November 14, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
WHAT the HISTORIC
SOUTH has to TEACH
AMERICA – New Abbeville Institute Essay
Friends,
On November 3, 2019, I offered a commentary titled, “What the
Historic South has to Teach America: Readings from Conservative Scholar Russell
Kirk,” as an installment in the MY CORNER series. Originally, I had included at
the end of my comments a long section of an essay that Dr. Kirk wrote in the fall
of 1958 as a preface to a complete issue of the scholarly quarterly, Modern Age, dedicated to the South. I
have since gone back and rewritten my commentary, integrating portions of the
article which the late Dr. Kirk penned back sixty-one years ago into what is
now essentially a new piece. And today it has been published by The Abbeville
Institute.
I offer it to you now:
ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE
What
the Historic South has to Teach America
Boyd Cathey on Nov 14, 2019
Many present-day Southerners—indeed, many of
those Americans who call themselves “conservatives”—find it difficult to
envisage a time when Southern and Confederate traditions (not to mention noble
Confederate veterans like “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee) were
acknowledged with honor and great respect. Today it would seem so-called
“conservative media” (in particular Fox News and the radio talksters) and
Republican politicians would rather praise “Father” Abraham Lincoln or the
radical black Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass (whose extra-marital liaison
with German-born socialist
and feminist Ottilie Assing certainly
influenced him and should raise eyebrows among contemporary conservatives, but
seldom does). These and other revolutionary zealots have been incorporated into
the pantheon of “great conservative minds,” dislodging such figures as
Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke, all of whom
possessed towering intellects and an acute understanding of the history and
nature of the American republic which Lincoln, Douglass, and those like them
lacked.
It is far too common in 2019 to witness the
historical ignorance of a Dinesh D’Souza or the meandering narration of a Brian Kilmeade in the
godawful Fox series, “Legends & Lies: The Civil War,” in which he accuses the South of “attempting to rewrite
history by denying slavery was the root cause of the Civil War,” and parrots
the far Left template on racism.
And what of distinguished Southern writers who
defend the South like historians Drs. Clyde Wilson or Brion McClanahan? Or
literary luminaries such as James E. Kibler? Or Emory University scholar Don
Livingston? When was the last time you saw their byline in the current,
Neoconservative-edited National
Review, once the “conservative magazine of record” in the land?
They are, to use a Stalinist metaphor, “non-persons” among establishment
conservatives and the contemporary “conservative movement.” One must not, under
any circumstance, mention their names among Neocon intelligentsia circles, lest
suspicions of “racism” or “Neo-Confederate tendencies” be exposed.
Perhaps the worst event symbolizing this exile
was the unceremonious expulsion—the political defenestration—of arguably the
South’s greatest essayist and author of the last quarter of the Twentieth
Century, the late Mel Bradford. Tapped originally in 1981 to be President
Ronald’s chairman
of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bradford was a staunch defender of the original American
Constitution, an acerbic and powerful critic of Lincoln and his legacy—and a
defender of the South. According to chronicler David Gordon: “Bradford rejected Lincoln because he saw him as a
revolutionary, intent on replacing the American Republic established by the Constitution with a centralized and leveling despotism.”
Although supported by such notable figures as
Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, Peter Stanlis, and Jesse Helms, Bradford was forced
to experience an ugly, defamatory and underhanded campaign by the Neocons
George Will, the Kristols pere
et fils, and others to halt his nomination, in favor of Democrat
Neocon, William Bennett. And, tasting blood, the new rulers of the conservative
movement were successful.
Yet, it was not always so. A half-century ago
Southern writers of distinction, defenders of our traditions and heritage,
including of our revered historical figures and champions of the Confederacy,
were welcomed in national conservative publications like National Review. And in
Russell Kirk’s scholarly quarterly Modern
Age, that acknowledged “father of the conservative revival” of the
earlier 1950s, dedicated an entire issue to the South and a defense of its
traditions, including its Confederate history. Kirk had authored what became in
a sense the “Bible” of that revival, The
Conservative Mind (1953), and his words carried tremendous
weight. That he would publish a whole issue celebrating the history and
essential role of the South in America [Modern
Age, Fall 1958], right on the cusp of the radical “civil rights”
movement of the 1960s, almost in defiance of it, was a measure of the
importance older conservatives attached to the Southland and their embrace of
Southern traditionalists.
In the prefatory essay to that issue, “Norms,
Conventions and the South,” Kirk
authored, as only he could, a stirring and profound defense of the traditional
South, its virtues, and its critical significance in the survival of the
American confederation. In it he declares that the South represents
“Permanence”—the “permanent things,” the norms and conventions handed down for
generations which moor and have stabilized the American Republic, and without
which the country would be adrift and subject to demagoguery, decay and dissolution.
But Kirk also—sixty-one years ago—had a warning
and an admonition for Southerners:
How much longer the South will fulfill this function, I do not
venture to predict here. I am aware of all those powerful influences, material
and intellectual, which are changing the South today. It may be that the South,
in the end, will be made homogeneous with all the rest of the nation, and that
its peculiar role as conservator of norm and convention will be terminated. But
if this comes to pass, the South will have ceased to exist: it will have lost
its genius.
