The Roots of American Order
By Russell Kirk.
ISI Books, 2003.
Paperback, 534 pages, $18.
Reviewed by Daniel Pitt.
If we go back fifty years to 1974, one might say it was annus horribilis for America. The US was in a grip of an energy crisis, the Presidency of Richard Nixon was shrouded in the Watergate scandal, there was the famous robbing of the Hibernia Bank, the awful Hi-Fi Murders in Ogden, Utah, the police strikes in Baltimore, the serial killer Ted Bundy was continuing his rampage, and there was chaos on American university and college campuses. Americans, and those in the broader West too, were starting to ask questions about how can western societies, and America in particular, restore order. Is there a touch of déjà vu about all this? There is, isn’t there?
The same year, Russell Kirk published his The Roots of American Order, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. The book was written by Kirk at the request of Pepperdine University. Dr. Kirk in his third person auto-biography, The Sword of Imagination, writes that Romuald Gantkowski was the “moving spirit there” and that Pepperdine University hoped to make a “series of television films based” on the book. In The Sword of Imagination, Kirk wrote of the time that he and Ronald Reagan met at a luncheon. Kirk remarked that “Mr. Reagan was persuaded to chair the committee of prominent Californians interested in promoting the production of a series of television films based on Kirk’s fat book The Roots of American Order.” According to Kirk, both men were quite shy around each other.
In this book Kirk manages to combine time with the timeless. He was writing two centuries after the founding of the United States of America and he stated plainly that “we need to renew our understanding of the beliefs and the laws which give form to American society.” Indeed, The Roots of American Order is just as important today as it was in 1974, and the book is important to the Anglosphere and to Western civilization. Why? Sir Roger Scruton, in his book Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, writes that conservatism “[i]n its most recent attempt to define itself…has become the champion of Western civilisation against its enemies.” By reading The Roots of American Order we learn that an enemy of a civilization is disorder and anarchy. This is because human persons require order both internally and externally and we require roots. Dr. Kirk cites the French Jewish Christian thinker, Simone Weil, that “order is the first need of all.” Order is “the path we follow,” but it is also the “pattern by which we live with purpose and meaning.” Putting down roots renews our social nature and develops our attachments to both persons and places and doing so alleviates our feelings of isolation from others around us. Or, as Weil expresses it, order is the light that shows the way to the traveller in the dark as “the traveller’s way is lit by a great hope.”
When one thinks of order one might think of the phrase law and order. Kirk explains, however, that order is wider and larger than law. Law is, of course, an important element of sustaining order but they are not indistinguishable. My own way of thinking about the difference between law and order is that law is a puzzle piece in the overall puzzle of order. The other puzzle pieces are traditions, norms, customs, and beliefs. Together they form the whole picture of order. Dr. Kirk provides us with two types of order: (1) order in one’s soul; and (2) order within the civil society at large. Kirk ensures that the reader is not led to believe that this categorization of order means that they are discrete and distinct, but quite the contrary is true, these roots of order are deeply “intertwined.”
Right, what is the soil within which these roots are embedded? Are these roots shallow and embedded in the topsoil only? No, these roots are “old and intricate,” embedded deep in the subsoil of our history. According to Kirk, Americans living in Washington, New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles derive their roots of order from five cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. The order that Americans enjoy is a “product of more than three thousand years of human striving.” When I first read the preceding passage by Kirk, I felt a degree of horror, or perhaps it was awe of the sublime. Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, wrote of experiences that we feel psychologically that provide us with excitement and a jolt of pain simultaneously, a perverse pleasure, because of their admixture of horror and astonishment. As the fog lifted to reveal the expansive landscape of the roots of western order, to use Burke’s term, my “strongest passion” came to the fore. My concern is that modern societies are chopping at these roots of order, and we do so at our peril. The roots of the western order will not grow back overnight, and we cannot create a new order from an a priori blueprint without doing horrendous damage to the current order. To use one of Kirk’s phrases, “nations are like trees: it will not do to hack at their roots, though we may prune their branches.” This sounds like good advice to me, I must say.
What do we derive from these cities? From Jerusalem, the concept of “a purposeful moral existence under God,” who cares about His nations and human persons and who is the source of all morality. From Athens, we learn that human beings are social beings, and they need to live in a community and that order in the soul and order in civil society are linked together. From Rome, we learn the importance of venerating our ancestors. Of course, these roots were intertwined “with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes.” From London, we get Magna Carta, equality before the law, common law, representative government, the English language, America’s social patterns and the foundations of its economy. On personal freedom in America, Kirk states that “in its origins, American personal liberty perhaps owes more to the common law than any other single source.” Indeed, according to Kirk, “the law, which is no respecter of persons, stands supreme: that is the essence of British legal theory and legal practice, and it passed into America from the first colonial settlements onwards.” From Philadelphia, the roots are America’s founding documents. In other words, the importance of art, law, ordered-liberty, community and tradition derive from these five cities, and they are essential to human prosperity, flourishing, and order.
Dr. Kirk, in sum, assured us that American order had been a success. “Under God, a large measure of justice has been achieved; the state is strong and energetic; personal freedom is protected by laws and customs; and a sense of community endures.” The Roots of American Order still speaks to our time. Why? Because our time is calling out for order.
Dr. Daniel Pitt is a Teaching Associate at the University of Sheffield and a member of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull. He was a former graduate student of Sir Roger Scruton.
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