The conservative movement is deeply confused today. Although America’s Republican Party has won considerable electoral success by opposing the worst excesses of the Left in recent years, it is difficult – if not impossible – to say that the governing populist coalition has conserved much of anything at all. From ballooning federal deficits to spiralling global security crises, not to mention unabated cultural decline and the near-total hegemony of social liberalism, by any objective measure, American conservatism has fallen considerably from the triumphs of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and victory in the Cold War.

In this sad moment of loss and retreat, then, perhaps the conservative movement can rediscover strength by looking back to its forebears and the principles they so nobly advanced – especially Russell Kirk and his vision of an imaginative conservatism. He sought to orient conservatism not toward temporary success in day-to-day political controversy, important as that may be, but rather around what he called the ‘Permanent Things’ that constitute the ‘unbought grace of life’. He aimed to found a conservative movement that is poetic rather than political, patriotic rather than critical, philosophic rather than ideological. If the conservative movement is to endure beyond a series of 24-hour news cycles or even four years of a presidential administration, then it must return to this older, dispositional conservatism.

Kirk’s most profound articulation of this disposition came in his 1953 book The Conservative Mind. More than any other text, it can best be considered the founding document of the conservative movement. Originally produced as a dissertation at the University of Saint Andrews, it quickly became a bestseller because the American people were desperate for something with greater moral substance than the New Deal liberalism then dominating public affairs. Readers were deeply frustrated with both the rationalist central planners governing the nation from Washington and the relativists who were beginning to take the commanding heights of culture and academia. The Conservative Mind offered them an unapologetic defence of their actual way of life – a great intellectual blow against the revolution of the 20th century.

In some ways, though, it may be surprising that a book like The Conservative Mind could have such an influence. Kirk indeed concerned himself with the deeds and speeches of great statesmen, such as Edmund Burke, John Adams, and Benjamin Disraeli, and with the political thought of great minds, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, and Irving Babbitt. But much of the book is more concerned with literary figures such as Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Henry Adams. Kirk believed that even more than written constitutions or abstract political theories, literature can express the true essence of a people and the fundamental roots of social order that we must strive to conserve. If conservatism hopes to conserve anything of true worth, then it must be more than a political movement – it must be understood as a literary tradition.

Kirk began The Conservative Mind by setting two tasks before himself: first, to define conservatism, and then to examine its ‘validity for this perplexed age’. Far from setting up conservatism as a rival ideology to those throwing the time out of joint, he argued instead that it seeks to defend existing establishments against upheaval because it understood them as particular expressions of certain universal truths about the human person. He identified a soft ‘canon’ of conservative principles – ranging from belief in a transcendent moral order to a faith in the wisdom of our ancestors.

Kirk proceeded through the rest of the book by means of a series of biographical sketches depicting the aforementioned figures, and many others who shared these convictions, as a way to concretely demonstrate their meaning. His accounts of their victories and defeats over two centuries reveal that conservatism is a way of life, that is to say a set of spiritual practices – like those offered by the philosophical schools of antiquity – to cultivate in our hearts a decent respect for the Permanent Things.

Kirk himself often remarked that there is an intimate relation between order in the commonwealth and order in the soul. In another masterwork, The Roots of American Order, he argued that ‘It is not possible to love what one ought to love, unless we recognize some principles of order by which to govern ourselves.’ That book, building on the intellectual framework of The Conservative Mind, traces those ‘principles of order’ through the long history of civilizational continuity in the West. Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia each contributed something of immense worth to our sense of man’s place in the constitution of being, our conception of the eternal contract of society.

Because he was so concerned with the person’s soul, Kirk did not believe conservatism could rest content with simply preserving a specific set of political arrangements or a particular class’s privileges. As he put it toward the end of The Conservative Mind: ‘Society’s regeneration cannot be an undertaking wholly political. Having lost the spirit of consecration, the modern masses are without expectation of anything better than a bigger slice of what they possess already… How to restore a living faith to the lonely crowd, how to remind men that life has ends – this conundrum the 20th-century conservative faces.’ The 21st-century conservative faces much the same conundrum, and the solution remains the same as what Kirk articulated: to heed ‘the summons of the poet’.

It was his conviction that literature, more than any other force, could provide this conservative function. In one essay, ‘Literature and the Contract of Eternal Society’, he maintained that men of letters and teachers of literature bear ‘the principle responsibility’ for ‘ensuring a continuity of the mind among men’. The Western poetic tradition (by which I mean both verse and prose) inspires the habits of reflection and choice conservatives prize by moving our hearts and furnishing our moral imagination. In this sense, then, the practitioners of literature can exercise what Kirk calls the ‘high duty’ and even ‘sacred function’ by becoming ‘keepers of the Word’. ‘It is they who, more than the statesman,’ Kirk went on to argue, ‘remind us of what Burke calls “the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place”’.

