"ORDER, THE FIRST NEED OF ALL": A REVIEW By Asithandile Gxumisa

Ours is a time of troubles. The West is in turmoil as a whole generation of men and women, rootless and thankless, rises up to lay waste to anything that smacks of their past: monuments are desecrated, statues toppled and ancient institutions set alight. In the East dormant disputes and old resentments threaten to sweep away the stability and peace of an entire region as two great powers, China and India, face off in the Galway Valley. Nearer home, in the Republic of South Africa, trouble has emerged in the shape of a Plague and a Scourge: a deadly Flu and a concatenation of cruelties perpetrated against women. In parts of the Middle East religious fanatics have yet to find a language better than bombs and rifles in which to converse. Perhaps worse than all these general calamities are the multiplying troubles of the souls of all of us - souls hopelessly adrift like ghostly cadavers in a raging sea of confusion, error and apoplexy. For are not the afflictions of republics, kingdoms and democracies only the trials of the souls of folks, writ large, who populate these worldly polities? That they were, are still and always shall be, world without end. Where then do we begin so as to make our societies a little more tolerable than what they are in the midst of all these troubles?

"Order is the first need of all", so declared Simone Weil as Adolf Hitler unleashed upon all of Europe unprecedented disorders. In his monumental book, The Roots Of American Order, Russell Kirk would take a page out of Simone Weil's own little book, as he sought, in his own words, to water the roots of the American order under which he had grown up. Going back, as far back in time as when Moses stumbled upon the burning bush, in his search for the roots of that delicate order, he would reveal to us that we should start where our betters, the ancients, always began: by restoring order in our own souls. This was in fact also the insight of that inimitable intellect, the philosopher Plato. For Plato, the philosopher of the soul, the order of the ideal Republic is the order of the soul, written in bolder letters. Just as the commonwealth has its own guardians, its soldiers and its farmers, so does the soul comprise three aspects. The intellect as its guardian, the will as its soldier and the appetite as its farmer. To Kirk Plato's The Republic was more of an allegory or an analogy of order in the soul of the person, a study of the complex realities of spiritual and social order, than a disquisition on the 'model constitution' to be imposed upon human societies.

So much for our pilgrimage through the imaginary world of philosopher-kings. In The Roots Of American Order, as in all his writings, Russell Kirk had no better response to our earlier question than Plato or Weil: order in the person and in the commonwealth is the first of all needs. And incontrovertible this truth, at least it should be to those who will but judge the matter with an open mind. For without order life is no better than a mindless search for Nowhere, no better than a flight of chaff before a howling gale. In truth, life should be no more than a nightmare of purposelessness were order of some kind lacking in our mundane world. In outlining what order is Russell Kirk invokes the example of a traveller at night, without a guide, reflecting always on the direction he intends to follow. To Simone Weil, from whom the image was borrowed, that is what a man seeking order looks like - his path "lit by a great hope". Therefore, order is like the road we follow, giving meaning and purpose to our existence. In his uniquely pellucid way, Russell Kirk would define "order" as a "systematic and harmonious arrangement" that prevails either "in one's own character" or "in the commonwealth". 

Not breaking with Plato, he would go on to also affirm that a kind of symbiotic relationship subsists between roots of the moral order, that is, order in the person, and roots of the civil social order, that is, order in the Republic. Of this inextricable link, between the "inner order" of the soul and the "outer order" of society, he would write "Without a high degree of private moral order among the American people, the reign of law could not have prevailed in this country. Without an orderly pattern of politics, American private character would have sunk into a ruinous egoism." And so by this we understand that the good or evil in our world is, more or less, a facsimile of the good or evil in all of us. Just as when a human looking into a mirror will not see there reflected a cherub; so also shall we not expect a paradise of order and peace in our societies while our individual souls wander in a "parched wasteland of disorder". Russell Kirk's magisterial work, The Roots Of American Order, was written primarily for a particular order of a particular people at a time of great troubles. However, his marvellous insights, in particular what he had to say pertaining to the moral order of the human person, transcend both time and place. Such indeed is the work of men dedicated to the defense of what Russell Kirk's friend, T. S. Elliot, called the "permanent things", enduring truths, customs of life and standards of order.

Given the space, I cannot here hope to do true justice to his book by this little review, amateur that I am. But what I have learnt and have found to be relevant to circumstances all about us I will gladly share with you who still have confidence in that "lamp of experience", the collective wisdom of our human ancestors. To them we owe the roots of our moral order, of which we are all in desperate need; to such men as Moses, Homer, the ancient Egyptian of "The Dispute Over Suicide" and Sunni Maa of the African Danakil Depression we owe the enduring revelations that have given orderly shape to our own souls. Because our soul is by its nature a supernatural entity, it was needful that the revelations that pertain to its order be, at root, extraordinary, transcendental and supernatural: the unveiling of truths that could not possibly have been discovered by natural experience in our world. Now, the most enduring of all these ancient revelations are Mosaic spiritual insights, their amaranthine glory chastened by what Russell Kirk called "the genius of Christianity". The Judeo-Christian tradition, inherited from the hard and bleak experience of the Hebrews under Yahweh in a strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea, still burns steadily in our midst like a star even as all others, the polytheistic and cosmological creeds of lost civilizations, have long given up their lustre. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. 

