Why we love Burke and why we
(sometimes) wish we didn’t

There has been a lot of talk recently about Edmund Burke, the 18th century English politician and writer. This surprises us, since we don’t  remember anyone talking about Burke outside of the academy for most of our fifty-six years. It seems to have been inspired by a desire to make our current President seem conservative, or at least not as liberal as his detractors claim.

For our part, however, we have always been a big fan of Burke, and not just because we were an English major and he happens to be a great prose stylist with no peer among his fellow politicians. No, we love Burke because he was a lover with a warm and generous heart.

The word “conservative” can mean a lot of different things. There are the Wall Street conservatives, champions of capitalism and the cold logic of the market. There are Buckley conservatives, strong on national defense and advocates of prudence in foreign affairs.  There are social conservatives. These days there are even Neo-cons, a neologism that announces its contradictions beforehand.

There is another type of conservative, however, which we will identify as the Aristotelian conservative. This type is motivated by a generous love for existent values. It is not based on the love of money or of morality. Aristotle called money “sterile,” and morality cannot be generous by its very nature.

No, it consists of a warmhearted love of nature and what it perceives to be the rationality of the human condition. The first of these is a common trait in Aristotle and Burke and all manifestations of the type. They are in love with the beauty and plenitude of nature, and also its functionality. They are the Country Mice. Their love is a generous love because it is not in any sense self-serving. It is also a worshipful love because it assumes the goodness of nature and Him who made it.

The second love is a little harder to describe but very prominent in Burke. Liberals call it reactionary, but it can also be thought of it as a synthetic position. Basically it boils down to this: in any time and place men of an Aristotelian temperament will find themselves confronted with resistance to the things they hold dear. Their rhetorical ploy is to attempt to overcome this resistance by claiming that it has already been folded into existence.

Aristotle encountered this resistance in his own teacher. It was Plato’s Idealism that led him down the path of trying to describe “the good” as a ratio of intellectual and material causes. The resistance that fuels Idealism leads to the annihilation of existent values and thus to nothingness. Aristotle tried to overcome this nothingness by incorporating it into present values.

Aristotelian conservatives are defined by how they deal with resistance to the things they love and to the nihilism inherent in resistance. Locke’s philosophy was inspired by Descartes; Kant by Hume; Hegel by Rousseau. Burke, of course, was reacting to the literal depredations of the Jacobins, a source of horror to many of his time. By opposing them, he was opposing any nascent Jacobinism in his own country, as he perceived it in a misbegotten sermon he’d had the misfortune to hear.

Like Aristotle, his basic argument is that the complaints and resistance of the radicals have already been built into being and the values and social arrangements that exist. Radicals love to caricature being and its defenders, the most famous example being the allegory of the cave, which suggests that anyone who finds value in present being is simply benighted.

Like Plato, liberals down through the ages have been eager to depict themselves as the sons of light and enlightenment. Since conservatives pose a threat to this identity, the liberal impulse is question the intelligence of conservatives. In Plato’s dialogues, for example—which are after all stories—the liberal Socrates always triumphs easily over his drudging foes and antagonists in the end.

He triumphs by caricaturing what his opponents believe. In modern parlance, he turns all conservatives into Wall-cons or So-cons or Neo-Cons because these identities are self-evidently limited and easy to ridicule and dismiss. Interestingly, the one person who does not make an appearance in Plato’s dialogues is the greatest student of all, Aristotle.

Why? Possibly because his philosophy is not so easy to caricature. He agrees with Plato that Intellect is divine and happiness consists of untroubled contemplation of the good. But Aristotle claimed that the goodness of intellect was already present and actual in existence, as seen for instance in the beauty of nature, or in the golden mean. The goodness of being is not a mere illusion, as the Idealists claim.

It is this caricaturing instinct of liberals of all ages that Burke is striving against in his essay on the French Revolution. His argument boils down to the idea that the resistance and passion for justice seen in the revolutionaries has already been folded into being and present institutions. In other words, present wisdom is not always quite as benighted as the Idealists want us to think.

