Kirk protests just a bit too much that conservatism is not an ideology

The late Russell Kirk is my favorite conservative writer, along with Pat Buchanan, but I think Kirk protests just a bit too much that conservatism is not an ideology.

Where conservatism might not be visionary and unrealistic or idealistic it is a system of ideas and ideals and contains economic or political theory and policy as much as any other ideology.

The defense that conservatism approves of a range of systems as long as there are conservators of that system does not make conservatism not an ideology, it just makes conservatism a wiser ideology.

I also think that while Kirk, like Burke, emphasizes "prudent change" he does not emphasize evolutionary change, and he does not include even prudent change regarding a transcendent-spiritual order, or the fall of man and the imperfect or sinful nature of man, when that is where change most needs to happen in ongoing conservatism.

Politics is both the art of the possible and the ideal, but Kirk wants to affirm only what he deems as the possible, which does not include the future biological evolution of man. The biological origin of our social behavior, which includes religion, actually ends the intellectual defense of postmodern relativism and the cultural Marxist ideologues, but it also takes some of the virtue-signaling away from conservatives.

The goal of materially evolving to Godhood need not deprive us of either science or religion. Defining the internal material force of life which activates life toward evolving toward higher and higher forms, and eventually to Godhood, while being shaped by natural outside evolution, may be a bit further than religion and science want to go, but we need to go there.

As I wrote a few days ago, the idyllic imagination which Kirk is skeptical of can project the evolution of material life all the way to supermaterial Godhood, which is best done by preserving the best of the past, and by conserving variety, as we evolve toward higher forms of the good, the true, and the beautiful. That is the change of "deep conservatism," which is more prudent than reckless.