Auld Kirk.(SHELF LIFE)(The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk; Locke; Coincidentally)(Book review)

ALAN WOLFE's enraged essay on Russell Kirk in The New Republic earlier this summer underscores a problem many people of a rationalist, coolly logical cast of mind--liberals and conservatives alike--have with Kirk. It's not so much that they disagree with him (though many, of course, do) as that they find him extremely irritating. His thought doesn't engage them on their own terms, and--as a result--his declarations appear to them pompous, and intellectually vacuous. The way I have tried to explain Kirk to his detractors is that he is not a dogmatic prescriptivist, seeking to deduce political ideas from axioms and then impose them on the recalcitrant. What he is, rather, is a poet of the possible, who tries to awaken our imaginations to some of the roads less traveled by modern man.

Gerald J. Russello, editor of The University Bookman, sees the postmodern era as much more receptive to a thinker like Kirk. His new book, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (Missouri, 248 pp., $44.95), lays out Kirk's thought in this congenial new context:

 
   On several occasions Kirk spoke approvingly of the beginning of a 
   postmodern era to replace an exhausted modernity. This new period 
   would dispense with liberalism's reliance on "defecated 
   rationality" and empty theory. Instead, Kirk envisioned an Age of 
   Sentiments to supplant the modern Age of Discussion.... Sentiment, 
   which Kirk defined as "a moving conviction ... a conviction derived 
   from some other source than pure reason," would replace the cold 
   reason Kirk found characteristic of modernity. 

So characteristic, indeed, that even many conservatives bridle at Kirk's notions as so much Romantic tosh. But is it not Kirk himself who is more true to the great philosophical tradition? After all, he is asking us to examine not just our means but our ends, to search for that wisdom about man and God that reaches our existential core. Is it likely that this wisdom will be perfectly transparent to human reason, and in conformity with its practical laws? Isn't Hamlet right, when he warns Horatio that "there are more things in heaven and earth"?

It is here Kirk finds an echo in the postmodern mind--and both together encounter the fury of the Defenders of Reason, who see postmodernism as an attack on the knowability of truth. Yet Kirk, like the best of the postmodernists, is calling not for a radical relativism--i.e., an assertion that truth doesn't exist--but for a humility of the intellect. The postmodernist challenges us to learn from the aspects of the truth presented by today's less powerful voices; the traditionalist Kirk asks us to show the same respect for those who are less powerful because they are voices of the past. (This idea is echoed in Chesterton's phrase "democracy of the dead.") Modernity viewed the past as an oppressor whose shackles must be removed from thought, but postmodernism can view the past the way a healthy new republic treats its former king: He is no longer king, but he must not be denied the full rights of citizenship--for he, too, has much to teach us.

Like the postmodernists, Kirk presents us with what has been called a ...