Russell Kirk's Conception of Decadence; G. Whitney

THEFREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY Do All Roads Lead to Avemus? Russell Kirk's Conception of Decadence by Gleaves Whitney , ~ Jhen the late Dr. Russell Kirk sought a y, publisher for The ConselVative Mind, he approached a young Chicago firm run by Henry Regnery. Regnery seized on the sig nificance of the manuscript and in 1953 pub lished the book that would help launch the postwar conservativemovement in the United States. That same year, just a few blocks away, another publication was about to debut, and it too would launch a major American move ment. Hugh Hefner's controversial magazine would become the vehicle for disseminating the "Playboyphilosophy"in the United States. There is high irony in the fact that the postwar conservative movement and the "Playboy philosophy" were launched within months and indeed within blocks of each other. But Kirkwould not have been surprised by the juxtaposition. He warned readers: "It appears to me that our culture labors in an advanced state of decadence; that what many people mistake as the triumph of our culture actually consists in forces that are disintegrat ing our culture; that the vaunted democratic freedom of liberal society in reality is in servitude to appetites and illusions that attack religious belief, that destroy community Mr. Whitney is senior speech writer for Michigan Governor John Engler and the senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

through excessive centralization and urban ization, and that efface life-givingtradition." The Road to Avernus If there was an allusion that Kirk believed best captured America's downward descent into decadence, it was the "road to Avernus." The allusion, frequently found in Kirk's later writings, comes from Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid. Avernus, according to Latin mythol ogy,was the entrance to Hades. It happens to be a real place, a lake located in the crater of an extinct volcano about eight miles west of Naples. The word is derived from the Greek, "a-ornis," literally, "without a bird," because of the belief that its mephitic vapors would cause any bird that flew over it to fall out of the sky. Dryden's translation renders it thus: Smooth the descent and easy is the way (The Gates of Hell stand open night and day); But to return and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labour lies.2 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective "avernal" entered our language about 1578 as a synonymfor "hellish." This is revealing, for it suggests the intent behind Kirk's repeated allusion to Avernus. Deca dence is not so much about Right or Left as 352 about Above and Below; not so much about the choices we make in politics and economics as about the thousands upon thousands of decisions we make in matters of faith and morals. Decadence is not to be confused with sin, of course. They are not the same thing.

But in a very real sense decadence is linked to a hellish existence, and in ways that become increasingly apparent as one ponders the many manifestations of cultural crisis. This link, this apprehension that decadence is hellish, is the key or "first principle" to apprehending whether we as individuals and as a people are in decline. Symptoms of Decadence But Kirk was no reductionist. He believed that, while the breakdown of faith and morals takes you down the main road to Avernus, there are many byroads headed in the same direction-byroads paved with the rubble of failed political and economic systems, with the erosion of civil and domestic society, and with the debris of the arts and higher learning. The political road to Avernus, for example, has been paved with the ruins of countless ancient cities. At their worst, such cities as Babylon, Persepolis, and Rome illustrate the clinical symptoms of decline. They were levi athans of unchecked power, overcentralized government, rampant overspending, crushing taxes, lethargic bureaucracies, and a spoils system that rewarded mediocrity.

These symptoms are hardly unfamiliar to readers of The Freeman. In 1996the IRS-the agency most Americans would gladly dump into the crater at Avernus-sent out more than eight billion pages of forms and instruc tions, and Americans collectively devoted more than five billion hours to filling them out.3 Another statistic that says something about our culture is that, in Washington, D.C., alone, there are three times as many lawyers as are found in the entire nation of Japan. Moreover, if you walk the streets of our nation's capital, you are twice as likely to pass a lawfirm as a church.4 It seems we reward not compromise and consensus, but conflict and concupiscence. Another important byway to Avernus is 353 paved with the rubble of failed economic systems and policies. The decline of self reliance and property holding, the shrinkage of opportunity and the middle class, an ob session with luxury and unearned wealth these are true signs of the decadent. They certainly were the symptoms that plagued the closing decades of the Roman republic largely as a result of a great influx of slaves.

Independent farmers and craftsmen could no longer compete in the marketplace with cheap slave labor, and the traditionally sturdy Roman populace became dependent on gov ernment welfare. Rome swelled with a pro letariat that developed an appetite for vio lence, narcotics, and the hideous diversions of the Colosseum. One of the most spectacular gladiatorial contests was put on by the Em peror Trajan, who, even accounting for the exaggerations of Suetonius, pitted some 10,000 gladiators against one another over a period of four months. These mass exhibitions of state-sanctioned murder were just one way Trajan kept the mass of impoverished citizens from thinking about more important things like how to get rid of him. Kirk saw the signs of decadence along another well-traveled byroad to Avernus the erosion of civilsociety and its institutions. Few could match Kirk's mordant wit when it came to exposing the follies of one terminally decadent institution-the academy. He called Michigan State University, his alma mater, "Behemoth U" because it regarded students as so many Model T's on the assembly line.

