“Triumphant social boredom is at once death and hell for a civilization,” Russell Kirk writes in the final chapter of The Conservative Mind. “So the conservative seeks to look beyond humanitarian sociology. Not to the statistician, then, but to the poet, do conservatives turn for insight.”

The roots of conservatism and of all intellectual discourse thus rest in the poet and, as Kirk would implicitly argue, in the philosopher. Turning to the poet rather than the statistician would, for modern lawmakers, be totally impracticable. What do Frances Harper and John Milton have to do with federal budgets? But Kirk’s point should be taken that ideas drive politics. And the most compelling ideas, those dealing with questions of human nature and the like, which have to be addressed long before ever getting to what a statistician’s offers, are to be found in the humanities.