The Beginning of Wisdom

In an interview on Freedom Isn’t Enough

Your last choice is Leon Kass, a marvellous book to add to this list. It’s called The Beginning of Wisdom, published in 2003, not to a great deal of fanfare. It’s not considered part of the conservative canon – why is it on your list?

I was Leon Kass’s researcher for part of the time he was working on this book. It’s on this list because, to my mind, it’s the best example of social conservatism as an intellectual exercise that I’ve seen. It’s a close reading of the Book of Genesis, but it’s not a dogmatic reading, it’s really not even a theological reading – it’s not about God exactly. It’s a philosophical reading in the sense that it takes the Bible to be a work of philosophy and it approaches it the way you might approach Plato’s Republic. It tries to tease out an understanding of society, and especially family life – which is really the central theme of the Book of Genesis – and it lays out, in an incredibly insightful way, a kind of anthropology of the family. It’s a reflection on the human meaning of family life, and how that leads into social life. So it seems to me that it should be on this list because it is a kind of check against libertarianism, against radical individualism. It argues that libertarianism, even at its very best, can’t be sufficient to our understanding of society. It also highlights why strong families are the essence of a strong nation. I think it also illustrates by example what it is to seek wisdom from tradition without being slaves to it.

It highlights our debt to family and to those generations before us that Burke and Hayek warn us we cannot simply dismiss. It’s a book of generations in a way.

It is, and if you look for a theme in these books I’ve chosen, and in my own conservatism, that’s certainly the theme: generational continuity which is both a fact of life and a source of strength. I think it’s one of the ways conservatism and liberalism in the modern age are rather different. It’s one of the ways I’m not a Jeffersonian, who argues that the world belongs to the living and the present should get out of the way of the future. I think that’s a deep mistake – and one of the important purposes of conservatism is to highlight that.

My fear is that modern conservatism has become a protest movement politics, which imagines itself to be revolutionary, but has no plausible means of bringing a revolution about. I worry a great deal about that.

If you begin with Burke, conservatism has always been, to some extent, a protest movement. It in fact began in response to modern liberalism. But what these books suggest is that there are ways of carrying out that response constructively and responsibly. And I think there are, I think there still are.