These two loves make Burke very lovable—love of nature and love of the wisdom manifested in present arrangements.  Love of nature speaks for itself, since nature is very lovable. The other love appeals to our sense of fairness. Burke is addressing the caricatures of the radicals in an ingenious and creative manner, inspiring gratitude in those who are like-minded and weary of being caricatured themselves. For this, we love him.

But we also have to admit we almost wish we didn’t. There can be problems with trying to hold on to the value of that which exists. Many carefully-wrought and sincere arguments were made in this country for the continuation of slavery, and, once ended, the continuation of the “separate but equal” fable. It was the liberal position—the position of resistance and insistence upon justice—that overcame the inertia of these arguments in the end and led to more humane arrangements.

Perhaps similarly, we now find ourselves perplexed over the healthcare debate. We are loath by nature to turn over the system we now have to the radicals who want to run everything from the top down and provide equal care to all Americans, since we know it will lead to a decline in quality, not to mention a loss of freedom, both for health care customers and for providers; and yet we are not insensible to the appeal of idealism. There are many who are poor because they cannot be rich. Should they not receive the same coronary bypass as the rich man, and do they really have to be crushed under the burden of runaway medical expenses every time they step into a hospital or doctor’s office?

Unresolved in ourselves is this tension between a love of present arrangements and their goodness and the need to go beyond them for the sake of justice and possibly something better. Some of Burke’s most ardent arguments seem silly to us today because we are Americans and can see the limitations of the social arrangements he was determined to uphold in the light of historical development and change.

There have been improvements in many areas, and these improvements would not have occurred without the impetus to change provided by the idealists and their resistance. Still, we find ourselves naturally inclined not to let go, not just yet, while there is good to be recognized and rewarded.  

 

 

"Texts" and context

It’s quite amazing to see the degree to which Modernism and its rear-guard step-child, Postmodernism, have annihilated context. No, the “text” does not exist in some sort of magic vacuum, as if it came into being from pure nothingness. Every text has a context, and there’s the rub for our would-be moralizing tale spinners. Their love of pure and simple valuations requires them to negate context in order to get to a bare-naked “text.”

There are countless examples of this loss of context in current academic discourse. It is as if we had forgotten history in our rush to satisfy our moral vanity and make ourselves seem like Zarathustras of racism and sexism and whatever. We were so busy running away from Hegel and the historical method that we ran right into a benightedness that actually seems to pride itself in its ignorance of context and shadings of value—Zinn and Chomsky being models of the type.

The game now is to show how righteous and morally superior we are by simplifying history to the point where it is no longer history but merely a story of savage indignation. Case in point: the ongoing attempt to depict the Bible as pro-slavery. Here is an offending “text” from Leviticus: “As for your male and female slaves whom you may have, you may buy male and female slaves from the nations that are round about you.” Heroically, the Postmodern critic seizes upon this scarlet verse and turns into a synecdoche. See! The Bible advocates slavery.

Or how about this really juicy tidbit from Ephesians? “Slaves, be obedient to your masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ, not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” Doesn’t this “text” prove that the Bible not only advocated slavery but even engaged in subtle slavery apologetics? Can’t you just read between the lines and see the self-serving “rhetorical strategies” of the writer, O Dionysian interpreter?

Where to begin? So many candles to light against the smug darkness. Let’s start with the simple fact that slavery was a universal condition of existence at the time those verses were written—and indeed, right up to “modern” times. Households and farms did not have machines to make their chores light. In the past, slaves did the work that machines do today. Slavery was the rule, not the exception, in all civilized as well as uncivilized nations.

For that matter, let us not forget that most of the population of Western Europe consisted of “serfs” up until the Middle Ages. In Russia, serfs made up 40% of the population as late as the 1850s. Serfs are not, strictly speaking, slaves, but they were servants, and serfdom is no less unthinkable today than slavery. And in the West, even middle-class households had servants to help with the chores.

The main driver for the abolition of slavery was the Industrial Revolution, not the superior virtue of humanities professors. Today we have machines to do our bidding, making slaves both unnecessary and economically unfeasible. To get one’s dander up over the existence of slavery in the past is to annihilate the context of history for the sake of a simple story that glorifies ourselves and our superior virtue when there is no reason whatsoever for us to feel superior.

