The Mystic Chords of Memory: Reclaiming American History
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous.
I am delighted to be with you this afternoon and to have a role in the Heritage Foundation’s worthy project of commemorating Russell Kirk’s many contributions to American intellectual life. My own task today is to explore the subject of historical consciousness in America—a subject about which, strange to say, Russell Kirk actually did not write a great deal, at least not addressing the subject directly. But he didn’t need to. His entire life and work were nothing less than an extended elaboration of that very theme. Historical consciousness seemed to have been infused into the air he breathed and mixed into the soil of the ancestral land in which he chose to live. No place or thing, however ordinary, was too humble for him to grant it the dignity of a story.
One notices this historical tendency even in Kirk’s language. It has a most peculiar lilt, which often charms and sometimes startles the reader with its unexpectedly fanciful and antique echoes. (As an example of the latter, I remember being shocked when I read Kirk describe a leading social critic as an exemplar of “defecated intellect”—shocked, that is, until I looked the word up, and saw that Kirk used the word in an older and more etymologically informed sense than my own, strictly scatological…