A Ghostly Parable Against Central Planning
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.
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