The reason there have been no major wars in the West since WWII is because the armaments, and particularly the atom bomb, have become too potent to make war seem attractive, not because modern man suddenly became enlightened and shed the bellicosity he had exhibited throughout the preceding centuries. Similarly, the reason we no longer countenance slavery is because technology has made it unnecessary, not because we are morally superior to our ancestors.

Leviticus simply states that buying slaves from neighboring nations is permissible. It does not say that slavery is commendable or right. The verse reflects the universal condition of the time in which it was written. To smugly condemn it from the Modern vantage point, when slavery is no longer necessary or even desirable, is to annihilate history as if it had never been written. To what end? Simply to demonstrate our moral superiority.

The same Bible that contains the offending verse from Leviticus also says: “Is this not the fast that I choose? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?...Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you, and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.”

This stirring liberation text has virtually no peer or even counterpart in the ancient world. Any balanced discussion of the Bible and slavery should include consideration of such verses. But they complicate things for those who seek shelter in simple valuations and the sweeping negations that are used to prop up moral vanity. A posture of savage indignation requires simple valuations, but history is not simple; therefore it must be annihilated.  

The self-glorifying abuse of the verse from Ephesians involves a different kind of contextual negation—not of history but of cultural givens. There was a time when we could take cultural givens as givens and reach a sensible, well-rounded judgment with regard to such “texts.” But now that the “texts” have been stripped of their context, all sensibility has gone out of academic discourse.

The cultural given for the Ephesians passage is the principle of submission. According to the Bible, the fall of man and cause of his unhappiness was rebellion against God. It follows, then, that the path back to happiness is to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Just as Christ submitted to God’s will and the cross and was rewarded with life, so slaves are advised to submit to masters and wives to husbands, not to empower masters and husbands, or, God forbid, corporations and “empire,” but as a matter of spiritual discipline.

Of course if God is negated, summarily and airily dismissed, as he is in the modern academy, then this sensible, logical context simply vanishes, as it if it had never existed. Centuries and ages of contextual understanding evaporate under the withering heat of Nihilism and its extreme subjectivity, which is necessary to sustain the heroic identity of the superman and ubercritic seen in Postmodern discourse.

This is the situation in which we now find ourselves. Humanities departments churn out volumes of smug but benighted value judgments from which all sensible context has virtually disappeared. And those who are repelled by this foul tide are cowed into submission, not by Postmodern arguments themselves, which are generally childish and shallow, but by the magnitude of the challenge of trying to recreate a substantive context that took millennia to come into being and now seems lost.

The Postmoderns are bulletproof in their benightedness. Doesn’t matter what you say to them; they smile condescendingly as if to let you know that they have gone ahead of the rest of us—the “common herd,” as their prophets like to say—into the world of light and no longer need to burden themselves with such mundane things as context and history.

It is as if they had liberated themselves from everything that is interesting and true.

 

 

Red-winged blackbird

On our way home from work last night, wearied by another long and dreary corporation Monday, we spotted one of the exquisite little creatures flying up from a rivulet through a meadow and perching on the green grass not twenty feet from our passenger window.

What caught our eye first was a burst of red against a gray June sky. Everything that had been out of focus was suddenly back in. And believe us when we say that everything was out of focus. Something about Mondays—hard to “reconstruct the thought-world within”; hard to resuscitate the notions of reality that make reality acceptable and provide a positive focus to one’s energies.

The biggest notion of all, of course, is God. As we get older, it is our experience that this notion becomes another notion to us. We become sadly conscious of the notion as a notion, as well as of the necessity of actively choosing it, by hook or by crook, to prevent this life from becoming inexpressibly wearisome, as Ecclesiastes would say.

On Mondays, we confess, we often lack the moral vigor to make this vital choice for ourselves. God can seem very far away for a variety of reasons, including, no doubt, our own sin and limitations. Thanks be to God, then, when nature intervenes on our behalf. The blackbird was our emissary. Its mission was to save us, to reintegrate our crumbling world.

Without going quite as far as Wordsworth or Thoreau—without glorifying nature—we will say gratefully that nature is often our savior in dark and difficult times. When God seems most distant, nature seems to have more power than any other thing we know to bring him near again.

