elfs | Re-reading Russell Kirk

I've been re-reading Russell Kirk's most famous book, The Conservative Mind ^{[powells][barnes&noble]}, and I had gotten as far as the foreward when I hit the first of, I'm sure, many realizations to come.

Kirk (and I have to emphasize that this is the Kirk of 1987, writing the Foreward to the 7th edition, not the Kirk of 1952 when he first wrote the book) talks in triumphalist tones about the collapse of liberalism, the rise of conservatism, and the coming Kingdom of God over the Harvest of Man. (Of that last, Kirk doesn't use those terms himself; instead, he approvingly quotes Catholic philosopher Tage Lindbom, who did.) And as he does so, he mentions in passing that there is little intellectual activity going on, within the left, whereas on the right there a call to a life of the mind as:

... a necessary bulwark against a Ortega-like 'revolt of the masses,' the destruction of standards of all sorts, and the widespread reduction of civilized life to the gross satisfaction of petty material appetites.

The egalitarian dystopias of Jaquetta Hawkes, Robert Graves, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley have taken on flesh. The world's evanescent liberal era, in fulfillment of Santayana's prophecy, is giving up the ghost. The outer order of the state falls into the clutch of merciless ideologues or squalid oligarchs.

The first thing I find fascinating in this little paragraph, aside from the triumphalism, is the way Kirk assumes that "Conservatism," especially the Catholic kind he professed, can be contrasted with "the gross satisfaction of petty material appetites."

Yet the modern Catholic League, at least in the guise of its president, Bill Donahue, not only approves of the gross satisfaction of petty material appetites, but goes on to disclaim any attempt to encourage a life of the mind as "class discrimination":

After all, why should the working class pay for the leisure, e.g., going to museums, of the upper class? We don't subsidize professional wrestling, yet the working class has to pay for the leisure of the rich. Not only that, because the elites don't smoke, they bar the working class from smoking in arenas. This is class discrimination and should be opposed by those committed to social justice.

This is what America is becoming: a world where an attempt, any attempt, to educate people is an elitist activity. The masses don't want education, they don't want museums, they don't want concert halls. They want professional wrestling.

Every successful nation on Earth has taken up as one of its goals the improvement of its citizens' life of the mind. That goal, in America is tempered by the notion that people are free to seek the improvements they themselves want, and not those dictated by our elected officials. Every successful nation on Earth recognizes that one of its legitimate duties is to provide education for its citizens. Countries that fail to keep up, fail entirely.

Contra Kirk, this is what the right has become: a rallying cry for deliberately cultivated ignorance, with a dollop of victimhood and resentment about a nebulous "they" who are somehow screwing the equally nebulous "you."