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The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky
Eleven lectures discuss human rights, the American family, education, virtue, the humanities, television, and social decadence
Hardcover
Published January 1, 1987
About the author
Russell Kirk
165 books319 followersFor more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
December 26, 2020
A series of speeches Russell Kirk gave in 1987 toward the end of the Reagan Administration on the ills of society at that time and the cures for those ills... An interesting read, I don't think he'd be happy with where we are today.
July 29, 2018
Very prescient... Plus, Kirk's precise use of language is a simply a pleasure.
December 28, 2020
In these lectures Kirk outlines ways to overcome current ills and how to embody a just, ordered society. Of particular note are his comments on education. A truly liberal education develops a free man with an ordered soul. Following CS Lewis’s comments in The Abolition of Man, a liberal education, and good literature in particular, trains the emotions as well as the reason. This is perhaps similar to what John Milton said of Edmund Spenser when he saw him to be a better teacher than Aquinas.
Kirk has an interesting analysis of the ethical teaching of ancient Greece. As Greece multiplied professors of ethics, loosely speaking, her morals decayed. Of course, that doesn’t mean one caused the other. However, as Kirk notes, Greece trained merely the intellect and not the “affections,” to borrow a term from later writers.
This set of lectures is quite good. Kirk maintains, if not stately prose, given that they’re lectures, a cadence of fine words.
Kirk has an interesting analysis of the ethical teaching of ancient Greece. As Greece multiplied professors of ethics, loosely speaking, her morals decayed. Of course, that doesn’t mean one caused the other. However, as Kirk notes, Greece trained merely the intellect and not the “affections,” to borrow a term from later writers.
This set of lectures is quite good. Kirk maintains, if not stately prose, given that they’re lectures, a cadence of fine words.
June 12, 2026
I came away from this book with mixed feelings—not because I disliked it, but because I found myself agreeing with much of it while rarely feeling surprised by it.
Russell Kirk argues for the importance of virtue, tradition, liberal education in the classical sense, and the moral formation of character. His criticisms of mass entertainment, excessive specialization, and the decline of higher learning often struck me as insightful and remain highly relevant. I especially appreciated his belief that education should be concerned with forming good human beings, not merely producing technical specialists.
In many respects, however, I felt that I had already traveled much of the road Kirk was inviting readers to begin. There was little here that fundamentally changed the way I think. Rather than discovering new ideas, I often found myself encountering thoughts I had already arrived at independently.
My biggest point of disagreement concerns Kirk's repeated emphasis on the loss of Judeo-Christian faith as the central cause of cultural decline. While I respect his Christianity and understand why it shaped his outlook, I am not convinced that the loss of faith necessarily means the loss of morality. Virtue, myth, and moral formation are not exclusively Christian possessions, and I suspect the problem of preserving moral life in a pluralistic and increasingly secular world is more complicated than simply calling for a return to religious belief.
Reading this book, I was reminded several times of Alasdair MacIntyre. Like Kirk, MacIntyre recognizes the importance of virtue and tradition, but he seems more willing to wrestle with the question of what comes after the fragmentation of shared belief. Kirk's answer often appears to be, "We must return to faith." I found myself wanting a more forward-looking response.
Kirk also made some predictions from the Reagan era that history has not entirely vindicated. Yet that is perhaps less a criticism than a reminder that every thinker is, to some extent, a prisoner of his own moment.
Ultimately, I suspect this book may have much more impact on readers who were raised very differently from me. For those encountering these ideas for the first time, it could serve as a valuable wake-up call. For me, however, it felt more like a confirmation of convictions I already held than a transformative reading experience.
Not a bad book by any means—simply one that met me after I had already begun asking many of the same questions.
Russell Kirk argues for the importance of virtue, tradition, liberal education in the classical sense, and the moral formation of character. His criticisms of mass entertainment, excessive specialization, and the decline of higher learning often struck me as insightful and remain highly relevant. I especially appreciated his belief that education should be concerned with forming good human beings, not merely producing technical specialists.
