Halloween was the favorite holiday of Russell Kirk, modern American conservatism’s founder. As much as he enjoyed trick-or-treating and other spooky festivities, October 31 meant something even more profound to him. Kirk believed All Hallows’ Eve serves as a reminder of what Edmund Burke called the “eternal contract of society” that exists between the living […] The post A Ghostly Parable Against Central Planning appeared first on Law & Liberty.
Halloween was the favorite holiday of Russell Kirk, modern American conservatism’s founder. As much as he enjoyed trick-or-treating and other spooky festivities, October 31 meant something even more profound to him. Kirk believed All Hallows’ Eve serves as a reminder of what Edmund Burke called the “eternal contract of society” that exists between the living and the dead.
It is altogether fitting and proper, then, that Kirk devoted much of his literary efforts to a classic American genre: the ghost story. Although today he is primarily remembered for his historical and political writings, his haunted tales have been hailed as masterpieces by everyone from Madeleine L’Engle to Stephen King. Once, the Count Dracula Society even gave Kirk its highest honor for gothic fiction—and a flowing black cape he was known to wear on occasion. Kirk himself saw his ghost stories as “experiments in the moral imagination,” illustrations of the enduring truths about the human condition and the connections between the visible and invisible worlds.
One of his best stories, “Ex Tenebris,” uses both fright and humor to demonstrate the folly of central planning. Although Kirk was no simpleminded libertarian ideologue, he understood that freedom was among the “permanent things” conservatives ought to preserve and enjoy. As a defender of tradition and order, he opposed all rationalistic attempts to level society according to abstract ideals. “Ex Tenebris” is a parable of that conservative insight, and a perfect yarn for Halloween.
The story opens with a description of a battered town in the English countryside, Low Wentford. Abandoned by nearly all except an old widow, Mrs. Oliver, its cottages have fallen into disrepair and ruin. A government planning officer, Mr. S. G. W. Barner, full of the “progressive aspirations of planned industrial society,” plots to completely remake the village by tearing down all the cottages and even Low Wentford’s disused parish church, All Saints. “Yes, that wreck of a church must come down, with what remained of Low Wentford,” Barner thinks to himself. “Ruins are reminiscent of the past; and the Past is a dead hand impeding progressive planning.” He turns out to be more right about the dead hand of the past than he could ever know.
The first stage in Barner’s scheme is to chase away all of Low Wentford’s residents. By the time the story begins, he has compulsorily transferred nearly all of Low Wentford’s elderly residents into council housing more suited to his modern sensibilities. All, that is, except Mrs. Oliver—she still clings to her “little red-tiled cottage,” its garden, and the derelict parish church, despite Barner’s best efforts. Even more than the gentry class, Mrs. Oliver represents to S. G. W. Barner the “repudiated social order” of traditional, rural life. She is the greatest threat to all his plans—or so he thinks.
To force poor Mrs. Oliver out of her home, then, Barner turns to the local baronet, Sir Gerald Ogham, who sold her the cottage in the first place. But Sir Gerald is no ally to Barner’s progressive plans. “Let a decent old woman keep her roses,” he says, “Why do you whirl her off to your jerry-built desolation of concrete roadways that you’ve designed, so far as I can see, to make it difficult for people to get about on foot? Why do you have to make her live under the glare of mercury vapor lamps and listen to other people’s wireless sets when she wants quiet? Sometimes I think a devil’s got inside you, Barner.” Ogham may have been a poor and unserious steward of Wentford House and its village, but he still possesses a glimmer of the noblesse oblige a central planner like Barner utterly lacks.
Despite this opposition, Barner is undeterred. He would never sacrifice his dreams of a progressive future in steel and concrete for the kind of humane concern this aristocrat displays for a tenant. And so Barner schemes to use eminent domain to finally force Mrs. Oliver into government housing, and justifies it to himself and others by claiming it is for her own welfare. But even a man like Barner can become impatient in the midst of bureaucracy’s slow grind. He resorts to bullying tactics, essentially trying to harass Mrs. Oliver out of her home. “Mr. Barner was a cheerless man,” the narrator reports, “and he frightened her.”
Kirk deployed the eerie to help us understand just how thin the veil between the visible and invisible worlds is.
But Barner’s boorish tyranny is not the only frightful force in Low Wentford. When Mrs. Oliver is tending to the graves in the derelict churchyard one evening, a somewhat ominous stranger appears and announces that he is her vicar, Abner Hargreaves. As the story continues, Kirk slowly reveals that Hargreaves is the ghost of a Victorian priest who may have murdered an aggressive village atheist generations ago. Before committing suicide, Hargreaves left instructions that he should be buried in the north end of the churchyard “with other murderers and perjurers and suicides, that burn forever.” His shade is doomed to linger for his sins.