That we Men are not alone in this harsh world, and that there prevails in this temporal dimension an order ordained of God was the awesome contribution of the tenacious Hebrews to spiritual order as we understand it today. A precious heritage this - worth all the energy of good men that can be expended in its defense. This "leap in being", a rare apprehension of higher order by the moral imagination, in the Hebraic experience was a marvel of marvels. For before this spectacular revelation, of a just God and His holy laws, there was absolutely no confidence anywhere in the world that there existed permanent order that runs through the cosmos. Modern folk, utterly unmoored from their past and puffed up by their tottering achievements, take all these things for granted. "They assume, however vaguely, that certain principles of justice exist, and that life has purpose of some sort." For this reason they quite easily forget that before the Word there was Darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yes, that Darkness. And in this state of near-universal and deceptively soothing amnesia this Darkness threatens to overwhelm us anew - both soul and society alike. Ideology, so memorably defined by John Adams in 1813 as the "science of Idiocy", that enemy of the higher kind of order, has taken captive of the modern mind. 

To ideologues, mercenaries from the chthonic Abyss, and not to prophets, men of supernal vision, do people nowadays look for guidance and direction in life. Because ideology is fundamentally the rejection of historical experience and immemorial truths, a fanatic struggle to undo all that is long established, the roots of the moral order that we inherited from the Hebrews have not eschewed the ideologue's red axe. Why - it is not because of racial inequality, or out of boredom merely, that the squealing youths of the West are bringing down the statues of their forebears. Rather, it is because they are drunk, often quite literally, from the sottish drug of ideology. They have lost all meaningful connection to the long roots that gave shape to the order of the souls of their ancestors which, in turn, made it possible for them to live tolerably with each other. Animated by the novel "political messianism" of intellectual elites, this overzealous lot has embarked upon a thoroughly Procrustean mission to re-create Man in the image of Man (or, rather, in the image of the lonely coffee-house philosopher at Yale or Harvard), and to rebuild society upon the sandy foundation of abstract dogmas so as, insofar as this enormously ambitious project has any tangible end at all, to usher in an aeon of millennial beatitude. 

South Africa is awash with evangels of this atavistic gospel, not least among them their own President who once solemnly promised to transform this land into the very "Garden of Eden". The Old Faith with its exacting obligations, its uncomfortable doctrine of Original Sin and its unattractive promise of Glory in the Hereafter is slowly being supplanted by the New Faith with its 'liberating' freedoms, its calming doctrine of inherent human goodness and its glowing guarantee of Paradise on Earth. Unlike the ancients whose religion taught them to examine their own hearts when calamities abounded in the commonwealth, ideologues will look everywhere for causes but their own hearts. Lo! it is the patriarchy or capitalism today, tomorrow the 'systemic racism' or neo-imperialism, never the heart. Thus do ideologues keep our eyes fixed upon leaves and stems while the roots dry up below the surface. And the inner order of the soul, long neglected by a sensate generation, is decaying. That decay, as proof of the symbiosis between personal and social order, is manifesting itself in all kinds of ghastly calamities that threaten to sweep away civil society as we have known it: pregnant women knifed and hanged upon trees, infants drowned in squalid brooks, cruel rapes, murders and vulgar blasphemies. The path to Paradise on Earth is proving to be a highway to a Terrestrial Avernus. 

To check this descent of the modern world into nether regions was why The Roots Of American Order was written. How can I bring out satisfactorily the depth and breadth of Russell Kirk's encyclopedic knowledge in this dilettantish review? His yatra-like journey in the book begins from holy Jerusalem upon a hill, passes through picturesque Athens overlooking the Aegean Sea, moves past imperial Rome adorned with classical temples and finally comes to an end in London by the tawny Thames. To these four great cities, so Kirk wrote, belongs the credit for the marvellous shape of the American order - both in the soul and society alike. When all is said and done the ending of the book, its lesson included, is just like its beginning: order is the first of all human needs. Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, the greatest commandment according to the Suffering Servant, the genius of Christianity. This old injunction, together with one very much alike unto it Love thy neighbour as thyself, is the bedrock of the grand order by which this universe is governed. We should build upon this solid Rock tolerable communities, for whatsoever else we build upon shall be as quicksand. In rejecting it we forfeit our very humanity, and that will be no more or less than we deserve. Still, in the midst of all our troubles, we affirm with Plato that God, not Man, is the measure of all things, we affirm with Kirk that order is the first of all human needs, and we declare with the Apostle in the clamorsome din of false seers that in the Beginning was the Word.