Likewise he was a trenchant critic of our elementary and secondary schools, which have dumbed down curricula to build up self-esteem, apparently under the illusion that ignorance is bliss. Modernism and PostModernism Kirk frequently cited the work of C. E. M. Joad,5 a Platonist-turned-Christian who dis cerned signs of decline in all manner of modern and postmodern philosophy. Avant garde thought was plagued by metaphysical disorientation, confused logic, a-la-carte mo rality, and the loss of any higher purpose in 354 THE FREEMAN • JUNE 1997 Russell Kirk human life. This century, these symptoms erupted spectacularly among the so-called Parisian intellocrats. These arbiters of intel lectual fashion were in fact rampaging ideo logues whose thought was distinguished by the failure to test ideas against reality. With remarkable casuistry, a Sartre or a Merleau-Ponty could argue away the brutal ities of Stalinism. A Derrida could vaporize the very concept of meaning-and philosophy and language departments have yet to re cover. The Parisian intellocrats prove that ideas-alas, even bad ideas-have conse quences.

Still another bywayto Avernus can be seen in the debris of modern/postmodern art and humane letters. Peter Ustinov once remarked that if Botticelli were alive today, he'd be working for Vogue. But it's not just the trivialization of art that is so disturbing; it's the nastiness. In one of his finest essays,"The Perversity of Recent Fiction," Kirk wrote that contemporary literature had come "a great way ... down the road to Avernus. And as literature sinks into the perverse, so modern civilizationfallsinto ruin." So manybooks and Hollywood scripts were "products of the di abolical imagination, in that they pandered to the lust for violence, destruction, cruelty, and sensational disorder." They were singularly lacking in the moral imagination. The "moral imagination"-this term is one of the most frequently encountered in Kirk's work. It comes from' Edmund Burke, and it refers to the human gift to see that we are more than naked apes; indeed, that we are made in the image of God. "The moral imagination," wrote Kirk, "aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth." Without it, letters and learning are sterile. Worse, our whole life suffers, for we are cast forth, in Burke's words, "from the world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of mad ness, discord, confusion, and unavailing sor row.,,6 Another byroad to Avernus was lined with the victims of the breakdown of society's most basic institution, the family. Kirk was much impressed by the analysisof the ancient writer Polybius, who attributed the decline of Greece in large measure to the decline of domestic society.Young people were increas ingly unwilling to marry; or if they married they were unwillingto have children; or if they had children, they were reluctant to bring them up, preferring instead to let them die of exposure or to give them up for adoption. As a result, a great many city-states lost their vitality and youth; they became easy targets for invasion because there were so few free men defending the city walls. Again the parallels with contemporary America are om inous.

The Cause of Decadence: Decline of the "Cult" All these byroads to Avernus deserve study in their own right. But if we only explore the byroads, we will never find our way to the main road, to the root cause of our predica ment. We must go beyond the symptoms in politics, economics, civil society, philosophy, RUSSELL KIRK'S CONCEPTION OF DECADENCE 355 and humane letters. Kirk tells us that the root of our problem is "The dismissal of the sacred: that rejection lies at the heart of our difficul ty."7 That is the main road to Avernus. Kirk held that our beliefs, our faiths, are central to our wellbeing as individuals and as a commonwealth. As the British historian Christopher Dawson frequently put it, a cul ture comes from the cult; it comes from what a people worship-be it God or mammon. "Cultus" is Latin for worship. People come together around the cult to try to apprehend some greater meaning in their individual and collective lives than grubbing for food and sexual release.

As Kirk used to point out, it is of immense practical importance that groups of families join together in a cult, for only then will they share a moral code. And onlywhen they share a moral code can they begin to cooperate on a large enough scale to defend themselves against marauders while advancing against the brute forces of nature. 8 Kirk tells us the precise moment when he realized that a culture comes from the cult. He was visiting the Chicago Institute of Art sometime back in the early 1950s,and strolled into a half-darkened corridor on both sides of which were miniature models of medieval buildings, making up a town. At the far end of the exhibit, in a case dominating the display, was the model of a great Gothic cathedral. The accompanying placard explained that the exhibition culminated in the church because it was the focus of all human activity, and the core and source of our civilization.

