I’ve long been an admirer of that Sage of Mecosta, Russell Kirk. His works can be read and re-read with nothing but pleasure. Presently, I’m wrapping up The Intemperate Professor and other Cultural Splenetics, a volume that, though slender, is of course full of wisdom—one in which the man “describe(s) the marks of a confused culture”, one wealthy beyond previous generations’ imaginings yet unable to produce much in the way of “greatness in mind and art”. It also exhibits Kirk’s prescience to the point I once found myself wondering if the man was a borderline prophet, too.
Today’s portion comes from his essay “The Inhumane Businessman”. Part of it may be read here, but this portion, which I frankly found chilling, was not included in Fortune (heaven only knows why). Kirk begins his essay by calling American businessman inhumane—and considering the way our media has groomed us to consider businessmen, not in the way you are likely to think.
I do not mean that they are inhuman; they are all too human. I do not mean that they are insufficiently humanitarian. I mean that American businessmen, like most other Americans, are deficient in the disciplines that nurture the spirit. They are largely ignorant of the humanities, which, in a word, comprise that body of great literature that records the wisdom of the ages, and in recording it instructs us in the nature of man. The humanist believes in the validity of such wisdom.
Reading The Intemperate Professor, I’ve decided it is a marvellous companion to Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which you will recall I read over the summer. Both books bring to our attention the destruction of the humanities in American education, and either predict disaster (Kirk) or document it (Bloom).
With that understanding of the man’s meaning:
A civilization or a nation can keep going for a long time on the impetus given its culture by a body of ideas that have been severed from their roots. Exhausting gradually the source of their spiritual and social prosperity, a people can, without knowing their precarious condition, live upon moral and intellectual capital for generations after this capital levy, this intellectual deficit financing, has commenced.
Yet eventually such a civilization or nation arrives at cultural bankruptcy. The traditional process which produced leadership, withering as nutriment, no longer finds its way up from those severed cultural roots, ceases to function almost altogether; the intellectual and political and industrial leaders of the older generation die one by one; and their places are not filled. The humanitarian cannot do duty for the humane man. There can come only two alternative results from this withering: a social decadence from which no recovery is possible, or else a social revolution which produces radical and unscrupulous aspiring talents to turn society inside out. When all the humane leaders have vanished, a nation’s only recourse for leadership is the commissar, under one name or another. That commissar is not humane: for honor and tradition, he substitutes naked power. Continue reading →
, B&H Publishing (2010)
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