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Edmund
Burke’s Conservatism
notes from The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and
the Birth of Right and Left
All
the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded
ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the
heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the
defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to a dignity in
our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and
antiquated fashion -- Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790) Thomas
Paine’s Liberalism For Thomas Paine, Burke’s great antagonist in
the debate between liberalism and conservatism,
the original state of nature serves as the just foundation
upon which society, and then government, is based. Men are all created
to be equal individuals with basic rights.
Public good is measured by the accretion
of good for individuals. Society, while un-necessary to the
individual’s existence, is necessary for his happiness. Natural society
existed at first without government, but over time, vice
resulted from the relaxation of the constant demands of necessity, so
government was created. We
enter into society and create a government to protect those rights
which we do not have the power to protect as individuals alone.
We become citizens by accepting the obligation to protect the civil
rights of others. In so doing, we protect our own. Above all society protects our right to
choice: the freedom to shape our own future un-coerced.
Government is a compact, not between the ruler and the ruled, but
between the people themselves. Power
willingly granted is legitimate and only government by consent is just.
All delegated power is trust; all assumed power is usurpation.
Monarchy and aristocracy both originated from usurpation and are
prolonged by the root of evil: hereditary right. Revolution,
according to Paine, results not in the dissolution
of society but in its restoration
to the purity of nature for the purpose of forming a new, more just
government. The new physics describes a nature consisting of
distinct and separable forces acting on distinct and separable objects
according to rational and therefore discernable rules. Nature
can be understood by breaking it down to its simplest parts and tracing
it to its beginning. Society is a function of nature,
government of art. Paine’s
faith in universal principles insists
that he under emphasize patriotism and duty to the homeland. The universal cause of freedom is at the centre of his philosophy. “My
country is the world and my religion is to do good.”
He envisioned a universal society unburdened by national prejudices.
His obligation was to his fellow man, not to community or country. Edmund
Burke’s Conservatism Burke does not deny the natural equality of man, but this
quality does not necessitate social equality. Instead, nature makes
necessary some inequality via time,
custom, succession. “All men have equal rights but not to
equal things.” To Burke, equality should not
be the goal of politics. Social peace, prosperity and stability are
more important for everyone. Attempts to level society never
equalize. Instead the great middle will tend to predominate, and their
leaders will provide only a disorderly rule of the unfit. Leveling removes respect for authority and social
obligation. The idea of eliminating
social distinctions is a monstrous fiction which only serves to
embitter a necessary inequality which has naturally evolved over time.
Distinction should go to those best suited for power. One component of
that suitability has to do with property and leisure which both tend to
be inherited. Social mobility is possible in English society, but raw intelligence and financial power are not as
important to leadership as knowledge of history and tradition, a sense
of people and, above all, prudence. Everyone is born with the
seeds of leadership in them, but cultivating these seeds requires a natural aristocracy. Societies
should seek to be well governed rather than playing out the
implications of abstract political equality whose society would elevate
those poorly qualified to govern. The division
of society into classes composes a strong barrier against the
excesses of despotism by establishing habits
of restraint in the ruler and the
governed. Removing these traditional social restraints would
force government alone to maintain the peace by brute force. Parchment principles are not nearly as powerful as
the restraints of habit and custom that grow from group identity and
loyalty. Our goal in life should be to seek the happiness
found by virtue, no matter the condition into which we are born. Social connections are essential to
liberty. Breaking them apart leaves the
individual subject to the brute power of the state and to each other.
Leveling eliminates respect for authority and social obligations.
Looking past conventional institutions and accepting only abstraction
as a source of authority would corrode political and social life. Government
does not derive its legitimacy from its origins. It develops through
time along lines which benefit the people and therefore point towards
the good. Society originated in barbarism, but over time society
developed a more mature form in its ongoing response to the exigencies
of the moment. It mellows into legality. Burke on Man
in the State of Nature Rejection of
the importance of beginnings separates Burke from most
political thinkers in the Western tradition who believe that foundation
is a crucial political moment which shapes the future character of a
regime. Burke argues that a regime takes
shape over time. What is
important is not the origin but the current shape and function of
government. Burke blurs nature and artifice. Art is man’s nature. By
denying Paine’s distinction, he closes off the reversion to the
original state of nature. Burke respects nature and society as elements
of a single human society. Regimes are built
on conventions and are natural because humans use art. By looking
past history in search of nature, the radicals ignore their best
possible sources of wisdom and instruction. Man has always been a
social creature, living together with others in an organized society
with government. Institutions
of society are often the contrivances of deep wisdom, not the rights of
man. A people are
joined in a single corporation which is wholly artificial and made by
agreement. When that compact is broken, they cease to be a people. A good patriot always
considers how to make the most of the existing materials of a country. It is beyond our power to make the world anew.
