Documentation: Roots, American Style—The Antidote to Confusion

Editor’s note: Regnery Gateway has recently re-issued Russell Kirk’s masterful Roots of American Order. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Frank Shakespeare penned this epilogue to the new edition.

The Roots of American Order, one of Russell Kirk’s many wonderful scholarly achievements, first appeared in 1974. At that time our country was preparing to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a magnificent statement of core principles that continues to inspire people struggling for freedom all over the world. In those years the country was also emerging from a tumultuous period during which its institutions—the family, religious tradition, private property, social authority, and government—had suffered serious assaults. Radicals, bent on challenging and even destroying the foundations of Western culture, had sought to repudiate our shared history and national character. Young leftists were using Watergate to foment skepticism. Our nation’s religious denominations were losing confidence in their ability to promote permanent values. The country as a whole seemed to have lost its direction.

Dr. Kirk’s book was an antidote to all such confusion of the era. He lucidly argued that our nation, if it is to remain great, must remember and understand the roots from which it grew. As Dr. Kirk put it, “these roots go deep, but they require watering from time to time.” Dr. Kirk saw that the then-fashionable attempt to pull up these roots and to reconstruct our country from scratch would in fact kill it. To prevent such destruction, he guided his reader on a sweeping tour of some 32 centuries of intellectual history. It was an exhilarating tour, one that gave anyone who read it a new appreciation of our heritage and our country. He made it clear that those who want to remake the nation and reinvent its moral codes had better understand the nature and magnitude of their mission, because they war against the greatest accumulation of wisdom in the history of man.

Today’s America is a more peaceful place. The voices of revolution have quieted, especially in the wake of the disintegration of communism and third-world liberationist ideology. The threats to American social order today are less obvious. But we have not entirely overcome many of the problems that plagued our nation when Dr. Kirk’s book first appeared. The revolutionaries are still among us, although they have become more subtle in their strategies.

Despite the extraordinary carnage caused by Marxist-Leninist ideology and the unchecked state power it unleashed, leftist intellectuals in American universities have continued their Gramscian march through our cultural institutions. The most recent ideological threat is “multiculturalism,” a thinly-disguised assault on Western thought and ideas. This new ideology, one completely foreign to our shared history, has become deeply entrenched, not only in academia, but in the media and popular culture as well.

We should not underestimate the threat posed by this so-called multiculturalism. Multiculturalism posits that the values undergirding Western civilization were destined only for certain groups, usually labeled “oppressor classes,” and that other groups, usually racial and ethnic groups, require special treatment, separate curricula, and independent political organizations What the advocates of multiculturalism have failed to realize is that the cornerstones of Western civilization—the dignity of the individual, the integrity of private property, the bedrock importance of religious faith, and the necessity for constitutional checks on government power—have universal applicability. These institutions were not designed to give this or that group certain privileges at others’ expense, but to protect the rights of all individuals and groups. Earlier in this century Marxists and secularists did much to undermine religious faith; now multiculturalism is in the process of repudiating even the value of logic and reason. These ideologues fail to realize that, without faith and without reason, all that remains is an existence much like the Hobbesian state of nature.

There are other threats as well, ranging from radical environmentalism, which seeks to exchange our prosperity for a nature-adoring poverty rooted in paganism, to a new racism, which uses rigid racial quotas to war on the voluntary wage contract and the autonomy of our educational institutions.

As the struggle builds between those who embrace our heritage and those who reject it, it is a blessing to have Dr. Kirk’s book back in print. His entire intellectual life has been devoted to one end—helping our modern age regain a lost sense of perspective. This book accomplishes that task as well as any ever written. More than most studies produced during this era, The Roots of American Order asks us to consider the sweep of history, philosophy, and even theology in order to understand what constitutes the Western social order. Dr. Kirk demands that we slow down, leave the op-eds and the microscholarship behind and think—think about what defines us as individuals, as a community, and as a nation.