The experience was to have a lasting effect on the man who described himself, at the time, as a "thoroughgoing secularist." The encounter in that half-darkened corridor sud denly made him alive tothe historic reality of Christian culture. And he became convinced that "Civilization, the civilization we have known, is the child of the church."g "But suppose," Kirk challenged us, "sup pose that with the elapse of centuries, faith diminishes and the cult withers. What then of a civilization that has been rooted in the cult?" He concluded: ". . . my own study of such concerns has led me to conclude that a civilization, a culture, cannot survivethe dying of the belief in the transcendent order that brought it into being." "When belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the cul ture will decay swiftly.... So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the twentieth century."lO Hence America's decline on the road to Avernus.

Yet Kirk was not without hope. He used to quote a line from St. Gregory the Great, who lived in the wake of the collapse of the Western Empire. Rome lay about him in ruin. A dark age had descended upon the West. But Gregory, in one of his more famous sermons, said: "See how the world now withers in itself; yet still flowers in our heart."ll 0 1. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14th ed., s.v. "Avernus," p. 63. 2. Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI, lines 128-31. 3. John Steele Gordon, "American Taxation," American Heritage, May-June 1996, p. 63. 4. Dick Armey, "How Taxes Corrupt," Wall Street Journal, June 19, 1996. 5. Cf. C. E. M. Joad, Decadence: A Philosophical Enquiry (London, 1948). 6. Russell Kirk, "The Perversity of Recent Fiction," address to the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., May 21, 1981, p. 3. This essay appears in Redeeming the Time, a collection of Kirk's writings, edited by Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996).

7. Russell Kirk, "A Culture's Road to Avernus," in Essayson Our Times, vol. 4 (July 1988), p. 4. 8. Ibid., p. 7. 9. Ibid., p. 8. 10. Ibid., p. 8. 11. St. Gregory the Great, quoted in Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Malibu, Cal.: Pepperdine University Press, 1977), p. 172.

Father's Day Gift Suggestion Faith of Our Fathers Edited by Mary Sennholz God-given natural rights were the guiding light of the Founding Fathers. The stirring closing paragraph of the Declaration of Independence was not only the formal pronouncement of independence but also a powerful appeal to the Creator of all rights: "We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are and of Right ought to be free and independent States." In the final sentence of defiance they appealed to the Almighty for His protection: "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor."

The moral precepts and the self-evident truths that guided our Founding Fathers may not be fashionable in our time, but they are as inescapable and inexorable as they have been throughout the ages. We are free to ignore and disobey them, but we cannot escape the rising price we must pay for defying them. Faith of Our Fathers includes an incisive introduction by Mary Sennholz and powerful essays by Clarence B. Carson, John Wesley Young, Robert A. Peterson, Wesley H. Hillendahl, Gary North, Ridgway K. Foley, Jr., Hal Watkins, James C. Patrick, Hans F. Sennholz, George C. Roche III, F. A. Harper, Jarret B. Wollstein, Leslie Snyder, Bruce D. Porter, Benjamin A. Rogge, Paul L. Adams, Ken Ewert, Ben Barker, John K. Williams, Edmund A. Opitz, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Calvin D. Linton. Published by The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533 ISBN 1-57246-063-6 398 pages (indexed) paperback $19.95 Availablein bookstoresnationally,or call (800) 452-3518 • Fax (914) 591-8910 The Foundation for Economic Education Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533 Tel. (914) 591-7230 Fax (914) 591-8910 E-mail: freeman@westnet.com June 1997 The Unique Role of FEE by Donald J. Boudreaux S ucceeding Hans Sennholz as president of FEE is humbling enough, but attempting to fill shoes once worn by Leonard Read is downright intimidating. Leonard Read was one of this century's most eloquent and pas sionate champions of liberty, whose writings continue to inspire me - as they have inspired so many others for the past half century or so. (I dare not try to count the number of times I've begun a lecture with the marvelous story told in "I, PenciL") I cannot begin to express my gratitude to FEE's Board for trusting me to meet the chal lenge of continuing Leonard Read's mission.

I can only say that this challenge is one that I will strive to meet with every ounce of my energies. When founded in 1946, FEE stood alone as an advocate of free markets and strictly limit ed government. Today, much to Leonard Read's credit, FEE is one among dozens of foundations dedicated to maintaining a free and open society. Such a proliferation of classicalliberal foundations might seem to place FEE at a disadvantage. With all the fine work done today by the Competitive Enter prise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, Liberty Fund, the Political Econ omy Research Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Independent Institute, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and other members of the State Policy Network, and the many other such "think tanks," what role remains for FEE to perform? Is FEE destined to become a victim of its own success in promoting classicalliberal ideas?