In the early days of the American Republic, however, many doubted whether the regime was capable of such a literature. The US frontiers may have been settled by men and women formed by the old European order, but this seemed to be a world altogether new. In The Conservative Mind, though, Kirk traced the origins of a literature of continuity back to a set of New England writers from the first half of the 19th century. According to him, they ‘succeeded in waking the American imagination’ because ‘they created, out of rude and fragmentary materials, a vision of the American heritage which still helps direct the amorphous mass of the American people into a national ideal originated among a few English-speaking people along the Atlantic shore.’ Preserving their literary works – poetry, short stories, novels – ought therefore to be a principal concern for American conservatives.

To Kirk’s conservative mind, the author who contributed the most to this renaissance was Nathaniel Hawthorne. ‘In the solitude of his haunted chamber in Salem’, Kirk wrote, ‘he learned how hard was the task of a romancer in a land without the mystery and awe of antiquity; he taught himself to conjure up the ghost of old New England, and his necromancy gave to American thought and letters a bent still discernible’. Specifically, Hawthorne’s art memorialised the virtues and the vices of his Puritan ancestors, and in so doing impressed upon the American mind a profound conception of original sin and the limitations of human nature.

Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, embodies many of the characteristics of the conservative mind. Most English classes today, if they read the book at all, tend to butcher it – but Kirk understood it as a truly fine literary achievement. In this story of sin and shame, Hawthorne dramatised the eternal tension between the individual and society and captured his complicated relationship with his Puritan ancestors.

‘Hawthorne was no idolizer of the past’, Kirk wrote, ‘he knew the past to have been black and cruel, often; but for that very reason, apprehension of the past ought to be fundamental to the projecting of any social reform. Only through scrutiny of the past can society descry the limitations of human nature.’ Just as the American Republic was being engulfed by the self-interested radicalisms of antebellum politics, Hawthorne offered a warning about the hubris of moralistic extremism.

Those themes are also present in his most excellent short story ‘Earth’s Holocaust’. In the tale, which is a kind of moral allegory, a group of zealous innovators light a bonfire somewhere on the Western frontier to burn away all the vestiges of humanity’s troubled past. They begin with the symbols of the ancien regime’s nobility: the crowns and surplices and all the other ‘trappings of aristocracy’, which have no place in an egalitarian republic. Soon, though, the enthusiasts go even further, tossing in all written constitutions, and the world’s great literature, and even the Bible itself. The fire rises and soon comes to burn not only the barbarisms of the past but also, it seems, nearly everything that makes life worth living.

At the end of the story, a ‘dark-visaged figure’ comes to the few lamenting at the coals of the spent bonfire. He ‘reassures’ them that the zealots have failed to burn one thing – the human heart. ‘And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern’, he says, ‘forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery – the same old shapes or worse ones – which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!’ It is a chilling vision of the folly of humanitarian enthusiasm, and the permanence of the human condition – a vision which very much remains in the best of American literature.

In other works, from The Blithedale Romance to ‘The Birth-Mark’ and more, Hawthorne pilloried the new puritans of his time for failing to understand both the tides of history and the unchanging nature of the human person. Their senseless optimism, he knew, would not ameliorate suffering in the world – it could only cause more of it. Kirk admired this realism and noted that Hawthorne has much to teach a careful reader. ‘By heroic efforts, Hawthorne suggests, man may diminish the influence of original sin in the world; but this struggle requires nearly his undivided attention,’ he wrote, ‘Whenever man tries to ignore sin, some avenging angel intervenes, progress material and spiritual collapses, and the reality of evil is re-impressed upon men’s minds by terror and suffering. Only one species of reform really is worth attempting: reform of conscience.’ This is much-needed conservative wisdom in an age of shrill utopianism.

But conservative literature does not simply exist to pessimistically remind human beings of our limitations, Kirk asserted, but also to restore a sense of hope. To that end, he often turned to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. In the jumble of images and phrases he assembled, Kirk spied a set of spiritual truths essential not only to the moral reformation Hawthorne desired, but also to the restoration of the dignity of man. ‘Through the whole of Eliot’s writing there runs the idea of a community of souls’, Kirk wrote, ‘a bond of love and duty joining all the living, and also those who have preceded us and those who will follow us in this moment of time.’

Eliot’s first great success came with The Waste Land, a long modernist poem written in the wake of Europe’s destruction in the First World War and a series of personal crises in Eliot’s own life. It makes for heart-wrenching reading, because it exposes the deep moral rot of the modern world and the rootlessness that characterises our struggle to live in it. One passage from early in the poem may suffice to demonstrate the wasteland of culture and the dark night of the soul Eliot confronted:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

To put it somewhat less poetically, The Waste Land is about the deep longing Eliot felt for the Permanent Things. In a later essay, written after his conversion to Christianity, he defined liberalism as ‘a progressive discarding of elements in historical Christianity which appear superfluous or obsolete’. Out of hubris, people in the West began thinking they could abandon the God of their fathers and create the world anew. As the West’s Christian heritage receded, many, including fascist and communist ideologues, returned to the old gods of power the pagans worshipped. He realised that this revolution is what imperilled the Permanent Things. It was what he was reacting against.