The Roots of American Order begins by tracing our intellectual roots to the Hebraic understanding of a purposeful universe under God’s dominion. The Jewish people understood their God to be omniscient and omnipotent, the author of both the moral law and the terms of justice. They understood that He watched over them and gave them a moral nature. In turn, they were obliged to keep the moral law and to suffer the consequences if they failed to do so. This moral law was not intended to be adapted to every new political trend. Moral law is, by definition, not infinitely malleable. Instead, the moral law stands implacably against arrogant ideological claims.

The American order was further strengthened by the philosophical reflections of the Greeks, with their high regard for the uses of reason, and by the stern virtues of such exemplary Romans as Cicero. When the Word became Flesh, our ancestors learned to understand better the duties and limitations of Man, as well as the importance of the Transcendent in our lives. The roots of our order also include the magnificent traditions and universities of the medieval world, the religious zeal of the Reformation and the response to it, the development of British common law, the debates and discord of the eighteenth century, and the written words of our Declaration and Constitution.

We must always remember that those who originally advanced the ideas which today undergird our institutions were actual and potential martyrs. They believed that more was at stake than their own material betterment; they were subject to a higher law that imposed a duty to construct a better future for generations to come. Their strivings—so brilliantly and engagingly described in Kirk’s pages—resulted in the ordered liberty of our predecessors, and, we can hope, that of our children as well. Dr. Kirk’s historical survey ends a century before our own. This is significant since most modern historians treat American history as if it began only with the expansion of the franchise and the rise of the ever-expanding panoply of special interest protests which now define our political life. By contrast, Dr. Kirk undoubtedly regards our own century as one in which the traditional order began to erode, endangering both our present and our future.

It should be clear that by “order” Dr. Kirk means more than positive law, those general rules that “make possible the tolerable functioning of an order,” or even the written words of our founding documents. We also have what he calls our unwritten constitution, and it constitutes the strongest thread of our social fabric. Our unwritten constitution includes elements always beyond ourselves: our ingrained habits and customs, our implied rights and obligations, our unstated doctrines and beliefs, the things we take for granted, the things we would notice only if we were deprived of them. This unwritten constitution is enforced by informal but powerful courts of social sanction. It is a crucial element of our order. Yet it is characteristic of our age that positive law has become the sum total of our nation’s purpose. We legislate for or against anything and everything, and this is somehow supposed to change our nature. But a comprehensive order is more organic, less concrete; it is integral to our national character, albeit in ways which we may not fully understand. An order is a tradition which we must respect. “No single human mind planned this order of ours,” Kirk writes, “the wisdom and the toil of countless men and women have gone into its making.”

To be sure, Dr. Kirk dissents from the conventional understanding of American intellectual history on several points. He is less willing than most, for example, to credit Locke and Hobbes with constructing our essential intellectual edifice, and he is more appreciative of the Jewish and Christian contributions. He views America’s War of Independence as the affirmation of an order already existing, rather than a revolutionary overthrow of an established order. And, unlike many intellectuals, his sympathies lie not with egalitarianism and majoritarian democracy but with restrained democracy; he shows how the slow cultivation of an American gentleman led to an insistence on placing limits on democratic rule in order to keep it from becoming mob rule.

What of our present age? Is our order, so ancient in its origins, in danger of cracking? Dr. Kirk reminds us that “the history of most societies is a record of painful striving, brief success (if success at all), and then decay and ruin.” We have no guarantee that America has been providentially appointed to carry the tradition through future ages. To preserve our position we need not another revolution, but a renewal of tradition. We must avoid frantic rushes into new intellectual and political fads. We must eschew ideology, which he defines as “servitude to political dogmas and abstract ideas not founded upon historical experience,” and embrace philosophy and intellectual history. We must reject utopian millenarianism, that insidious force that, from time immemorial, has tempted man to exchange what is right and good for a rootless and radically uncertain future. In short, we had better take the time, if we can find it between elections and media feeding frenziEditor’s note: Regnery Gateway has recently re-issued Russell Kirk’s masterful Roots of American Order. Former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Frank Shakespeare penned this epilogue to the new edition.

