If we are to recover “the moral ideal” and if we are to be reconsecrated to the life of the spirit, we are in urgent need of an unconditional conservatism: lean, ascetical, disciplined, prophetic, unswerving in its censorial task, strenuous in its mission, strong in its faith, faithful in its dogma, pure in its metaphysic. [...]
Irving Babbitt wrestled with those fundamental life questions that relate to the fate of man in the modern world. What he chose to say about this world of increasing material organization continues to make Babbitt’s work and thought disturbing and unpalatable. Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) never wavered in what he viewed as being his commanding office [...]
Moral indolence and apathy, both Babbitt and Weaver stress, must be surpassed if one is to fly beyond the nets of naturalism and temperamental excesses. Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by Irving Babbitt, with a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, by Richard [...]
T.S. Eliot certainly possessed creative courage, but he also possessed, as Russell Kirk demonstrates better than any other commentator, a consummate spiritual courage. This confluence of creative and spiritual courage finally permits Eliot to attain his greatest visionary moment in his composition of "Four Quartets." Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in [...]
A conservatism at the mercy of hollow men is inconceivable, and yet cruelly possible, which ultimately makes it necessary to protect and to conserve the soil of conservative thought and consciousness. That the canons of conservatism must beg to be defended against present-day pretenders who mask their ambitions and antinomies under the rubric of conservatism [...]
Romano Guardini reminds us, above all, to render “to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are God’s.” His writings help us to recognize the spiritual necessity of not being slaves of the things of the world. His testimony thus pleads with us to disentangle ourselves from the enemies of [...]
Excellence predicates aspiration and transcendence, a quest for a higher quality of attainment and, in effect, going beyond the moment. Excellence, which can be defined as the state of excelling and of surpassing merit, is now increasingly one of the lost words of the English language. And increasingly the special qualities that this word denotes [...]
The conservative as conservator guards against violations of our reverent traditions and legacy, and is, in fine, a preserver, a keeper, a custodian of sacred things and signs and texts. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll get knocked down by anything.” —Anonymous It is now more than half a century since the publication of [...]
We need to restore moral value to leadership. In whom do we now recognize and salute leaderly qualities? Who are representative of great leadership? What accounts for the growing diminution of standards of leadership? “In the long run democracy will be judged,” writes Irving Babbitt in Democracy and Leadership (1924), “no less than other forms [...]
For Joseph Conrad, the struggle between good and evil in the human soul was a permanent reality, a reality one might prefer to avoid, or try to sublimate, but one that nobody who has lived long can absolutely deny. Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, by George A. Panichas (165 pages, Mercer University Press, 2005) In [...]
Irving Babbitt was in no way a dogmatic, ossified traditionalist. He was a creative traditionalist: He encouraged renewed expressions of imaginative vision, and he was open to the possibility of a deepening and an expansion of humane knowledge. The Critical Legacy of Irving Babbitt by George A. Panichas (235 pages, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1999) I [...]
There is a divine order of being of which we must be a part. To reject this order and our part therein is to choose madness and make any decent life impossible. As a literary critic, George Panichas shed great light on the relationship between this recognition of the order of being and our ability [...]
Idolatry is a dimension of the value that is now placed on sports in America, and is expressed in unbridled adoration of physical feats, and in bowing down to the things of the world. “A technologically supported secularism would make men as gods whose mere desires transform material reality to suit their needs.” So writes [...]
Its contemplation of evil makes “Mrs. Dalloway” a modern classic that speaks in a universal language and has universal meaning… The British writer, C.E. Montague (1867–1929) poignantly describes this debasing process in an acclaimed book that appeared in 1922, Disenchantment. To read Montague’s text regarding his own personal experiences in the war and how “handsome [...]