Eliot’s quest for permanence was not simply political or cultural – it was also deeply personal. Like Saint Augustine and countless other lost souls before him, he could find no peace until finding rest in God’s arms and the Church. Eliot recorded this journey to conversion in his poetry, especially his Four Quartets. If The Waste Land offers a searingly painful image of a life without God, the Quartets offer a hopeful – if not altogether uncomplicated – vision of spiritual fulfilment.

The best of the poems, ‘Little Gidding’, links Eliot’s own personal struggles with faith to a wider civilisational continuity. Take, for example, this passage from the last section of the poem:

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

Eliot found in the traditional forms of Christendom a balm to soothe his weary soul, and, as Kirk put it, his poetry provides a glimpse into that ascent for readers facing a similar struggle. More than a heap of broken images, then, his poems are a living history, a set of symbols to guide us on our own pilgrimages through the wasted world. ‘As a champion of the moral imagination, Eliot had begun by describing the abyss into which we fall if we reject the inner order and the outer,’ Kirk wrote in his book on the poet. ‘He had concluded by suggestion that it is not impossible to recover the order of the soul and the order of the commonwealth.’ This is the conservative end of all the best poetry constituting the Western tradition.

Another modernist writer who participated in this great tradition is William Faulkner, perhaps the finest artist the American South ever produced. Although Kirk professed an admiration for his writing on numerous occasions, to my knowledge, he never wrote explicitly about the man. Nonetheless, he deserves a place of high honour within the conservative canon. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner wrote about the pain of the past and the persistence of original sin; like Eliot, he confronted the ugliness of modernity’s wasteland and provided a vision of hope to guide us through this vale of tears.

Faulkner’s novels are exceedingly difficult to read. Beyond the inherent tragedy shot through their plots, many are written in an innovative stream-of-consciousness style, revealing the innermost thoughts of profoundly troubled people in a way that can be difficult to follow both mentally and emotionally. Some of these revelations may strike conservatives as indecent or otherwise disquieting, to be sure, but they play an important function – they stretch the reader’s moral imagination. Faulkner, unique among American authors, has the ability to make readers put themselves in the place of his characters and thereby teach us what it means to be fully human.

The novel in which Faulkner exercises the moral imagination with the most artistic greatness is The Sound and the Fury. Through a complicated set of interlocking narratives, it tells the story of the decline of the Compson family, once scions of fictional Jefferson, Mississippi. Burdened by the past and seemingly incapable of life in the modern world, the Compsons slip into a nihilism similar in tone to Eliot’s Waste Land. By contrast, their black servant Dilsey and her religious family find a way to endure by clinging to the Permanent Things. It is an extraordinarily complex novel, but it unfolds an almost unfathomable beauty to the careful reader.

Above all, Faulkner’s writing stands as a great condemnation of the egoism which afflicts modern life. Far from embracing the self-obsessed nihilism of the Compsons, Faulkner helps guide us into a deeper love for our fellow man and reminds us of the duty of self-sacrifice. Like Kirk, the Mississippian understood this is the true task of the man of letters. As he put it in a speech he gave upon winning the Nobel Prize, the modern writer must remember the ‘problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat’. Faulkner went on to say:

He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

This is a deeply conservative vision of the writer’s task, one which affirms the long continuity of moral imagination which has always characterised the better angels of Western civilisation. Faulkner was an innovative writer, of course, but, like Burke, he knew that change is the means of preservation. By finding new ways to express the great tradition, Faulkner passed it down to us, the living. And, as he said in his Nobel Prize speech, this was a cause for great hope:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Faulkner is entirely correct. It is in poetry that conservatism finds its fullest articulation as a way of life. By stirring our souls, it reminds us of the most fundamental truth Kirk sought to teach: despite all the confusions of an ideological age and the sorrows of an antagonistic world, life is still worth living because the human person is still capable of loving. The poet is better suited to restore this perception to the public than the politician, Kirk wrote, because he ‘is loyal to norms, not to faction’ and therefore ‘scourges the follies of the time’. By serving as a link between the past, the present, and the future, great literature preserves that which makes us most truly human: the spirit, the soul, the heart.

Needless to say, this kind of conservatism has very little to do with the right-wing forces controlling America’s Republican Party today. None of the factions competing for power in Washington possesses the poetry of the soul that is the conclusion of The Conservative Mind. Following Kirk’s example, conservatives can and should offer the world something better and more beautiful than populist rage. At its best, truly, conservatism offers a humanist hope.

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at a Piety Hill Seminar hosted by the Russell Kirk Center, ‘Russell Kirk and the Conservative Disposition‘.