Russell Kirk\u2019s Concise Guide to Conservatism<\/em><\/a> (Regnery Gateway, 2019).<\/p>\nIn his introduction to the new edition, intellectual historian Wilfred McClay writes that the work is “as delightful as it is instructive…Kirk’s insights about family, the importance of private property, education, religion, and a dozen other subjects not only remain completely sound but now seem downright prophetic.” This section on the family as the core of a healthy society is taken from chapter V.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Conservatives and the Family<\/h1>\n from Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism <\/em>\u00a0(Regnery Gateway, 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n“T<\/span>he germ of public affections,\u201d Burke wrote, \u201cis to learn to love the little platoon we be\u00adlong to in society.\u201d We cannot feel any affection for our country unless we first love those near to us. The con\u00adservative feels that the family is the natural source and core of any good society; that when the family decays, a dreary collectivism is sure to supplant it; and that the principal instrument of moral instruction, ordinary edu\u00adcation, and satisfactory economic life always must remain the family. What makes life worth living is love; and love is learnt in the family, and withers when the health of family-life is impaired.<\/p>\nNow very powerful forces are at work to diminish the influence of the family among us, and even to destroy the family for all purposes except mere generation. Some of these forces are material and unintentional: certain as\u00adpects of modern industrialism, which break up the old economic unity of the family; cheap amusements and transportation, which encourage members of the family to spend nearly all their time outside the family circle; the assumption of the old educational functions of the family by public schools, in considerable part. The real conservative seeks to modify or reverse these tendencies by reminding men and women that family love is more important than material gain; and he tries to devise practical means to reconcile family unity with the de\u00admands of modern life.<\/p>\n
But other forces hostile to the family are not merely impersonal and unconscious: they are more or less de\u00adliberate, and they may be countered by intelligent action in the social and educational and political spheres. The chief of these ominous forces is the deliberate desire of certain people to have the political state assume nearly all the responsibilities which the family once possessed. This movement is the most thorough and disastrous form of collectivism. That some of the people who advocate such a course are well-intentioned does not excuse their design. We all know what hell is paved with. A distin\u00adguished historical sociologist, Dr. R. A. Nisbet, in his Quest for Community, <\/em>describes the scheme of the totali\u00adtarians, the Nazis and the Communists, for extirpating the family:<\/p>\n\nThe shrewd totalitarian mentality knows well the powers of intimate kinship and religious devotion for keeping alive in a population values and incentives which might well, in the future, serve as the basis of resistance. Thus to emancipate each member, and especially the younger members, from the family was an absolute neces\u00adsity. And this planned spiritual alienation from kinship was accomplished, not only through the negative proc\u00adesses of spying and informing, but through the sapping of the functional foundations of family membership and through the substitution of new and attractive political roles for each of the social roles embodied in the family structure. The techniques varied. But what was essential was the atomization of the family and of every other type of grouping that intervened between the people as society and the people as a mindless, soulless, traditionless mass. What the totalitarian must have for the realization of his design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
George Orwell, in his novel 1984, <\/em>describes London children taught to spy systematically on their parents, and approved for bringing about their destruction. This final disintegration of family love, and all love, already is a reality in the nations dominated by the Communists. And if the family continues to decay in the rest of the world, such a culmination is conceivable even in our society.<\/p>\nSome of the deliberate or quasi-deliberate techniques of the mass-state for undermining the family are these:<\/p>\n
(1) Taking the instruction of children entirely away from their parents by the official adoption of theories that prescribe \u201ceducating the whole <\/em>child\u201d in the state schools, with a corresponding depreciation of parental intelli\u00adgence and rights.<\/p>\n(2) Creating \u201cyouth organizations\u201d to take young people quite out of the sphere of the family in their leisure hours, and to indoctrinate them in the ideology of the mass-state.<\/p>\n
(3) Abolishing the inheritance of family property, through confiscatory inheritance taxes or through in\u00adcome tax policies that leave small margin for family sav\u00ading.<\/p>\n
(4) Planned encouragement of divorce, \u201csexual free\u00addom,\u201d and \u201cdeprivatization of women,\u201d through positive legislation or official propaganda, with the aim of weakening the bonds of affection within the family that offer a strong barrier to the wishes of the total state.<\/p>\n
And there are yet other ways in which political au\u00adthority is employed to make the family into a mere household\u2014and into only a fragile and impersonal household, at that. Against these deliberate attacks on the family, as against the less deliberate assaults of modern life, the conservative sets his face. He knows that if the family is to survive, thinking men and women who believe the family to be a great power for good must take prompt counter\u00admeasures. He knows, with Professor Pitirim Sorokin, that the family must be restored and reconstructed among us, not merely praised in vague terms. As Dr. Sorokin writes:<\/p>\n
\nThe family . . . should become again a union of bodies, souls, hearts, and minds in a single collective \u2018we.\u2019 Its basic function, that of inculcating deep sympathy, compassion, love, and loyalty in its members, not only in relation to one another but toward humanity at large, must be restored and fully developed. This is necessary because no other agency can perform this function as well as the average good family. This type of family will be\u00adcome the cornerstone of a new creative social order.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
For, as Dr. Sorokin suggests, the intelligent conserva\u00adtive does not simply stand still. In this age particularly, tradition and established institutions are being broken up by terrible forces, and the conservative has to look into the future, as well as study the past, if he is to con\u00adserve the best in our heritage. He must restore the family in order to keep the family from extinction. He may create a new and better social order, not by cooperating in the grim process of social collectivization, but by infusing new life into the ancient and well-loved institutions of family, church, and community. The family is true voluntary community, inspired by love and common understanding. The only alternative to the family is the total state, governed by force and central power.<\/p>\n
The conservative is in favor of many kinds of freedom. He supports, for example, political liberty, under just and balanced constitutions; economic liberty, under the rules of morality; intellectual liberty, balanced by a sense of intellectual responsibility. But there are alleged \u201cfree\u00addoms\u201d that the thinking conservative knows to be an\u00adarchical and malevolent. He does not recognize any nat\u00adural freedom to take someone else\u2019s goods, or to subvert law and order, or to demolish the moral principles which have created true freedom itself. And he denies that any person, or any collective body, rightfully enjoys the free\u00addom to break down all the subtle ties of affection and interest that have created the family. Such an appetite is not liberty, but license. Demands for reducing marriage to a mere legal form of sexual union, if even that; for converting man and woman into a mere blur, with identi\u00adcal functions and tasks; for \u201cliberating\u201d the child from the influence of his parents; for abandoning the moral precepts which are the accumulated wisdom of the race, in favor of some collectivistic \u201cnew morality\u201d\u2014these de\u00admands are not part of ordered liberty, but are the nega\u00adtion of true freedom.<\/p>\n
The family is more than a simple arrangement for the gratification of sexual impulses, and more than a mere housing-device. As Dr. Sorokin says, \u201cMore successfully than any other group, it has transformed its members into a single entity, with a common fund of values, with com\u00admon joys and sorrows, spontaneous cooperation and will\u00ading sacrifice.\u201d It keeps sterile collectivism at bay. It teaches us the meaning of love and duty, and what it is to be a true man or a true woman. It is the primary \u201clittle platoon we belong to in society.\u201d The conservative knows that, the family lacking, nothing very important in our culture can be preserved or improved. The traditional family\u2014which, like many old-fashioned things, is an in\u00addispensable thing\u2014gives us those roots without which we all would be just so many lonely little atoms of humanity, unprincipled and at the mercy of some iron political domination.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 The Russell Kirk Legacy, LLC<\/p>\n
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Classic Kirk:<\/strong>