Alan Wolfe’s New Republic piece is not so much a book review as a thinly guised personal attack on one of the universally acknowledged sources for the modern American conservative movement, Russell Kirk (1918-1994). As Kirk himself was among the most perceptive conservative critics of higher education in the late 20th-century, he would not have been surprised by Wolfe’s conventional academic display of intellectual arrogance, intemperance, and, yes, irritability. Unsurprisingly, Wolfe’s lack of discipline prevents him from understanding the first thing about the mind of the man who’s his subject. The occasion for Wolfe’s polemic is the appearance of a collection mostly of Kirk’s essays and speeches edited by the literary critic George A. Panichas. The charge: Kirk is a “contemptuous conservative” (aren’t we all?), he exhibits a “smallness of person” (again, aren’t all conservatives small-minded?), his “political writings are fantastic” (not in the complimentary sense), he “can offer only cliché dressed up as conviction” (not a bad cliché in the making), he is “breathtakingly unoriginal,” (for doggedly citing his sources), and on and on it goes. Wolfe is clearly left scratching his head and asking, “What did William F. Buckley, Jr. and legions of others like him ever see in this guy?”
Wolfe displays his factual ignorance of his subject matter on more than one occasion: For instance, he scores Kirk for seeming to dabble with religion, asserting that Kirk “cannot find the answer” to the question of “which Christianity?” in the Catholic Church. Had Wolfe troubled to Google the words “Russell Kirk” and “Catholicism” he could have uncovered the fact that Kirk converted to Catholicism at age 45. Indeed, the fifth link turned up by such a search is an article on Kirk entitled “the Conservative Convert.” William F. Buckley Jr. in his book
Nearer My God to Thee even asked Kirk to reply to WFB’s questions about the claims of Catholicism.
Not that this would have endeared Kirk to Wolfe, whose prose drips disdain for every variety of Christian faith he mentions. Wolfe treats Kirk rather straightforward presentation that Christianity was an advance on Judaism as something shocking. Christians have always and everywhere believed this to be true. What is shocking is the way that Wolfe draws a caricature of the Christian tradition. On the one side he presents us with an ideological and nearly totalitarian Catholicism, on the other he presents us with a mindless, obscurant, and anti-intellectual Evangelicalism. If such a crude analysis were applied to any other tradition the author of it would rightly be called a bigot.
Wolfe, however, can’t seem to help himself. He is audacious enough to imply that Kirk misunderstands Nazism because Kirk focused less on the particulars of Nazi social planning (such as the horrific extermination of Jews and other “life unworthy of life” such as the handicapped) than on the general principle these atrocities illustrate: That the hubris entailed in presuming to “plan” the fates of millions and bend their daily lives to the strictures of an ideology will usually lead to tyranny and murder — as it did for tens of millions more in Communist countries from Hungary to Cambodia.
If the last, and decidedly terrible century in many ways, taught us anything it was that using bayonets and bureaucracies to “remake” human nature leads to killing real men and women, when they fail to meet (or decline to cooperate with) the ideals of the men in power. This insight used to be common currency throughout not just the conservative movement, but also the anti-Communist Left — and has been reiterated by the likes of Milosz, Havel, and Sakharov, not to mention (to spare Wolfe’s sensibilities) Walesa and Wotyjla.
Wolfe seems puzzled that “of all the crimes committed by the Nazis, the proclivity of human perfectibility is an odd one to choose.” In fact, in citing this particular Nazi fantasy, Kirk cut straight to the heart of the matter, rebuking all politicians and ideologues who invoke the impossible ideal of transforming men into gods as a pretext to massacre their enemies. Cognitively, Kirk got the order precisely right: Actions follow from thoughts. If power tends to corrupt, then the power to transform human nature entails the ultimate corruption — as prophets from Zamyatin to Orwell and Huxley well understood.
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