Working with existing materials requires knowledge of the history and
character of one’s own society. Statesmanship
is not geometry or physics. It is an experimental science
only pursued with prudence. Learning from experiments takes time. History offers lessons no statesman can ignore. Burke
rebukes Enlightenment philosophes for over emphasizing reason and
forgetting the sympathies and sentiments of a people. We must tend to our moral imagination or it will
direct reason towards violence and disorder. We
can be deterred from vice by love of our neighbors, habits of peace,
and pride in our community. Communal traditions play to our sentimental
attachments and help prevent political violence. However,
when natural revulsion to mob violence
is overcome, a catastrophe is surely at hand. We revert to our original naked, shivering nature. Triumph
of the rights of man leads to the loss of all natural sense of right
and wrong. The system of chivalry once championed these
sentiments, these illusions which make power gentle and obedience
liberal. Burke and
Social Evolution Burke denies
that any political system is somehow natural to man, but we
can best guide political change by looking to nature, not to the realm
of physics as Paine’s system does, but to a system of
inheritance whereby biological organisms pass
traits on to the next generation. Just as in nature, we pass
on a ‘permanent body composed of transitory parts’: a
model of species, a people embedded in a larger context, not
mere individuals. This cultural transmission accounts for the life
cycle. We don’t reinvent the wheel each generation. Most innovators are
usually imprudent. Political institutions and practices are a charge, a
gift from the past owed to the future. These institutions have pedigree
and illustrious ancestors. Change is
inevitable. It is the most powerful law of nature, but evolution
should be imperceptible-- just as it is in our own nature:
gentle, gradual change; evolution, not revolution. Prescription is the
art of adapting established practices to changing times. The
Citizen’s Freedom of Choice and Obligation to the State Paine argues
that we enter into society and create a government to protect those
rights which we don’t have the power to protect as individuals alone.
We become citizens by accepting the obligation to protect the civil
rights of others, and in so doing, we protect our own rights. Above all
society protects our right to choice: the freedom to shape our own
future un-coerced by the power of the state.
Government is a compact not between the ruler and the ruled but between
the people themselves. How central
should choice be to political life? Richard
Price had argued that the Glorious Revolution had established the
fundamental rights of the people, acting through Parliament, to choose
their own governors and frame government for themselves.
Burke attacked the theory of rule by
consent which lay at the heart of Enlightenment liberalism. To
Burke, The Glorious Revolution had not established the right of a
people to govern themselves; instead, England had avoided the
establishment of a republic and preserved the ancient constitution of
government which had secured laws and liberties. Burke
defends representative institutions as part of the regime, not as the
whole. The people have a voice, but a means
exists to subject the public will to prudent leadership. Pure
democracy carries no principle of restraint and would result in a
tyranny of the majority and the danger of arbitrary rule. For Burke,
the focus on choice amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the
human condition. People join a society not
through choice but through birth into a family, station and nation
which all exert inescapable demands on him. The place of
every human determines his duty. Human obligations involving family,
community, the nation, and religious faith are not chosen. Political
and social life begin
from these, not from an act of choice. We enter a world that already
exists. The basic facts and character of
human procreation demand obligations from parents and subsequently the
child as well. There is a
pre-disposed order to things which begins with the family,
not the individual, and moves up towards society. So
the family itself becomes the target of genuinely radical liberal
revolutionaries. Through
prescription, the slow adaptation of a government to existing
conditions, the species, not the individual, nor the majority, acts
wisely. The most important facts about society are not the result of
anyone’s choice. The Social
Contract For Burke, the social contract is not an agreement
made between people but a description of binding relations: “a great
arrangement”. The strongest moral obligations
are never the results of options. The contract does not establish the
grounds on which society may be dissolved. It describes the
relations of parts. Burke’s
conceptions of the rights of man are practical rights for the benefit
of society. Some
benefits actually limit freedom. We cannot live in a society if we
follow our desires and passions without restraint. So society
guarantees some liberties but also issues some restraints, the balance
of which is a matter of prudence, not absolute principle. Rights are relations, not individual entitlements.