In many respects, however, I felt that I had already traveled much of the road Kirk was inviting readers to begin. There was little here that fundamentally changed the way I think. Rather than discovering new ideas, I often found myself encountering thoughts I had already arrived at independently.
My biggest point of disagreement concerns Kirk's repeated emphasis on the loss of Judeo-Christian faith as the central cause of cultural decline. While I respect his Christianity and understand why it shaped his outlook, I am not convinced that the loss of faith necessarily means the loss of morality. Virtue, myth, and moral formation are not exclusively Christian possessions, and I suspect the problem of preserving moral life in a pluralistic and increasingly secular world is more complicated than simply calling for a return to religious belief.
Reading this book, I was reminded several times of Alasdair MacIntyre. Like Kirk, MacIntyre recognizes the importance of virtue and tradition, but he seems more willing to wrestle with the question of what comes after the fragmentation of shared belief. Kirk's answer often appears to be, "We must return to faith." I found myself wanting a more forward-looking response.
Kirk also made some predictions from the Reagan era that history has not entirely vindicated. Yet that is perhaps less a criticism than a reminder that every thinker is, to some extent, a prisoner of his own moment.
Ultimately, I suspect this book may have much more impact on readers who were raised very differently from me. For those encountering these ideas for the first time, it could serve as a valuable wake-up call. For me, however, it felt more like a confirmation of convictions I already held than a transformative reading experience.
Not a bad book by any means—simply one that met me after I had already begun asking many of the same questions.
June 13, 2022
Beautiful words & visions from St. Russell of Mecosta. Sad to see how the high hopes of the 1980s (not that Kirk skated by the nation's deep challenges) have been largely disappointed over the last 30+ years.
February 23, 2021
This series of 11 essays written in the mid 1980's is still relevant today. Mr Kirk identifies trends that have led us to some of our biggesr challenges today. Definitely worth reading.
May 9, 2020
Would be easy to cherry pick some ridiculous statements or simply the rather hypocritical praise of Reagan (I guess he'd love Bush Jr too) but given this was published in the 80s before the Berlin wall fell I'm just too astounded by its prescience and shocking relevance today. Wouldn't want to be friends with the author and don't agree with his opinions but I found the ideas interesting.
September 26, 2026
This may be the most intellectually bankrupt book I've ever finished, and I've read *Mein Kampf*.
Kirk has apparently discovered the secret to writing a book of ideas without ever having to seriously engage with an idea: find a civilization-sized pile of quotations from Burke, Eliot, Chesterton, Augustine, Marx, and everyone else unfortunate enough to cross his path, arrange them around a series of predetermined moral conclusions, and then declare modernity defeated.
The Marx sections are particularly embarrassing. You could turn this book into a drinking game called "Did Marx Actually Say That?" and be unconscious before dinner. Kirk repeatedly collapses Marx, Marxism, communism, Bolshevism, atheism, revolutionary violence, and whatever else he currently dislikes into one undifferentiated satanic blob. Apparently historical specificity is another symptom of decadence.
The funniest part is that Kirk spends the book attacking the "Knowledge Class" for substituting slogans for thought. He then spends hundreds of pages doing precisely that. His opponents are not people whose arguments need to be understood; they are symptoms of an intellectual disease. Once someone has been assigned the appropriate category—modernist, egalitarian, materialist, revolutionary, progressive, etc.—the case is closed.
And this is where the enormous quantity of literary and philosophical references becomes almost comical. Kirk has read these people. He has read a lot of people. But reading someone and understanding them are apparently two different activities.
Burke, at least, gets something resembling serious treatment because Burke's entire intellectual vocabulary is basically Kirk's native habitat: tradition, prescription, prudence, inherited institutions, suspicion of abstraction. But elsewhere the great thinkers of Western civilization are treated less like thinkers than like an enormous cabinet of decorative furniture. Quote them, invoke their authority, and move on.