More power than kindness? More power than pity? Not if these things could be found in their pure state. Kindness and pity are human behaviors, and the vessels are flawed. Whatever man was meant to be, the image has lost the refreshing purity of God’s goodness in it.

Or so it seems to us anyway, in our Monday musings. Which is why we sing a song of praise to the red-winged blackbird. Come, little blackbird, come—especially when you are most needed.

 

 

Unanswered questions

Hamlet keeps coming up. That’s because he asks a universal question: whether it is nobler “to be”—to attempt to obtain being or identity in the way of the world—or “not to be”—to resist the world and its self-seeking violence.

Hamlet’s dilemma is the universal Christian dilemma. Christ said that if any man would follow him, he would have to take up his cross and deny himself. He would have to choose between the sincere love seen on the cross, in which there was no selfishness or self-interest, and the way of the world, which is the way of vanity.

Hamlet’s father had been murdered. Not only was the offense heinous, but it was also personal. Which then was nobler? To imitate Christ and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in his mind—that is, to remain lowly and meek like Christ himself in the face of his enemies—or to seek being in the world by taking up arms and making himself into an avenging angel?

This has nothing to do, by the way, with the temptation he expresses subsequently to kill himself and exit his misery by his own dagger. “To be or not to be” is not the choice between and suicide and life. “To be” means to obtain being in the world—a desirable identity. But what if there is a terrible injustice, like the one Hamlet discovered? How is a desirable identity to be obtained in such instances?

The world offers an obvious answer: through revenge. Hamlet feels himself to have been wronged. Every honeyed word from Claudius’s lips is perceived by him as a mockery of his existence and integrity. The court’s untimely revels make him feel his nothingness; and according to the human way of thinking, the way to overcome that nothingness is to avenge his father’s death, as his father’s ghost seems to  implore him to do.

Human beings are uniquely aware of their nothingness, which is hateful to them. More than anything, they want to overcome it and obtain “being.” They want to justify their existence in their own minds; but the only way to justify themselves through human action is by comparing themselves with their fellow beings—that is, by diminishing the being or identity of another.

The will to dominate is the way of the world. Conservatives loathe liberals and vice versa because they link their being or identity quite naturally to their worldviews and notions of value. Thus it seems to them that the only way to preserve their being is to attack and diminish the enemies who appear to be deliberately robbing them of being.

Christ offered a different way to obtain being: “Love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you.” It is not being-in-the world that is sought through a Christ-like love but being in the mind of God. A desirable identity is obtained by remaining humble and meek and refraining from violence because “God is love” and such behaviors have great value. God frowns on those who take judgment into their own hands and seek retribution.

Hamlet’s question, then, is ultimately one of faith. Do we believe that we have the power to make the world right and to justify ourselves and our notions of value by taking arms against our enemies, real or perceived? Or do we believe that God and his unselfish love reign supreme over human affairs, raising up the humble and meek and casting down proud rulers from their thrones? Which of these two worldviews informs our being?

The question confronting Hamlet was whether to seek being by clinging to the world and its violence or by clinging to the meekness of Christ. Make no mistake: violence is the way of the world. The athlete who uses the will to power to dominate his opponent has employed violence. The politician who tells lies or half-truths in order to win the election has used violence. The murmuring that goes on about others behind closed doors is violence.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” because the court and its power are based on violence and self-interest. Hamlet’s sincere love for his father sensitizes him to the insincerity of the political class. He may have been unaware of the true nature of the court and its outward shows of nobility while he was a youth—while he was free to be the flower of the court, as Ophelia describes him.

But his loss of freedom and introduction to the dilemma of being came with the death of his father. Hamlet could not help seeing the mendacity of the court and its brief show of mourning when he himself was in true mourning. Political statements that he might have glossed over in the past now struck him in their naked self-interest. The honeyed words that fell from Claudius’s mouth were like hot lead pouring through his veins.

An interesting example of this endemic insincerity is Polonius, who had long ago adopted the watery character of the quisling. Polonius places his faith in the world, seeking being in positions of political power; but in reality, this misplaced faith results in the annihilation of being, since he must bend his identity to the will and objectives of his political masters.