The purpose of government is not to protect the rights of the
individual but to supply the wants of the people. The representative is
not simply the voice of the majority, but he owes the people his
judgment as well. In so doing, a prudent government makes sure that
each man has the right to have his needs served by the action of the
state. The
Citizen’s Duty and Patriotism Burke
emphasizes patriotism as a key aspect of the social and generational
context of politics: just as we feel loyalty and a duty to protect our
family, so do we shoulder responsibility for our community and nation.
The impetus to duty issues from these feelings of love and
responsibility. Reform should begin from a
position of gratitude for what the nation provides us. The
statesman must sustain these vital attachments of the people to their
country. In Paine’s utopia every country would be more or less the same
if all abided by principles of freedom and justice. Burke argued that a
nation’s historical experience defines its forward path. The nation
builds on its past accomplishments. The
nation is not a mere locality but the ancient order into which we are
born. On
Capitalism and Our Obligation to the Poor Paine
believed that free trade would uproot traditional social and political
relationships and allow men to pursue their material well-being free of
the obstacles of prejudice. Burke believed in free trade because
regulation by the government interferes with an economy in ways which
are beyond the understanding of legislators. To
Burke, the laws of commerce are similar to the laws of nature
themselves. A free economy sustains social stability and
therefore its wealth, some of which should be used to help the poor,
but this is a private obligation, not a
government responsibility. The
pursuit of profit is the grand cause of prosperity for all. Poverty
is the result of economic dislocations made worse by government
attempts to regulate the economy.
Let society restrain the vices which result from free trade through
moral and legal opinion. The statesman must strive to preserve the
dynamism of the economy with all its imperfections.
The cost of remedying the situation of the impoverished would do worse
damage to society as a whole and result in far worse suffering for the
poor. The needs of the poor should be addressed instead
through charities amply supported by the wealthy and the noble. The
government’s actions would never work and would disrupt the social
order in the process. (Adam Smith read and heartily approved of Burke’s
opinion.) Paine argued
that free trade and capitalism would do much to disrupt established
order. He also made the case for something like the welfare system. The
government had the obligation to provide for old age, post natal care, education,
pensions, even funeral expenses which could be financed by ‘ground
rent’ on property. He argued that private charity could not hope to
remedy the extent of the misery. Burke argued
that obligations are functions not of our choice but of our deeply
embedded place in the social order. The duty
for the care of the poor belongs to the rich, not the government. Reason and
Prescription According to
Paine, insights into political science enable citizens to free
themselves from countless ancient prejudices, but Burke would argue
that governing human communities is far too complex a task to be
simplified into pseudo-scientific questions and resolved through
logical thought experiments. Due to the
complexity of human nature and the insufficiency of choice, reason’s potential is limited. By ignoring
sentiments and attachments that move people in politics, statesman must
confront the most difficult challenges when coping with the people’s
irrational moods. Conclusions should be drawn from experience, so
politics is an experimental science. Practice trumps theory. Politics
must not be mistaken for metaphysics. Governing is not about proving a
point; rather,
it is about advancing the interests and happiness of the nation. The abstract
precision of physics, the schemes of visionary politicians anatomizing
the doctrine of free government is less helpful than making choices
based on simple moral prudence. Political
wisdom is incapable of precise definition outside of the social context
of the situation. Effective choices can be wrong in theory but correct
in practice, combining theory with an appraisal of the specific
circumstances. Politics is particular: concrete and particular. “I must
see the thing. I must see the man.” Human nature and citizens in civil
life come in a wide variety of conditions and in specific situations.
They have “crucial differences and attachments.” Burke
ridicules the French radicals’ decision to divide the provinces into
precise departments, crushing all attachment to the community. Burke’s
moderation rejects anarchy as well
as tyranny. Any radical re-arrangement of
society lays the seeds of extremism. Extremists are perfectionists, and
there is no perfection in politics. In practice their rule
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, justifying extremes that ignore
anything that doesn’t fit their theories. |