There is no real engagement with opposing arguments because Kirk has built himself an intellectual escape hatch: if reality contradicts the moral order he has already identified, reality is simply decadent. Evidence becomes confirmation. Counterexamples become symptoms. Disagreement becomes pathology. History becomes a morality play in which Kirk already knows who the villains are.
The result is not conservative philosophy so much as conservatism as a self-sealing intellectual system.
And the prose, while undeniably polished, makes this worse. Everything is delivered in the portentous voice of a man announcing the collapse of Western civilization for the 47th consecutive time. Every ordinary social development becomes evidence of civilizational decline. Every preferred tradition becomes a repository of wisdom. Every disliked development becomes a symptom of spiritual pathology.
There are plenty of authors whose politics I find repellent but whose books I would still recommend because they force you to think. This isn't one of them. Kirk doesn't seem particularly interested in the possibility that his opponents might have understood something he didn't.
He doesn't argue with modernity.
He pronounces judgment upon it.
And then he quotes somebody dead to make it sound like an argument.
1/5. I picked this up at random because the title and cover looked interesting. One of the more spectacular examples I've encountered of a book being much more impressed with its own intellectual pedigree than its actual thinking.
Fuck this book.
Kirk has apparently discovered the secret to writing a book of ideas without ever having to seriously engage with an idea: find a civilization-sized pile of quotations from Burke, Eliot, Chesterton, Augustine, Marx, and everyone else unfortunate enough to cross his path, arrange them around a series of predetermined moral conclusions, and then declare modernity defeated.
The Marx sections are particularly embarrassing. You could turn this book into a drinking game called "Did Marx Actually Say That?" and be unconscious before dinner. Kirk repeatedly collapses Marx, Marxism, communism, Bolshevism, atheism, revolutionary violence, and whatever else he currently dislikes into one undifferentiated satanic blob. Apparently historical specificity is another symptom of decadence.
The funniest part is that Kirk spends the book attacking the "Knowledge Class" for substituting slogans for thought. He then spends hundreds of pages doing precisely that. His opponents are not people whose arguments need to be understood; they are symptoms of an intellectual disease. Once someone has been assigned the appropriate category—modernist, egalitarian, materialist, revolutionary, progressive, etc.—the case is closed.
And this is where the enormous quantity of literary and philosophical references becomes almost comical. Kirk has read these people. He has read a lot of people. But reading someone and understanding them are apparently two different activities.
Burke, at least, gets something resembling serious treatment because Burke's entire intellectual vocabulary is basically Kirk's native habitat: tradition, prescription, prudence, inherited institutions, suspicion of abstraction. But elsewhere the great thinkers of Western civilization are treated less like thinkers than like an enormous cabinet of decorative furniture. Quote them, invoke their authority, and move on.
There is no real engagement with opposing arguments because Kirk has built himself an intellectual escape hatch: if reality contradicts the moral order he has already identified, reality is simply decadent. Evidence becomes confirmation. Counterexamples become symptoms. Disagreement becomes pathology. History becomes a morality play in which Kirk already knows who the villains are.
The result is not conservative philosophy so much as conservatism as a self-sealing intellectual system.
And the prose, while undeniably polished, makes this worse. Everything is delivered in the portentous voice of a man announcing the collapse of Western civilization for the 47th consecutive time. Every ordinary social development becomes evidence of civilizational decline. Every preferred tradition becomes a repository of wisdom. Every disliked development becomes a symptom of spiritual pathology.
There are plenty of authors whose politics I find repellent but whose books I would still recommend because they force you to think. This isn't one of them. Kirk doesn't seem particularly interested in the possibility that his opponents might have understood something he didn't.
He doesn't argue with modernity.
He pronounces judgment upon it.
And then he quotes somebody dead to make it sound like an argument.
1/5. I picked this up at random because the title and cover looked interesting. One of the more spectacular examples I've encountered of a book being much more impressed with its own intellectual pedigree than its actual thinking.
Fuck this book.
