Modern Age, 1957-2007.

IN THE YEAR of Our Lord 2007 we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Modern Age as a conservative review by Russell Amos Kirk and Henry Regnery of blessed memory. We do so with great thanks as we pause to mark a milestone and at the same time to press on in the face of formidable challenges posed by a postmodern New World Order. Conditions and circumstances a half century later disclose dramatic changes of enormous sociohistorical and geopolitical import. As the curse of ideology intensifies, we confront a new Jacobinism unleashing new afflictions garbed in the clothes of technology and of the Great Beast of technicism.

When Modern Age first appeared on the scene, the lures of collectivism and statism were prevalent and perhaps as tormenting as blitzkriegs that darkened East and West in the catastrophic years after 1939. In the post-1945 years, goblin footfalls reverberated in dangerous conflicts like the Korean War and later the Vietnam debacle and, more recently, the Iraqi War. Clearly, these events, these spectacles, tore holes in the American consciousness.

In its fifty-year lifetime Modern Age has witnessed some momentous events, and has recorded its responses and interpretations with a courage of honesty and judgment not often found in the mainstream periodical literature or in the power-centers that shape American culture and character. In the midst of millenarian visions and revisions Americans have been offered vague promises of greatness, even of terrestrial paradise, in the name of a New Frontier or a Great Society. We have duly celebrated the phenomena of a crumbling Berlin Wall, of an Iron Curtain, and the collapse of Soviet Communist hegemony.

Here at home we have sadly and cynically experienced the wrench of Watergate, the arrogance of power, and constitutional crisis. We have grappled with proverbial deficits, cries in public education, drug usage, staggering crime rates, and, in a word, devolution in sense and sensibility. There are the persistent ories demanding the Death of God, the death of the imagination, the death of the word, the death of culture. And there have been increasing worries over the military-industrial complex, and the ever-sharpening tensions emerging from multi-culturalism and pluralism, and from globalization and democratism, with all the faults.

Unassuaging evidence of liberal-radical attitudes, theories, and practices, of impiety at all levels of human existence persists as the principles of humane civilization and our sacred patrimony have faltered. Emancipation, egalitarianism, and entitlement have increasingly become a standard sociopolitical lexicon of rights, even as standards of discrimination have tottered and bread and circuses have assumed new faces, as new defiances and perversities have proliferated. Decadence and anarchy in turn have attained sanctioned heights or depths, inevitably diminishing the idea of the holy and enlarging the realm of enmity. Unabashedly, the heralds of change and progress have marched on.

Clearly, the word and the work of the "terrible simplifiers" have had no end, except as a means to an end. Iconoclasts and idolaters stalk the human scene and blaspheme the Word of God. Of this circumstance we can be absolutely certain, as we are also certain that the moral life and the ethical life, no less than the religious sense and the historical sense--and in fact any intimation of the spiritual idea of transcendence and transfiguration--are constantly liable to subversion by monists, secularists, positivists, and utopians who spurn both the world as an organic whole and the meaning of man's historical destiny, and who design the objectification, organization, and mechanization of life.

Steadily resistant to the supra-secular and supra-humanist dynamic found in modern history, Modern Age has maintained faith in the Permanent Things, at the same time exposing strange and hidden gods who command human allegiances and governance. As it commemorates its survival after fifty years of continuous publication, Modern Age does so not in any posture of self-congratulation, but with a true feeling of humbleness, fully knowing that its mission and ethos speak to what constitutes dissidence of dissent and to a numerically small number of readers and auditors. Indeed, it is something of a miracle that this quarterly has survived in a welter of print heavily supported or endowed by forces and movements oblivious of moral rules and principles and antagonistic to the moral sense or tie, and relentlessly persistent in adapting to and expediting a relativism that gathers new power with each new theory it introduces, and then discards for an even more mischievous theory of advantage and aggrandizement.

With the passage of the decades, too, contributors to Modern Age have discerningly appraised the proliferating pattern of distempers, nationwide and worldwide, in military and foreign affairs, in human behavior and relations, statistically recorded with alarm, anguish, sorrow. Barbarism lurks in the heart of darkness, as civilizing reticences and restraints recede, and as Hebrew, classical, and Christian traditions are usurped with the same defiance shown for, on the one hand, the unwritten laws of the ancients, and, on the other hand, the visionary principles of the Founding Fathers in the American experience. Denouncements of anything that counsels the law of measure and the noble impulse increase exponentially, beyond all frontiers, with all the entailing costs. In the midst of irregularities, and malignancies, we observe the rule of right reason and standards of excellence, as well as standards of democracy and leadership, giving way to opportunists, apostates, and upstarts anointed as icons in all fields of endeavor.

Even a cursory glance at the essays, reviews, and commentaries appearing in the pages of Modern Age will reveal not only a resolute engagement with the problems and proclivities highlighted in these paragraphs, but also a conservatism that, in disposition, temper, sensibility, is moral, contemplative, and ascetical in practice and perspective, and at once diagnostic and corrective in exposition and commitment. This is precisely the conservatism that has been, in more recent years, eclipsed or expurgated, yet one that has much to say about our situation as it alters in a postmodern setting presided over by self-acclaimed geometricians and enlighteners impervious to the deeper metaphysical needs of civilization, and of the human personality and soul. For five decades Modern Age has remained constant and vigilant in character and commitment despite the piercing winds of change, the clash of opinions and of civilizations, the schemes of ideology, and the convulsive appetite for the abnormative, the paranormal, the antinomian.

No cursory enumeration of the contents of several hundred issues of Modern Age can begin to summarize or exhaust their intrinsic worth and relevance. It can, however, alert us to the first things and the first principles that impel and shape its ongoing role as a conservative critical quarterly. Conveying conscienced and principled testimony, and providing dissenting analyses and judgments, which go against the majoritarian grain, can be costly for those who choose to take a stand. They must live up to higher standards of thought and action, at once analytical, judgmental, even censorial, in the very context of the conservative mind at a maximal point of development. That, in any case, is what has emboldened a faithful nucleus of collaborators who, in Modern Age, have defined and defended conservative perspectives, however troubling these may be in dark and troubling times.

That this nucleus has not succumbed either to external admonishments or to the lures of fame and fortune, that this nucleus has retained its interior principles of moral responsibility in the face of official disdain or popular indifference is precisely the kind of resistance that, in the end, has made it possible for Modern Age to concentrate on its aims and not to cave in to the quantitative might of numbers and affluence. To know that the longtime sponsor of this journal, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, stalwartly supports its continuing publication and its editorial autonomy and integrity, it goes without saying, is a distinctly large and encouraging consideration in enabling its collaborators to see their thoughts in print and in discussion. Sponsor and contributor meet in a common alliance to assess ideas that have consequences, to withstand the sectaries of destruction and decomposition, to affirm the dignity and not the abolition of man.

Which now brings us to ask an intricate and inescapable question, "What is the purpose of, the rationale for, a conservative quarterly review that has no great numbers in the specifying terms of circulation and visibility? Under the circumstances, and necessarily within prescribed limits, what can we ever hope to accomplish, what mind can we reach, what illusion can we dispel, what conscience can we awake? These are questions that require diligent reflection. Yet it can be said that, if in any way this journal spurs the contemplation of our humanity and of human possibility, if it helps to elucidate a politics of prudence and a deeper understanding of the human condition and destiny, and of the higher values and the higher self, it fulfills its primary task as a traditionalist conservative review, which is itself in search of a higher conservatism. The pursuit of this disciplining task in an imperfect world is never-ending. That selfsame task remains a stringent taskmaster as Modern Age continues to do its appointed work, ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast.