THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE CHARACTER by RUSSELL KIRK (Principal remarks delivered September 27th, 1954 at Yale Law School, being the first in a series of Lectures on "The Role of the Conservative in Today's World" sponsored by The Conservative Society of Yale Law School, a student organization.) "Conservatism is the negation of ideology," Mr. H. Stuart Hughes wrote more than three years ago, in an article concerned with the decline of political ideology in Europe. This is quite true. Where ideology seizes upon a nation's consciousness, the influence of true conservatism declines; and where the power of ideology declines, there conservatism has opportunity for appealing anew to men's minds; and appeal to them it must, with all the intelligence at its com- mand, if it is to save them from apathy or from nihilism. I think, then, that our country, like most of western Europe, is drifting away from ideology, and that here, as beyond the oceans, only an elevated conservatism can avert that bored indifference to past and future, and that destructive contempt for all moral values, which work the ruin of order. Napoleon, who detested the doctrinaire reformer, gave us the words, "ideology" and "ideologist" as terms of abuse; old John Adams was driven nearly to distraction by "ideology", writing of it, "Our English words, Idiocy or Idiotism, express not the meaning or force of it. It is presumed its proper definition is the science of Idiocy. And a very profound, abstruse, and mysteri- ous science it is. You must descend deeper than the divers in the Dunciad to make any discoveries, and after all you will find no bottom. It is the bathos, the theory, the art, the skill of diving and sinking in government. Burke, writing before the word "ideology"? was coined, employed the word "abstraction" to de- scribe the ideological approach to politics; and he detested this quite as heartily as Adams did. In the conservative's opinion, the ideologue is a being suffering from the delusion that his rigid closet-philosophy contains all the answers to all the problems of humanity. We have but to be governed by his rules, the ideologue thinks, and the terrestrial paradise is ours. The ideo- logue may be an a priori thinker, or an a posteriori thinker, but in his system no room is left for Providence, or chance, or free will, or prudence. He is the devotee, often, of what Burke called "ian armed doctrine." Now the conservative believes that the individual is foolish, although the species is wise; therefore, unlike the confident ideologue, he declines to undertake the reconstruction of society and human nature upon the scanty capital of his private stock of reason. The conservative believes that the world is not perfectible, and that we poor fallen human creatures, here below, are not made for happiness, and will not find happiness - at least, not if we deliberately pursue it; therefore, unlike the ideologue, he is not inclined to believe that any single fixed system of political concepts can bring justice and peace and liberty to all men everywhere, if uniformly applied. Conservatism does not breed fanatics. It does not try to excite the enthusiasm of a secular religion. If you want men who will sacrifice their past and present and future to a set of abstract notions, then you must go to Communism, or Fascism, or even Benthamism. But if you want men who seek, reasonably and prudently, to reconcile the best in the wisdom of our ancestors with the change which is essential to a vigorous civil social existence, then you will do well to turn to conservative principles. Particular remedies and plans of action are subjects