March 12, 2022
This book was written ahead of its time and the author gave potent universal observations that are applicable today which makes it more worrisome how less the world has progressed from the 80s. Another way to look it at is - how many shock absorbers were cultivated to delay the change generated by the communion of minds that might have jumped this bandwagon only to push things forward.
Upsetting and reassuring at the same time, there have been philosophers, thinkers and educators who chose silence as the common human agency operates in antagonism to transformation. Immoral to rip generations of their ethical and virtuous development as staying at parallelism with criticism of the happenings and trends only renders cognitive evolution.
Upsetting and reassuring at the same time, there have been philosophers, thinkers and educators who chose silence as the common human agency operates in antagonism to transformation. Immoral to rip generations of their ethical and virtuous development as staying at parallelism with criticism of the happenings and trends only renders cognitive evolution.
October 5, 2022
America’s Augustine Age?
Renewal of ancient constitutions and neglected mores.
Pax Romana.
The American Mission
“The American mission… is to reconcile the claims of order and the claims of freedom to maintain, in an age of ferocious ideologies and fantastic schemes, a model of justice.”
The Illusion of Human Rights
Prospects for the American Family
Prospects for American Education
Can Virtue be Taught?
The Conservative Purpose of Liberal Education
Humane Learning on the Age of the Computer
The Tension of Order and Tension in the University
The Age of Sentiments
“It is painful enough to be governed by other people’s reasoning, without being governed by their sentiments.”
Television.
The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky
Renewal of ancient constitutions and neglected mores.
Pax Romana.
The American Mission
“The American mission… is to reconcile the claims of order and the claims of freedom to maintain, in an age of ferocious ideologies and fantastic schemes, a model of justice.”
The Illusion of Human Rights
Prospects for the American Family
Prospects for American Education
Can Virtue be Taught?
The Conservative Purpose of Liberal Education
Humane Learning on the Age of the Computer
The Tension of Order and Tension in the University
The Age of Sentiments
“It is painful enough to be governed by other people’s reasoning, without being governed by their sentiments.”
Television.
The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things Are Written on the Sky
December 29, 2024
There is too much to say about this collection of Kirk’s speeches. The main thing to know is that, despite being decades old, they remain prophetic and applicable in a stunning feat of prescient wisdom.
I came to this book for insight into education, but was rewarded to discover the foundations of an inspiring, conservative, and “Augustinian” vision for America that is not partisan or narrow.
I came to this book for insight into education, but was rewarded to discover the foundations of an inspiring, conservative, and “Augustinian” vision for America that is not partisan or narrow.
October 15, 2020
Much better than I expected, Kirk weaves a unique tapestry of ancient philosophy, post-enlightenment theory, and contemporary trends to make prescriptions & predictions for the future.
The section on Virtue Ethics is largely supported by current Moral Psychology research.
The section on Virtue Ethics is largely supported by current Moral Psychology research.
October 5, 2022
Collection of essays that mix a shock over lost values with practical solutions for the future. Perhaps most useful today as a perspective reset for just how far we've moved from the norms of previous generations. What would Kirk say now?
Read
September 30, 2019Listened to this as an audiobook.
September 11, 2020
A touch dated because of the many references to Ronald Reagan. Still, many of the challenges brought up by Kirk have only become more relevant since the 80's.
October 31, 2020
The surprising part was how witty Kirk’s writing is. I couldn’t stop laughing as he was describing his battle against a TV in his house.
February 1, 2021
Some ideas here are timeless such as the debate around the meaning of civic virtue and what makes a good education. Most of the specifics are dated, a few of them aged horribly.
March 23, 2021
Kirk was prescient and would be sadly shocked that the observations he made in 1987 are even more true in 2021.
November 14, 2024
A minor Conservative classic. Full of gems.
March 13, 2025
Kirk’s ability to reference ideas and quote books makes me want to throw my tv out the window.
March 23, 2011
An ominous work, short and true, unfortunately
August 29, 2016
Russell Kirk, the original "reform conservative," in 1987.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews