In his book “Edmund Burke – A Genius Reconsidered” Russell Kirk offered this summary of Burke’s politics:

God willed the state, Burke declared, for man’s benefit; men must not venture to trade upon the petty bank and capital of their private rationality, but should venerate and abide by the wisdom of their ancestors, the winnowed and filtered experience of the human species. Life being short and experience limited, the individual – even the wisest man of his age – is comparatively foolish; but through the experience of man with God, over thousands of years, the species has wisdom, expressed in prejudice, habit and custom, which in the long run judges aright.

These sentiments’s while most directly Burke’s are also at the heart of the moral imagination that animated Russell Kirk, one of the most unique American’s of the 20th century. In an age obsessed by notions of progress and individual autonomy Dr. Kirk stood for something completely different.

A vision distinct not merely from doctrinaire liberals, but from many who would call themselves conservative.

Like many others I first came to know Dr. Kirk through his writings in National Review. As a young man he intrigued me; here was a voice, clearly conservative, but singing from a slightly different song book than so many of the politicians I admired. During my sophomore year of college I took my intrigue a step further and purchased Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind”. Its impact on me was immediate and profound. Indeed it was not long afterwards that my political theory professor Dr. Ashley Woodiwiss wrote a comment on a paper I wrote on George Santayana’s novel “The Last Puritan”, noting that it was apparent I was in the process of sorting through various competing streams of conservative thought. Dr. Woodiwiss was correct, and in time it became apparent to me that the “Stream” Dr. Kirk had opened up was the deepest of those I had had the opportunity to splash around in.

To give you something of the flavor of the man I’d like to share with you a paragraph or two from an article I just came across today. It was written by Bill Buckley shortly after Dr. Kirk’s death. Mr. Buckley begins by describing how he traveled to Piety Hill, Kirk’s ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan to ask Dr. Kirk to write for his brand-new magazine, National Review. In any event here is Buckley:

I confess I was very nervous. Although Russell was only a few years older, at 28 I felt that an entire world lay between us, the wide gulf between his learning and my own. He was then a bachelor, and shortly after I arrived … he took me to dinner… where he promptly ordered two Tom Collinses. Emboldened by that warm aloofness which was his trademark, I put it to him directly and his response was instantaneous: Yes, he would write a regular column…

I was so elated …. that I took to ordering more Tom Collinses, but in every case, one for each of us. The evening proceeded toward a pitch of such hilarity that, at midnight, I was barley able to drive the car back to Russell’s house. On arriving, he led me to my bedroom, bade me goodnight only one second before I collapsed into my bed, to rise seven hours latter and bump into Russell Kirk – only then emerging from his study. He had, in the interval since dinner, written a chapter of his history of St. Andrews University, and would catch a little sleep after he served me breakfast.

Now there is simply not time this evening to give through consideration to Dr. Kirk’s thinking or to his broader influence on the conservative movement in the Unites States. So with your indulgence I intend to spend my time looking very quickly at only one aspect of this amazing man; a man who I might add in passing may have been at his best not as an intellectual historian or political theorist, but as a writer of ghost stories.

What I propose to consider tonight is Dr. Kirk’s outline of what he called, in the title of another of his books, “The Politics of Prudence.” I would then like to very briefly discuss that outline from the practical perspective of a State Legislator. So let’s get to it.

One of Kirk’s great themes was abhorrence of ideology. Indeed Kirk specifically contrasted prudential politics (his version of conservative politics) and ideological politics. In Kirk’s vernacular ideology is not systematized thinking or adherence to certain political principles. Rather, Dr. Kirk defines ideological politics as the view that politics is a “revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even human nature.” And here he is always quick to note that both liberals and conservatives can fall prey to ideology.

Ideology then is utopian and Gnostic; Gnostic in the sense that it claims some secret or hidden knowledge that perfect society via political direction. We might say that in Kirk’s view the ideologue suffers from an over realized eschatology. The promise of heaven on earth.

The politics of prudence has more limited aims. It begins with the premise that even if conservatives were to largely achieve their political objectives we would still live in a world of sin and death. Now to Kirk this choice between ideological and prudential politics is no small matter. Indeed he credited the misery of the 20th century largely to the pursuit of ideology. As he put it, ideology “promises mankind an earthly paradise: but in concrete fact has created a series of terrestrial hells.”

In the American context Dr. Kirk warns against what he calls the “mild ideology” of democratic capitalism that operates as a rival to belief in a transcendent moral order. In Kirk’s view ideology fills a vacuum left by loss of attachment to community and the religion of our forbearers. Now Kirk I should add was both a little d democrat and a capitalist, indeed he wrote an economics textbook very much in praise of free enterprise and he had no qualms with democracy as the best system of government for America. But, he was keenly aware of the fact that even things good in themselves can turn dangerous when infused with utopian aspirations.

As an antidote to such utopian aspirations Dr. Kirk posits the politics of prudence. For Kirk, like Plato, prudence is the chief political virtue and the mark true conservatism. As such he sees conservatism less as a system of set dogma than as a manner of looking at the civil order; and as such Kirk acknowledges that the particular principles conservatives emphasize during any given time will vary with the circumstances and necessities of that era.

That having been said Dr. Kirk was willing to set forth 10 distinctives of conservative thought. Principles which, if applied properly under the circumstances, might promote a tolerable social order. In his work “Prospects for Conservatives” he noted the difficulty of achieving even this modest goal, “what we have to dread” he wrote “is that our complex structure of sentiments and political institutions which shelters justice and order and freedom, will be reduces piecemeal, gradually, often with the very best of intentions.” Now it is exactly this threat that I believe we face today in Kansas, but more of that later. First let’s consider Dr. Kirk’s 10 principles.

1) The first principle suggested by Dr. Kirk is belief in an enduring moral order. This idea encompasses several notions: a) that human nature is constant; b) that moral truths are permanent; c) that all social questions are at heart moral questions; that, to put it provocatively, not only can we legislate morality, but properly understood we legislate nothing but morality.

This first principle is perhaps the great dividing line between the ideologue and the true conservative. It marks out the boundary between him and those who believe that the temporal order is the only order, that material needs are the only needs, and that they may do as they wish with human patrimony.

2) The second principle is that of adherence to custom, convention and continuity. These concepts link generation to generation, holding out the notion that order, justice and freedom are the product of long social experience, the result of centuries of trial, reflection and sacrifice. There should be an inherent distrust in those who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs.

3) Third he suggests belief in the principle of prescription; adherence to things “established by immemorial usage so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary.” Or put another way when it comes to the basic institutions of civilization the argument that “we’ve always done it that way” is a good one. It is a necessary check against the innovators lust for power, his manic desire to remake the world in his own image. The conservative sees himself a member of the community of souls, joined in perpetuity by a moral bond between the living, the dead and those yet to be born.

4) Fourth is the principle of prudence itself. A politics of humility that acknowledges the complexity of human society. Prudence of course must also take into account the reality that prudent change may by the means of social preservation. Now this is a crucial point, and one that Dr. Kirk returns to repeatedly and it adds a level of complexity to his thought. Kirk the great defender of tradition, is also a firm believer that that defense must make allowance for social development. In the conservative mind Kirk quotes approvingly from Burke as follows: “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.” Prudence must discern between salutary organic development and disruptive social mutation.

5) Fifthly the conservative pays attention to the principle of variety. “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” and “The intricacy of long established social institutions.” This is set over against the narrow uniformity of radical egalitarian systems. Kirk calls us to a resistance to “logicalisim” in society, to embrace “a conservatism of enjoyment, a sense that life is worth living as the proper source of an animated conservatism” that rejects the leveling that leads to social stagnation.

6) Sixth, imperfectability. In Kirk’s own words, “the ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the 20th century world into a terrestrial hell.”

7) Seventh, the conservative recognizes that private property and freedom are closely linked. The more widespread the possession of private property the more stable and productive a society will be. This theme plays a significant role in an economics text book Kirk wrote “Economics Work & Prosperity.”

8) The conservative upholds voluntary community over against involuntary collectivism. “If in the name of abstract democracy the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction – real government by consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.”

9) The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraint upon power and human passions. Autonomy has been over praised and wrongly conceived in our day. Turning once again to his book “Prospects for Conservatives” we hear this from Kirk: the conservative “knows that true freedom of the mind and of action is the prerogative of men and women rooted in an order, with an historical tradition and sense of continuity, who defend their rights because they would be ashamed to betray their legacy. The most “autonomous” persons who ever existed, the Christian gentlemen, were free because they felt themselves to be secure in an order, attached to which were very high privileges and very great duties.”

10) Finally, Dr. Kirk suggests that the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depends upon the circumstances of the age and the nation.

Now prudence for Dr. Kirk is no dry discipline; rather it is one aspect the exercise of the moral imagination. In his biography of T.S. Eliot, Kirk describes the moral imagination as “the power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment. The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” Without moral imagination the exercise of prudence is an impossibility.