The Roots of American Order, one of Russell Kirk’s many wonderful scholarly achievements, first appeared in 1974. At that time our country was preparing to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a magnificent statement of core principles that continues to inspire people struggling for freedom all over the world. In those years the country was also emerging from a tumultuous period during which its institutions—the family, religious tradition, private property, social authority, and government—had suffered serious assaults. Radicals, bent on challenging and even destroying the foundations of Western culture, had sought to repudiate our shared history and national character. Young leftists were using Watergate to foment skepticism. Our nation’s religious denominations were losing confidence in their ability to promote permanent values. The country as a whole seemed to have lost its direction.

Dr. Kirk’s book was an antidote to all such confusion of the era. He lucidly argued that our nation, if it is to remain great, must remember and understand the roots from which it grew. As Dr. Kirk put it, “these roots go deep, but they require watering from time to time.” Dr. Kirk saw that the then-fashionable attempt to pull up these roots and to reconstruct our country from scratch would in fact kill it. To prevent such destruction, he guided his reader on a sweeping tour of some 32 centuries of intellectual history. It was an exhilarating tour, one that gave anyone who read it a new appreciation of our heritage and our country. He made it clear that those who want to remake the nation and reinvent its moral codes had better understand the nature and magnitude of their mission, because they war against the greatest accumulation of wisdom in the history of man.

Today’s America is a more peaceful place. The voices of revolution have quieted, especially in the wake of the disintegration of communism and third-world liberationist ideology. The threats to American social order today are less obvious. But we have not entirely overcome many of the problems that plagued our nation when Dr. Kirk’s book first appeared. The revolutionaries are still among us, although they have become more subtle in their strategies.

Despite the extraordinary carnage caused by Marxist-Leninist ideology and the unchecked state power it unleashed, leftist intellectuals in American universities have continued their Gramscian march through our cultural institutions. The most recent ideological threat is “multiculturalism,” a thinly-disguised assault on Western thought and ideas. This new ideology, one completely foreign to our shared history, has become deeply entrenched, not only in academia, but in the media and popular culture as well.

We should not underestimate the threat posed by this so-called multiculturalism. Multiculturalism posits that the values undergirding Western civilization were destined only for certain groups, usually labeled “oppressor classes,” and that other groups, usually racial and ethnic groups, require special treatment, separate curricula, and independent political organizations What the advocates of multiculturalism have failed to realize is that the cornerstones of Western civilization—the dignity of the individual, the integrity of private property, the bedrock importance of religious faith, and the necessity for constitutional checks on government power—have universal applicability. These institutions were not designed to give this or that group certain privileges at others’ expense, but to protect the rights of all individuals and groups. Earlier in this century Marxists and secularists did much to undermine religious faith; now multiculturalism is in the process of repudiating even the value of logic and reason. These ideologues fail to realize that, without faith and without reason, all that remains is an existence much like the Hobbesian state of nature.

There are other threats as well, ranging from radical environmentalism, which seeks to exchange our prosperity for a nature-adoring poverty rooted in paganism, to a new racism, which uses rigid racial quotas to war on the voluntary wage contract and the autonomy of our educational institutions.

As the struggle builds between those who embrace our heritage and those who reject it, it is a blessing to have Dr. Kirk’s book back in print. His entire intellectual life has been devoted to one end—helping our modern age regain a lost sense of perspective. This book accomplishes that task as well as any ever written. More than most studies produced during this era, The Roots of American Order asks us to consider the sweep of history, philosophy, and even theology in order to understand what constitutes the Western social order. Dr. Kirk demands that we slow down, leave the op-eds and the microscholarship behind and think—think about what defines us as individuals, as a community, and as a nation.

The Roots of American Order begins by tracing our intellectual roots to the Hebraic understanding of a purposeful universe under God’s dominion. The Jewish people understood their God to be omniscient and omnipotent, the author of both the moral law and the terms of justice. They understood that He watched over them and gave them a moral nature. In turn, they were obliged to keep the moral law and to suffer the consequences if they failed to do so. This moral law was not intended to be adapted to every new political trend. Moral law is, by definition, not infinitely malleable. Instead, the moral law stands implacably against arrogant ideological claims.

