Russell Kirk provided both invention and discovery for Anglo-American traditionalists with his 1953 opus, ‘The Conservative Mind’ which outlined a God-centric morality and identified the obvious weakness in human reasoning and understanding, and limits on ‘rational’ thought.  It was a work which took an axe to the underlying belief systems of the ‘Enlightenment’ and the possibility of endless human ‘progress’ and intellectual ‘development’.  Kirk joined his traditionalist approach and criticism of post-modern ‘thought’, to politics.  All political issues are in the main moral and practical issues, solved within a reigning framework of belief.

“Human reason set up a cross on Calvary, human reason set up the cup of hemlock, human reason was canonised in Notre Dame….politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature.”

Kirk follows Edmund Burke in rejecting the ‘Enlightenment’ dogma that reason is and must be, uber alles.  Kirk avows the reality of natural law rights, moral truths, and the emotional, non-material aspects of human existence.  Not everything in life is a mathematical equation.  Universal principles inform moral reasoning and activity, not the articles made by broken men.  Moral relativism is the cheap clothing of ‘Enlightened’ ideology.

Kirk rightly maintains that there are severe limits to reasoning and that a cult of reason obscures moral and natural law truths.  No ‘Enlightenment’ governance ever established a ‘universal’ rationality.  The Enlighteners attempted to establish a society based on mathematical truisms.  They failed.  The implementation of ‘rational’ ideas led to civil war, international war, blood, violence and tyranny. 

Kirk also highlighted the blight of ‘science’, which we see in the cults of socialism, Corona, plant food and warming, abiogenesis and Darwinism, amongst other scientisms.  From ‘scientific socialism’, to ‘positivism and humanism’, to medical fascism in the guise of Rona, a plethora of ‘experts’, ‘analysts’, ‘sages’ grace the thrones of governmental agencies dictating, directing, managing and prosecuting.  All of the cults premised on false data, false assumptions, false priorities and emergencies and all designed to destroy freedom, religion and individuality, in the name of ‘science’.  Burke saw and predicted all of this.

Rationalism’s main sin, pace Burke is its unfettered arrogance and hubris.  A finite mind can apparently comprehend the infinite, state the ‘rationalists’.  The cult of the rational constructs their models, based on simplistic assumptions and demands that the great stream of humanity conform to his model.  The mystery and immaterial nature of life is rejected. The model and utopian vision extolled.  The only way to achieve the model’s aims, is of course to ‘totalise’ society and command it from the top of the political hierarchy to comply and obey.

Kirk’s belief system is founded on Christianity, which is violently denied and violated by the ‘Enlightenment’.  The ‘Age of Reason’ is a revolt against all things Christian.  Thomas Paine and the Free Masons were and are, very open about destroying all Christian heritage.  For them the cross is the enemy.  ‘Reason’ would be the new religion and all humans would simply obey the directives of ‘science’.

Human existence and social cohesion is as much a product of tradition and habit, as it is, of reason and mathematics.  Kirk espoused the Burkean view that tradition allows the average person to access millennia of wisdom and knowledge, including natural law and its associated and developed rights.  He quotes Cicero in asserting that natural law is linked to moral imagination, not in opposition to the state, but to apply human precepts wisely and humanely. 

Kirk was right.  His legacy is important but has been trammelled and pounded into dust by the state.  The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence are examples of Burkean-Kirkean ideals, yet they lie destroyed, under the debris of stolen elections, Rona Medical totalitarianism, open borders, religious relativism, gender confusion, an endless panoply of government agencies, laws and statues, and the philosophical imperative of ‘following only the science’ or scientism, which has rendered most people compliant and supine.  The attack on tradition has accelerated and unless turned back will end in the demise of Western civilisation.