One example of a politician Kirk viewed as an exemplar of the moral imagination was John Randolph of Roanoke. Something of a curmudgeon, as Dr. Kirk noted in his biography of Randolph, “’Dying sir, dying’ had been his reply for decades when men asked him how he did.” Randolph was also something of a romantic figure, summing up his life in politics Dr. Kirk put it this way, “Against the lust for change Randolph had fought with all his talents. And though he lost, he fell with a brilliancy that was almost consolation for disaster.” Now the reason I mention Randolph here is as a sort of jumping off point for the concluding topic of these remarks, a look at my own efforts to apply the politics of prudence to the realities of the Kansas Legislature. In particular it might give some pause to learn that someone like me, who claims such reverence for continuity, introduced not one but two constitutional amendments within his very first legislative session. Perhaps, this fact, taken alone, could serve as evidence for the proposition that while I like continuity in the abstract, maybe in real life I’m just as inclined as the next guy to propose radical measures to achieve my own narrow view of the good society.

The amendments I proposed both came as a response to the Kansas Supreme Court’s Montoy decision regarding school finance. The amendment that received the most attention in the legislature and in the press, and that actually received the necessary 2/3 vote in the Senate (but not alas in the House), would have clarified that the legislative branch, not the judicial retains power over the purse. Article 2 of our State constitution (the section on legislative authority) currently provides that “No money shall be drawn from the treasury except in pursuance of a specific appropriation made by law.” My amendment would have added, along with some other verbiage, that “The executive and judicial branches shall have no authority to direct the legislature to make an appropriation of money.” Of course in Montoy our state Supreme Court did in fact order the legislature to appropriate a specific dollar amount for K-12 education.

Now in proposing a constitutional amendment I take some solace from the fact that Randolph himself, though admittedly on only one occasion, was the proponent of constitutional change. It was during the period of the impeachment of Justice Chase in 1805. Randolph recommended, before the unsuccessful prosecution, the adoption of a constitutional amendment providing for the removal of federal judges by vote of congress. Arguing that the Constitution faced either amendment or deterioration at the hands of Judges. And Kirk himself shared something of this view, noting in one of his last books the danger attendant to “the strong tendency of our Courts of law to remold our political and social institutions nearer to the judges’ hearts desires.”

My own reading of our current situation in Kansas is that we have indeed arrived at one of those situations where change is the only means by which our traditional system of ordered liberty may be preserved. That, as odd as it may sound at first, we must amend our constitution in order to preserve its continuity in the face of an ideological Court.

Now I do not make this claim lightly, but it is readily apparent to me that by ordering the legislature to spend a specific amount of money, and threatening drastic remedies for noncompliance, the Court was attempting to compel individual legislators to vote a particular way on appropriations bills. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy once noted in a similar situation, a legislative vote taken under such circumstances clearly blurs the lines of legislative accountability by making it appear that a decision was reached by elected representatives when the reality is otherwise.

Such a circumstance is contrary to the basis tenants of representative democracy. In our system the Legislature alone may spend the peoples’ money, because it is the Legislature that is accountable to them. The confinement of appropriations to the legislative branch under our system of government was not random. It reflected our national ideal that the power of appropriation must be under the control of those whose money is being spent. This basic idea was at the very core of why our country came into being in the first place.

It important to remember in this regard the uniqueness of the founding of our nation. As historian Gordon Wood of Brown University has written; before the American Revolution, “the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the 18th century.” Yet they rebelled anyway, but why? We all know the basic story of how the colonists detested the system of taxation imposed upon them. But was this system of taxation really that unfair; was the tax too high, was it imposed in a particularly draconian fashion, or for an illegitimate purpose. Well, no it was not, as another historian has written, “Viewing the matter calmly from a distance, it must be confessed that no better or more equitable method of taxing the colonies could have been found, that is if it be conceded that England has the right to tax them at all.” But it was to this very point that the colonists would not concede, for to them taxation without representation was tyranny.

As Dr. Kirk put it in his book “The Roots of American Order”, “If they should give way on the Tea Act then before long they would be governed directly by parliament as they never had been governed before. They looked upon George the III as a Monarch who intended to make a revolution, by subverting the old ways of self-government: they protested that they, in resisting Crown and Parliament were preventing this royal revolution.”

I proposed my constitutional amendment, not out of a love for innovation and change, but out of the belief that if we do not stand up to Montoy we will be governed directly by Courts as we never have been before. We face a Court intent upon making a revolution, by subverting our old ways of self government via judicial fiat. I believe that the politics of prudence compels us to resist the Court via the orderly mechanism of the amendment process and in so doing prevent a judicial revolution.

Allow me to close then with this, in the epilogue to his book “Rights and Duties – Reflections on our Conservative Constitution”, Dr. Kirk left us with this charge:

Of those Americans who dabble in politics at all, many think of such activities chiefly as a game, membership on a team, with minor prizes to be passed out after the latest victory. Yet a few men and women, like Burke, engage in politics not because they love the game, but because they know that the alternative to a politics of elevation is a politics of degradation. Let us try to be of their number.”