My answer is a resounding "No!" I would never have accepted the task assigned to me were I not convinced that FEE does indeed have a unique and important role to playas we enter the 21st century. Before identifying that role, let me clarify what FEE is not. FEE is not a policy advocate. The job of analyzing and explaining policies consistent with liberty belongs to Cato, CEl, the Insti tute for Justice, and similar organizations. These organizations do a superb job alerting politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and business leaders to the details of sound alternatives to statist "solutions" for various real and imag ined social ills. FEE is not a surrogate graduate school aim ing directly to expand the frontiers of acade mic research. The Institute for Humane Stud ies, the Center for Study of Public Choice, and other academic centers excel at identifying promising intellects and encouraging talented individuals to produce top-quality research.

FEE is emphatically not partisan. For both practical and ideological reasons, FEE sup ports no political party or candidate. Indeed, FEE's premier goal is a depoliticized society. FEE would be hypocritical in the extreme if it were aligned with any political party or group of candidates. FEE - which lives by the motto "Ideas Have Consequences" - proudly stands apart from politics, recognizing that partisanship is the natural nemesis of truth. FEE's immediate charge is continually to educate people in the moral and intellectual principles of liberty. And while FEE reaches out to all people, special effort must be directed toward the young - for it is the young who search most fervently for moral and intellectual guidance. By directing many of our efforts at high-school students and col lege undergraduates, we not only earn a long-term payoff from our successes - 20 year olds will live for an additional 60 years or longer - but we tap the impressive ener gies that young people bring to matters about which they are passionate. One fact I've learned from teaching at the university level since 1982 is that young people who are exposed to the intellectual case for the free society quickly see the truth in these ideas and appreciate the immeasurable moral superiority that a depoliticized society enjoys over a politicized one.

FEE's ultimate goal is to remove the bur den of proof from those who oppose govern ment intervention and to place this burden where it belongs - namely, upon those who endorse political means. Although today's intellectual climate is more hospitable to free-market ideas than it was in 1946, the burden of proving our case remains on those of us who oppose political means. The popu lar mind is distressingly oblivious to the amazing capacities of a free people to create all manner of institutions that promote peaceful and productive cooperation under myriad circumstances. Too many people still impulsively believe that government should commandeer tax dollars to pay for, say, flood relief and scientific research; too many peo ple impulsively believe that government health and safety regulations are worthwhile; too many people impulsively believe that discretionary government control over the money supply is necessary ... the list goes on and on. In short, too many people contin ue mistakenly to believe that government coercion is generally superior to voluntary exchange and interaction as a means of engendering civil society.

Because we proponents of a depoliticized, privateproperty-based society still bear the Donald J. Boudreaux burden of proving our case against political action, policy-oriented think tanks such as Cato and PERC must struggle ceaselessly to hold back the tide of the Leviathan state. To the extent that FEE succeeds in shifting the burden of proof to advocates of active government, the work of free-market policy shops will be much more effective. Through The Freeman,through our op-ed distribution program, through our seminars, and through our various outreach programs, FEE complements our sister free-market foun dations. FEE's efforts to spread widely the timeless truths of fundamental economics and the principles of liberty work as a lever for organizations at other stages in the education al process. By changing the underlying pre sumptions and attitudes held by most citizens - by making people generally more receptive to private property and free markets - FEE helps to fashion an intellectual and political climate that is much more congenial to poli cies that promote individual liberty.

Again, the single most effective means of re-establishing the primacy of classical liberal ideas is to introduce these principles to young people. We must be aware that competition for the attention - and for the hearts and minds - of the young is today more intense than ever. I will do my very best to ensure not only that FEE's message remains true to Leonard Read's ideals, but also to his insistence that these ideals be con veyed clearly, crisply, and creatively. President June Book Sale A SPECIAL SELECTION OF BOOKS BY AND ABOUT FREDERIC BASTIAT "What is freedom? It is the sum total ofall ourfreedoms. To be free, on one's own responsibility,to think and to act, to speakand to write, to laborand to exchange,to teach and to learn-this alone is to befree." -Frederic Bastiat THE LAW, by Frederic Bastiat Translated from the French by Dean Russell; Introduction by Sheldon Richman. First published in 1850, The Law is Bastiat's most famous and enduring work.

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