What would Kirk, “the Sage of Mecosta,” that
superb word-smith and Olympian man-of-letters say today he if were to return to
our Southland? What verdict would he cast on those guardians of our heritage
and our inheritance…and the actions we and our fathers have taken, or not
taken, during the past six decades? How would Kirk—who saw before he passed away in 1994 the poisonous infection of the
Neoconservatives—evaluate the willingness of far too many Southern
“conservatives” to forego serious investigation into and defense of their
history and accept the “mess of stale porridge” offered up by a Brian Kilmeade,
or a Dinesh D’Souza, or a Senator Lindsey Graham?
In his essay Kirk employs the great Virginian
John Randolph of Roanoke to bring home his message:
…John Randolph is the most interesting man in American political
history, his wisdom and eloquence curiously intertwined with vituperation,
duels, brandy, agriculture, solitude, and tragedy. Through Calhoun, [Langdon] Cheves, and many others, Randolph’s
opinions were stamped indelibly upon the South…. A fervent Christian, a
champion of tradition, the principal American expounder of Burke’s conservative
politics, Randolph of Roanoke abided by enduring standards in defiance of
power, popularity, and the intellectual climate of opinion of his era.
In his oratory in the U.S. Congress and his
eloquent speeches to his constituents in Southside Virginia, Kirk continues,
Randolph explained that,
There are certain great principles…which we ignore only at our
extreme peril; and if those principles are flouted long enough, private
character and the social order sink beyond restoration. In this, as in much
else, Randolph was the exemplar of the Southern society. For the South has long
been the Permanence of the American nation. Strongly attached to Christian
belief, bound up with the land and the agricultural interest, skeptical of the
visions of Progress and human perfectibility, imbued with the tragic sense of
life, the South has not been ashamed to defend convention and continuity in
this great, swelling, confusing Republic: to abide by ancient norms of private
and public life. The problem of the races informed Southerners that society’s
tribulations are not susceptible of simple abstract remedy; the rural life kept
the South aware of the vanity of human wishes, the existence of Providential
purpose, and the immortal contract of eternal society; the political and
literary traditions of the Southern states endured little altered by the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century passion for innovation. Military valor,
courtesy toward women, and the pieties of community, home, and family persisted
in the South despite defeat and poverty and the intellectual ascendancy of the
North. So it is that in our time of troubles the South has something to teach
the modern world.
And this recognition extended throughout
Southern culture, and most especially in the richness and profundity of
Southern literature:
…Southern writers still recognize those enduring elements of
human nature, including the splendor and tragedy of human existence that are
the stuff of which great poetry and prose are made. Belief in normality, and
defense of convention, have not lain like lead upon Southern thought and life;
on the contrary, these have been the foundations of Southern achievement….In
its taste for imaginative literature, similarly, the South has chosen for its
favorite authors the champions of norm and convention…. [and] a spirit of
courage, of chivalry, of loyalty, an expression of ancient truths, that was
congenial to their instincts.
For those on the Left, for those Dr. Kirk calls
“doctrinaire liberals, the zealots for Progress and Uniformity,” the South
continues to represent all of the worst and most hated aspects in American
history: racism, slavery, misogyny, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism
and bigotry. But, as Kirk explains, that hostility is rooted in a deeper
prejudice that “the South still stands resolute in defense of norms and
conventions. To the ritualistic liberal, the South is what [George] Santayana
called ‘the voice of a forlorn and dispossessed orthodoxy,’ rudely breaking in
upon the equalitarian dreams and terrestrial-paradise schemes.” It is the
Left’s own form of poorly concealed bigotry.
For the contemporary post-Marxist revolutionary
Millennial, the fanatical indoctrinated student brandishing a “Black Lives
Matter” placard, the loony feminist demanding an end to masculine oppression,
and the LGBT zealot pushing transgenderism, the South and its traditions are
major impediments to the realization of a dreamed of Utopia that is in reality
a dystopian nightmare far worse than any vision ever entertained by Comrade
Stalin or Chairman Mao.
The convictions and customs of the South perpetually irritate
the radical reformer, who is impatient to sweep away every obstacle to the
coming of his standardized, regulated, mechanized, unified world, purged of
faith, variety, and ancient longings. Permanence he cannot abide; and the South
is Permanence. He hungers after a state like a tapioca-pudding, composed of so
many identical globules of other-directed men….he flail[s] against the
champions of norm and convention, endeavoring in the heat of his assault to
forget the disquieting voice of a forlorn and dispossessed orthodoxy that
prophesies disaster for men who would be as gods.
And in one of those memorable passages for which
Russell Kirk is remembered and celebrated, he closes his essay in striking
form—a remarkable tribute to the traditional South, its heritage, and its
pivotal role in the creation and sustaining of an America which seems to be
passing away now before our eyes:
My argument is this. Without an apprehension of norms, there is
no living in society or out of it. Without sound conventions, the civil social
order dissolves. Without the South to act as its Permanence, the American
Republic would be perilously out of joint. And the South need feel no shame for
its defense of beliefs that were not concocted yesterday.
So, I repeat my question: What would that
Northern champion of the South and its role of Permanence in our confederation
say today? Can that South that Russell Kirk so lauded and defended
survive, even in our dark times? And what is our obligation, our solemn obligation to our
native land, to our ancestors, and to those who follow us?
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd
D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic University of
Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in
intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow).
He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk.
In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the North Carolina
Division of Archives and History. He has published in French, Spanish, and
English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and opera. He is
active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical, archival,
and genealogical organizations. His book, The
Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, was published year by the
Scuppernong Press.
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