The Conservative Mind's Criticism of Imperial Liberal Humanitarianism

It will probably discredit me in the minds of some, but I have to admit that I read Russell Kirk’s (1953) The Conservative Mind with a great deal of guilty pleasure, and admiration. Some time I would like to return to his defense of the liberal arts in the service of the cultivation of a natural aristocracy. But today I explore what I earlier (recall) described as a his “call for a reformed more prudent imperialism.”

At first sign, Kirk’s work belongs to the tradition of American isolationism. It’s quite critical of imperialism, and one can quote many passages like the following (from the discussion of Irving Babbitt in chapter XII): “Imperialism is one aspect of man's ancient expansive conceit, which the Greeks knew would bring hubris, and then blindness, and finally nemesis.” Nemesis plays an important role in this chapter (and Kirk’s general argument). For Kirk (and Babbitt) it clearly means the divine punishment of hubris.

First, the existence of nemesis is part of the argument against the false realism, and false empiricism, of Machiavellianism (I quote Kirk who partially quotes Babbit):

Yet Machiavelli and his followers are not true realists: "The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation." With Hobbes, this negation of morality enters English political thought, and we continue to suffer from its poison.

Nemesis, thus, follows eventually and necessarily from an enduring transgression of moral boundaries. (I leave it to fans of Star Trek to draw the obvious connections.) Kirk’s claim is, part and parcel of, and supported by, the providentialism articulated throughout The Conservative Mind. But having said that, Kirk’s “whatever one may term it” betrays a hint of the need for new myths for a materialist (a point he ascribes to Santayana).

As an aside, while the main official target of this argument will be ‘liberal humanitarianism,’ the quoted passage is clearly a swipe against Burnham, whose The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom had sought to offer anti-liberals a positive program. But Burnham’s new (managerial) elite is, in fact, dangerous because, like the modern Nietzcheans whose poetics it constantly emulates, it fails to recognize natural limits and so is itself an engine of destruction.

Second, in his own age Nemesis is exemplified and illustrated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki--a point reiterated several times throughout the book. Here it also sets up the argument against ‘Liberal humanitarianism’ which “in the United States found itself embarrassed, to put the matter mildly, when the Second World War was won-won at the expense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all they meant to the American conscience, won at the expense of consuming centralization at home, the maintenance of permanent armies abroad.”

No less eloquent than the Marxist critic or the Schmittian, Kirk evokes Liberal humanitarianism (with its self-confident standardization and consumerism) as the false imperialism throughout his argument. In fact, it is the task of the twentieth century conservative to tame this “corroding imperialism more ominous even than those the Romans failed to resist after they had crushed Macedonia.” It is precisely “in [post WWII] victory” that conservatism is required “to redeem her from ungoverned will and appetite” that is the product of two centuries of (Hamiltonian) expansionism. Kirk forcefully rejects the idea that American “institutions” can be imposed “upon cultures which have as good a claim to respect.”

In fact, Kirk’s providentialism is informed by the near miraculous revival of conservative forces during the mid-twentieth century against the grain of progressivism. This revival he understands as a moral awakening due not just to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the horrors of the Gulag and many smaller examples of the excesses of planning.  

I don’t think Kirk advocates retreat from empire altogether. Rather, he councils national humility in preserving it, against what he calls “the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy.” He goes on to claim that it is an empirical “error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism are inimical; they  will hunt together in our time, as they did in Periclean Athens and Revolutionary France.”

Those of us long accustomed to an imperial presidency with its tendency toward plebiscitary democracy, the permanent multitude of US American bases around the world, and a number of disastrous foreign interventions in the name of humanity will have to judge Kirk’s exhortation – despite its truth – a failure. But no liberal can rejoice in this failure—rather it should be the foundation of more sober reflection on reform of our crass political culture, our weakening institutions, and empire.

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