(6 of 7)
Two Thinkers, Two Wars. Kirk thanks the "coquetry of history and the mystery of Providence" for the rising influence in the mid-1920s of two conservative philosophers, Harvard's Irving Babbitt and Princeton's Paul Elmer More. By the time they wrote, liberal Utilitarianism had so completely infected the U.S. that many of Burke's predictions were visibly true. Said Babbitt: "We are trying to make, not the Ten Commandments, but humanitarianism work—and it is not working . . . The public is ... largely composed of people who have set up sympathy for the underdog as a substitute for all the other virtues." The basis of the "new ethics," he wrote, is "the assumption that the significant struggle between good & evil is not in the individual but in society."
Princeton's More sensed a people so interested in innovation and change that they were losing contact with the past, like a ship in a thickening fog which blots out "the far-flashing lights of the horizon . . . until we move forward through a sullen obscurity, unaware of any other traveler upon that sea, save when through the fog the sound of a threatening alarm beats upon the ear."
More potent than two (or two thousand) philosophers was the influence of two world wars, especially the second, in breaking the confident march of the various schools of anti-conservative thought. When a majority of one of the most advanced nations on earth voted Hitler into power, it became at least questionable that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." When the "progressive" drift toward a strong central state, eating away at local and other independent institutions, reached its climax in totalitarianism, men began to be reminded of the 'virtue in complex, balanced societies. Facing Belsen and Buchenwald and the Communist slave labor camps, it was hardly possible to believe that progress since the French Revolution had purged men of evil.
Burke had clearly foreseen Bonaparte in the principles of the French Revolution, and it is no stretch of partisan imagination to say that he had foreseen Stalin and Hitler, too. Men of 1953, living in the shadow of lost illusions, will find the conservative tradition more interesting than it seemed 40 years ago.
Six Canons. Wrestling with a definition of conservatism, Kirk identifies six "canons of thought" by which it may be recognized. They are:
¶"Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.
¶"Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.
¶" Conviction that the only true equality is moral equality, that all attempts to extend equality to economics and politics, if enforced by positive legislation, lead to despair, and that civilized society requires order and classes.
¶"Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not economic progress.