An adept politician like Polonius learns how to clothe self-interest in noble-sounding sentiment.  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” sounds like noble advice, with its rolling cadence—until we remember that Christ said, “Lend freely, expecting nothing in return.” Only in the light of Christ and his gracious love does the selfishness of Polonius’s proverb stand out in full relief, since his true objective was to prevent his son from damaging the family fortune.

An even better example is the proverb we sometimes see on greeting cards: “To thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” In reality, it doesn’t “follow” at all. After all, Claudius was being true to himself and his ambition when he poured poison in his brother’s ear. We get a clearer notion of what Polonius means by being “true to himself” later on in the same scene when he sends someone to spy on his son and trick him into doing wrong.  

“Be true to yourself” would be a true and noble sentiment if the “self” we were being true to were the one that loves sincere love. Unfortunately, as Polonius’s actions show, we mortals have two selves: the one that loves love for and the one that loves oneself. And for whatever reason, it seems that the latter love is too often ascendant in human behavior to make Polonius’s proverb truly noble.

The world as it is seen in the court in Demark is marked by egotism, self-interest, and cynicism. The problem for Hamlet, as he seeks true being and a desirable identity, is that this is the world in which he lives and moves and has his being. Hamlet is no less torn than Polonius between sincere love and self-love, as his famous soliloquy shows. Every mortal is torn in this way.

But it seems to Hamlet, as he watches the revels of the wedding falling hard upon the funeral of his father, that he literally has no being. Those revels are a repudiation of his being, which at that moment is absorbed in mourning. He manages to ask the right question: is it nobler to suffer his nothingness in the mind, signing himself with the cross and Christ, or to seek his sign with vengeance and a sword?

Unfortunately, he chooses the wrong answer. It is his sincere love for his father that makes Hamlet different and gives him a desirable identity. If he were as cynical as Claudius or Polonius, or as slothful as his mother, he would not be torn; he would not be afflicted with the hateful burden of his nothingness. What seems to him like nothingness is in fact a powerful identity, as seen in the eagerness of Claudius to wheedle him into putting aside his weeds of mourning, which remind the usurper of his own perfidy.

As long as he was clinging to the cross and was willing to suffer in his mind, his identity was pure. He may have seemed strange to Polonius and others, but at least he was set apart from their selfishness. But when he decided to take arms, he lost this purity and became just like them—he became violent. In fact his violence was worse than their violence, because it was done unwillingly, and therefore poorly.

Hamlet had to work himself up into a self-righteous lather before he could take arms against Claudius, which is why he could not kill him while he was kneeling in prayer. But a man who has worked himself up into a lather is no longer capable of acting rationally. A true quisling like Polonius never gets angry, and thus he never blunders. Hamlet is not like Polonius—he truly loves sincere love—but when he tries to make himself the defender of sincere love, he stumbles badly and accidentally kills the wrong man.

We can’t quite bring ourselves to call him an innocent man. He was spying on Hamlet, after all. But Hamlet’s example illustrates that those who love sincere love should not try to impose their being on the world—because they do it badly. Hamlet actually destroys his identity by taking arms against his sea of troubles. The more he tries to put the world right through his put-on madness, the more he blunders, and the worse his reputation becomes.

Or forget the bauble, reputation. It is the inward man that is scarred and ultimately ruined through the vanity of thinking we can make the world right by taking arms. Men are fallible beings and cannot judge infallibly. Hamlet thought he was judging rightly when he struck out at the figure behind the curtain—killing the murderer of his father—but in his rage he made a terrible misjudgment.

He was made to pay a terrible price for this misjudgment when he happened upon Ophelia’s funeral and saw himself revealed in the eyes of Laertes as a cruel and selfish murderer, not only of his father but of his sister. Hamlet leaping into the grave is the nadir of nothingness. The real man within, in love with sincere love, has been betrayed by the outer man who sought being in the world through violence.

The question has not changed for us today—not at all. If we love sincere love, and we trust in God to act on our behalf and resist the temptation to take up arms against our seas of troubles, then we are certain to suffer, just as Christ suffered on the cross. But to act on our own behalf is to act selfishly. There is no way around the conundrum.

Do we believe it is nobler to suffer? Or if we take up our sword, are we prepared of the consequences, including possibly the loss of being? That is the question.