The American order was further strengthened by the philosophical reflections of the Greeks, with their high regard for the uses of reason, and by the stern virtues of such exemplary Romans as Cicero. When the Word became Flesh, our ancestors learned to understand better the duties and limitations of Man, as well as the importance of the Transcendent in our lives. The roots of our order also include the magnificent traditions and universities of the medieval world, the religious zeal of the Reformation and the response to it, the development of British common law, the debates and discord of the eighteenth century, and the written words of our Declaration and Constitution.

We must always remember that those who originally advanced the ideas which today undergird our institutions were actual and potential martyrs. They believed that more was at stake than their own material betterment; they were subject to a higher law that imposed a duty to construct a better future for generations to come. Their strivings—so brilliantly and engagingly described in Kirk’s pages—resulted in the ordered liberty of our predecessors, and, we can hope, that of our children as well. Dr. Kirk’s historical survey ends a century before our own. This is significant since most modern historians treat American history as if it began only with the expansion of the franchise and the rise of the ever-expanding panoply of special interest protests which now define our political life. By contrast, Dr. Kirk undoubtedly regards our own century as one in which the traditional order began to erode, endangering both our present and our future.

It should be clear that by “order” Dr. Kirk means more than positive law, those general rules that “make possible the tolerable functioning of an order,” or even the written words of our founding documents. We also have what he calls our unwritten constitution, and it constitutes the strongest thread of our social fabric. Our unwritten constitution includes elements always beyond ourselves: our ingrained habits and customs, our implied rights and obligations, our unstated doctrines and beliefs, the things we take for granted, the things we would notice only if we were deprived of them. This unwritten constitution is enforced by informal but powerful courts of social sanction. It is a crucial element of our order. Yet it is characteristic of our age that positive law has become the sum total of our nation’s purpose. We legislate for or against anything and everything, and this is somehow supposed to change our nature. But a comprehensive order is more organic, less concrete; it is integral to our national character, albeit in ways which we may not fully understand. An order is a tradition which we must respect. “No single human mind planned this order of ours,” Kirk writes, “the wisdom and the toil of countless men and women have gone into its making.”

To be sure, Dr. Kirk dissents from the conventional understanding of American intellectual history on several points. He is less willing than most, for example, to credit Locke and Hobbes with constructing our essential intellectual edifice, and he is more appreciative of the Jewish and Christian contributions. He views America’s War of Independence as the affirmation of an order already existing, rather than a revolutionary overthrow of an established order. And, unlike many intellectuals, his sympathies lie not with egalitarianism and majoritarian democracy but with restrained democracy; he shows how the slow cultivation of an American gentleman led to an insistence on placing limits on democratic rule in order to keep it from becoming mob rule.

What of our present age? Is our order, so ancient in its origins, in danger of cracking? Dr. Kirk reminds us that “the history of most societies is a record of painful striving, brief success (if success at all), and then decay and ruin.” We have no guarantee that America has been providentially appointed to carry the tradition through future ages. To preserve our position we need not another revolution, but a renewal of tradition. We must avoid frantic rushes into new intellectual and political fads. We must eschew ideology, which he defines as “servitude to political dogmas and abstract ideas not founded upon historical experience,” and embrace philosophy and intellectual history. We must reject utopian millenarianism, that insidious force that, from time immemorial, has tempted man to exchange what is right and good for a rootless and radically uncertain future. In short, we had better take the time, if we can find it between elections and media feeding frenzies, to be tutored by the wisdom of the ages.

In spite of everything, Dr. Kirk remains hopeful for America’s future, for “the general character of American order remains little altered.” Our prayer should be that it will always be so, and that the long-lived ordered liberty of America will continue to be a blessing to its own citizens and a beacon to other peoples.

 

©1991 by Frank Shakespeare. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Regnery Gateway, Washington, D.C.

Author

  • Frank Shakespeare

    Frank Shakespeare served as the United States Ambassador to Portugal from 1985 to 1986 and the United States Ambassador to the Holy See from 1986 to 1989. He now serves as an honorary member of the board of trustees for The Heritage Foundation.

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