would say is that you’re creating a “Who knows what would happen” situation where it doesn’t exist. It’s a bit of liberal hubris (says Kirk) to suppose that we’re on the edge of something new and revolutionary and nobody knows what it could lead to. I believe he’d also say we know more than enough about history to actually look at it and see what happens to civilizations who turn their backs on their traditions. I’m very much NOT a student of history, so that’s not a position I could well defend, but I’m pretty sure that’s what Kirk would say and I reckon he defends it somewhere in his writings.