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BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE (339 pp.)-Russell Kirk-Henry Regnery...
Like a lot of intellectuals who worry professionally about the state of the world, Historian Russell Kirk does not much like the shape of things. In The Conservative Mind (TIME, July 6, 1953), he made it plain that American conservatives had found a gifted and sorely needed spokesman. He is young (37), he can write hardhitting prose, he is not ashamed to range himself on the side of God, custom and character, and he believes strongly in such old-fashioned virtues as duty and responsibility. His book of essays, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, ranges in subject matter from censorship...
...Kirk is no reactionary, is in fact considerably more liberal than many self-proclaimed liberals. But he is rightly impatient with those intellectuals who assume "that we were all born yesterday, and that a vulgar pragmatism ought to supplant the bank and capital of traditional wisdom." Like most honest thinkers, he values the best of man's past and rebels against the notion "that the end of man is gratification of carnal appetite." He is convinced that the "social order now exhibits the symptoms of advanced decay" and is moving into "an Age of Gluttony." Who is to check...
Ideologies are anathema to Kirk, but he is also disturbed by the U.S. habits of "getting and spending." Here he becomes somewhat vague, as if he chose to ignore the fact that the good and full life can at the same time be a prosperous life. But he is most irked by the whining sort of U.S. intellectual who sets himself apart, "a species of dilettante who prides himself on being different, for no particular reason and with no particular duties." The men of this breed must find Kirk a very peculiar intellectual indeed. Can he mean it when...
...that rim Chicago's lakefront is a pleasant, peaceful thing: the streams of cars on Lake Shore Drive, the narrow strips of green park, the rock-ribbed beaches, the glistening lake with its splashing bathers, and, in the distance, a crisp sail. From his 15th floor apartment, A. Kirk Besley, 53, superintendent of Chicago's Norwegian American hospital, often passed the time at his picture window studying the scene through his binoculars...