Mrs. Oliver, however, seems not to fully understand that Hargreaves is an emissary from the invisible world beyond the grave. Chilling as his presence is, she takes a certain comfort from it. His stern and passionate talk reminds her of an older breed of ministers who really believed in heaven and hell, not just earthly utopias. Mrs. Oliver eventually confides in Hargreaves about Barner’s harassment campaign and general wickedness—at which point Hargreaves abruptly leaves their tea to take action.
In a truly creepy vignette, Hargreaves supernaturally contacts Barner via telephone and summons him to All Saints to settle the matter of Mrs. Oliver’s cottage once and for all. Barner expects to meet a sentimentalist who simply cannot bear the sacrifices necessary for a brighter future. “Leave sociology to trained minds, Mr. Hargreaves,” he says, “I see you have not the faintest conception of the essentials of planning.” Barner possesses all the arrogance of expertise, but altogether lacks any sense of true charity. Like all central planners, he simply dismisses “the memories of childhood” and “the pieties that cling to our hearth, however desolated” as mere sentimental impediments to progress.
To Barner’s horror, though, there is nothing sentimental about Hargreaves’s fury. After preaching at him with the intensity of an Old Testament prophet, imploring repentance, Hargreaves determines that S. G. W. Barner will never yield. So, with a ghoulish smile, he takes him by the throat—and kills him.
Unlike the antagonist, Kirk’s tale ends happily enough for Mrs. Oliver. The council abandons Barner’s levelling scheme and indeed commits to restoring some of Low Wentford’s ruined buildings. Mrs. Oliver is free to tend her garden, bake her scones, and sweep the churchyard’s gravestones. Perhaps even Hargreaves—who no longer appears to Mrs. Oliver—achieved some measure of redemption by protecting her from the callousness of Barner’s progressive plans.
The moral lessons of “Ex Tenebris” are quite clear—it would almost be too didactic, were it not for Kirk’s skill at weaving a tale and the fantastical ghostly trappings he gave it. In the first place, the story illustrates the desiccated character of central planners like Barner. Drunk on government power and dreams of a progressive utopia, these tinkerers and schemers completely disregard actual human concerns as they seek to implement their rational innovations. Kirk’s contempt for this sorry human type is as obvious as it is righteous.
In other words, Kirk knew that progressive central planning’s assault on freedom was ultimately an assault on the human spirit itself. He did not believe that society was a machine to be engineered and run by master mechanics. Nor did he believe that society was some kind of organism destined for evolution. Rather, as he explained Edmund Burke’s views in The Conservative Mind, Kirk understood that society is “a spiritual unity, an eternal partnership, a corporation which is always perishing and yet always renewing.” Technocrats like Barner are too given to the mechanical or organic analogies for society, and fail utterly to see that governing by raw power is so much more destructive than the kind of natural and humane love that Mrs. Oliver represents.
The truth of the spiritual unity between the living and the dead is also at the heart of the second lesson of “Ex Tenebris,” namely, the supreme worth of a moral imagination rooted in the wisdom of our ancestors. Kirk certainly believed that hauntings and spirits were real, but he also used ghostly images to help readers understand his conservative philosophy. “As a pious act,” he opens his first book, “I summon up John Randolph from among the shades.” Like Hargreaves became a kind of spectral guardian for Mrs. Oliver, Kirk believed that great conservative minds such as Randolph or Burke could guard their inheritors against the evils of our times. As his friend and mentor T. S. Eliot put it, “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
Just as this insight about inherited wisdom informs Kirk’s nonfiction, it also sets his gothic tales apart from many lesser entries in the genre. Kirk deployed the eerie to help us understand just how thin the veil between the visible and invisible worlds is. “These tales of malign spirits were written by a man of Christian virtue, possessed of faith, hope, and charity,” he wrote in one essay on a friend who also wrote ghost stories. “If, as I trust, they disconcert you—why, that will be a salutary dread, cheerfully imparted by one who knew that a holy fear is the beginning of wisdom, and that perfect love casts out fear.” Much the same can be said for Kirk’s fiction.
“Ex Tenebris” is only one of dozens of stories, most recently collected in a volume titled Ancestral Shadows. From the metaphysical mystery of “Saviourgate” to the shocking (yet redemptive) violence of “There’s A Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” these stories are so much more than supernatural thrillers—each is a profound illustration of the moral imagination, something we desperately need in our troubled times. And for that reason, there is perhaps no better way to celebrate Halloween than to take up and read Russell Kirk’s ghostly tales.
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