Pointless suffering

"Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes" is a review of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein. Excerpts from the considerably longer review:

The ninth of November, 1799—the 18th of Brumaire in the calendar of the French Revolution—is often remembered as the day the Revolution ended. Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Italy and scourge of Egypt, engineered the dissolution of the executive committee of the French Republic. The following day he entered the lower house of the French Assembly with a military escort. The deputies, recognizing a coup, cried “down with the dictator” and roughly manhandled the great general until he retreated. But troops soon cleared the chamber. Napoleon was made first consul and granted expansive powers. A new constitution followed, animated—according to one of its authors, the powerful Abbé Sieyès—by the principle that “power must come from above and confidence from below.” Remarked Sieyès of this new order: “Gentlemen, we now have a master.” ....

For the ancient Greeks, and for millennia thereafter, political turmoil was “revolutionary” in that it was a perennial pathology of cyclical history, bringing only pointless suffering. ....

To the ancients, Mr. Edelstein writes, “the state in revolution was a perversion of the state, a social hell in which the trappings of society remained in place only to mask the unbridled violence and greed…that really governed human affairs.” Revolutions were calamitous “mutations” to no purpose, adding only tragedy to the affairs of men. ....

The French philosophes, Mr. Edelstein argues, were the first to exchange “a vision of revolution as devastation for one of revolution as improvement.” Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet and others developed a perfectionist faith in accumulative human improvement. They introduced the belief that history progressed and that the “iron law of inequality,” as Mr. Edelstein puts it, could be overcome. Tradition and custom were recast as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Social classes would melt away beneath a future sun.

Crucially, these progressive philosophes also developed a confidence in the capacity of the central state to act as the engine of reform. ....

The Revolution to Come cleaves the much-celebrated “age of democratic revolutions” into two. The French Revolution embodied the new confidence in historical progress and enthusiasm for unchecked power. Its guiding spirit, Mr. Edelstein insists, was Voltaire, the enthusiast for enlightened despots, rather than the radically democratic Rousseau. Napoleon, perhaps even Lenin, emerge as the heirs of Frederick the Great: authoritarian, but no less revolutionary for that.

The American Revolution was of a different quality. It emerged from the British tradition of mixed constitutionalism and what Mr. Edelstein calls “radical conservatism.” “Rather than transforming their world,” he writes, Americans “wished above all to preserve the state.” For Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, pure democracy and revolution remained threats. The American constitution thus sought to manage class conflict and balance governmental powers, both federally and within the central government. ....

...The Revolution to Come is still harder on the “modern” revolutionaries of the French dispensation. In his best chapters, Mr. Edelstein unfolds the despotism and pitiless violence that stains this tradition. Advocating historical progress was one thing; securing popular consensus on the nature of progress was something else entirely.

In place after place, disagreement over the question of what progress meant inevitably spawned factions, strife, conspiracies, and atrocities. The drive to centralize power disabled any constitutional mechanisms that might have tamed this factionalism. The contest to control the single central power—through which the future would be defined—became increasingly ferocious. Purges targeted traditional counterrevolutionaries, but even more, false friends: the quisling moderates who might undermine the cause from within. The only solution was radical, reforming despotism. .... (more)

Jeffrey Collins, "The Revolution to Come Review: Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes," The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.

When the world looks dark

Michael Dirda is just about the only reason I subscribed to The Washington Post and now he has retired. I do, however, have access to an archive of his columns and reviews. This was from just after the 2024 election:

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.

More personally — it was my birthday after all — I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to ....

The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.

The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. ....

Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March, John Williams’s Augustus, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian....

Michael Dirda, "Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2024.

Sound prejudice

From one of Russell Kirk's newspaper columns, collected in Confessions of a Bohemian Tory (1963):

"Prejudice" means pre-judgment: that is, decisions we reach speedily without having to weigh much evidence. So whether our prejudices are sound or unsound depends upon the source of our deep-rooted beliefs and preferences.

Of course, one may cherish foolish prejudices against the shade of another man's skin or the color of his hair or the character of his religion. But also it is true, as Edmund Burke wrote, that by a wise prejudice a man's virtue becomes his habit.

Thus people of healthy inclinations and decent moral training nourish a prejudice against murder. When we hear that homicide has been committed, we react against it from our prejudices—and rightly so. We don't ask whether the murdered man was a good sort, or whether the murderer had pleasant manners, or whether (supposing you and I should feel like giving somebody his quietus) we might be able to get away with the act undetected. ....

On the contrary, we simply obey the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," if you and I are normal. On learning of a murder, we resolve that whatever the particular circumstances, murder is evil; and we resolve that justice must be done. A sound prejudice, acquired early in life, informs us that murder is forbidden, and ought not to be tolerated out of sentimentality.

Similarly, we are able to maintain a decent civil social order because most of us act on wise prejudices against theft and cruelty and fraud. We don't have to be forever hesitating and trying to reason about the loss or gain possibly involved in cheating or beating our neighbor. If we are good, most of us are good from moral habits. We don't have to perform a kind of moral calculus every time we are compelled to make a moral decision.

We deliberately instill desirable prejudices early in life by spanking little boys, for instance, if they persist in kicking other little boys in the shins. Prudent parents rightfully bring up their children prejudiced against shop-lifting, window-smashing and dog-tormenting. They don't teach their offspring to inquire, "Would anybody see me hurt that puppy?" or "Would it be more fun than danger to turn the hose on Sally?"

Let me add that healthy-minded parents also endeavor to keep their children free from false prejudices. It is a matter of early discrimination. But to be reared altogether without prejudice is to be brought up irresolute and essentially immoral. It is not mistaken to be prejudiced against cheats and liars, fanatics and demagogues.

Russell Kirk, "Prejudices," Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, Fleet, New York, 1963, p. 238.

Virtucrats

Joseph Epstein is a favorite essayist I always read whenever and wherever I find him. From "Virtucrats on Parade":

To win an argument you need reason, and, when it comes to politics, you cannot, as Jonathan Swift had it, reason someone out of something into which he or she has not been reasoned.

Consider how one came to one’s own politics. Many among us have adopted the politics of our parents. Others have come by their politics in direct opposition to their parents’ politics. Some take up the politics reigning among their social milieu; still others, seeking to distinguish themselves, choose a politics of nonconformity. For some people, politics is of trifling interest; for others, politics dominates their lives. Still others, bored blue by the subject, scarcely have any politics at all. ....

Michael Oakeshott thought politics “an inferior form of human activity” that was about nothing more than the struggle for power, and as such “an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” Oakeshott viewed “politics [as] the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life but of organizing a common life.” He contemned those who in the political realm thought they had all the answers, which many strongly politicized people do.

Michael Oakeshott’s were the politics of conservatism, but of a kind that entailed “the propensity to use and enjoy what is present rather than to wish to look for something else.” For him, to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” ....

In our time, politics have more and more become about dueling virtues: with those on the left claiming themselves superior because of their struggle for justice, those on the right claiming the wisdom of their perception of the limits of the possible. And each side is intent on crushing the other. The more politics dominate a time, as Oakeshott noted, the worse that time. ....

In 1985 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, I coined the word “virtucrat.” Elsewhere I’ve defined a virtucrat as “any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply righteous in the bargain.” A virtucrat apprehends the world’s injustice and feels obliged to set things right. He is confident that he sees through the lies and cons of the rich and powerful, which he feels must be exposed. His life becomes a mission, his view of himself that of a sensitive, serious, above all highly virtuous person. ....

The old adage has it that virtue is its own reward, yet in politics the pretense to virtue has all too often brought not reward but the severest punishment to those societies—Russian, German, Chinese—whose leaders promised that under their plans virtue would flourish as never before. (more)

Joseph Epstein, "Virtucrats on Parade: Beware angels in politics," Commentary, February, 2025.

Moral imagination

From a long, very interesting, essay by Katherine Rundell, herself an author of books for children, "Why children’s books?":

.... It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for everyone: because if it is not for everyone then it’s not for anyone at all. It offers us the specific joy of finding our commonality: we can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida. ....

...[T]here are common threads that run through the children’s books that have endured and the new books that children currently devour. If, as a practitioner, I were to draw up a list it would include: autonomy, peril, justice, secrets, small jokes, large jokes, revelations, animals, multitudinous versions of love, inventions – and food.

Food gives both solid reality and delicious longing to children’s books. Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series about monastic chivalric mice, was a milkman when he began volunteering to read at a school for the blind. He found himself horrified by the quality of the books he was reading, and decided to write his own – and, because the children were blind, he accentuated senses other than sight: smell, sound, temperature, texture and, most important of all to children, taste. The food in Redwall is the thing most of its readers remember....

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages. And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder? ....

What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’ ....

C.S. Lewis wrote that tales of the marvellous are their own, real thing: fictional, yes, but also solid pieces of knowledge. They are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’ The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics. Edmund Burke popularised the term ‘moral imagination’ to describe the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting moment and beyond the limits of a single person’s experience. ....

There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. ....

To write those books is to insist that though the world burns, and there is more fire to come, it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice. It will always be worth showing them how to build an internal blueprint for happiness. Nothing about being alive demands joy. But, over and over, the great children’s books insist on it: on joy as a way that humans both create and are given meaning. Joy is insisted on through talking spiders, and rats in rowing boats, and in the vast promise of an opening line: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ .... (much more)

Katherine Rundell, "Why children’s books?," London Review of Books, Feb./ 6, 2025.

"Men of intemperate minds cannot be free"

From a fine essay by Yuval Levin, "Taking the Long Way," about what contemporary conservatives and liberals forget about the necessary precondition for a truly free society:

.... The idea of liberty that both progressives and conservatives generally articulate takes the person capable of freedom for granted without pausing to wonder where he might come from.

An idea of liberty is an essential part of the answer to that crucial unasked question. But it is not the libertarian freedom generally voiced by today’s left and right. Surely liberation from coercion alone does not prepare us for the practice of liberal freedom. To liberate us purely to pursue our wants and wishes is to liberate our appetites and passions. But a person in the grip of appetite or passion can’t be our model of the free human being. Such a person is not someone we would trust with the exercise of great political and economic freedom.

The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desire. ....

This older idea of liberty requires not only that people be free to choose but also that they be able to choose well. This liberty arises when we want to do more or less what we ought to do, so that the moral law, the civil law, and our own will are largely in alignment, and choice and obligation point in the same direction. To be capable of freedom, and capable of being liberal citizens, we need to be capable of that challenging combination. And to become ­capable of it, we need more than the liberation of the individual from coercion. We need a certain sort of moral formation. ....

Religious institutions are not just counterbalances but foundations of the liberal order. They command us to a mixture of responsibility, sympathy, lawfulness, and righteousness that align our wants with our duties. They help form us to be free. ....

Not everyone has the good fortune of a flourishing family, or the opportunity for rewarding work, or a liberal education, or a humbling faith, let alone all of these at once. But some combination of these soul-forming institutions is within the reach of most, and the work of reinforcing them, sustaining the space for them, and putting them within the reach of as many of our fellow citizens as possible is among our highest and most pressing civic callings. That calling, rather than a hyper-individualist liberationism, should be the organizing principle of our political life, helping us see what to conserve and how to advance. .... (much more)

Yuval Levin, "Taking the Long Way," First Things, October 2014.

Beneath the shadow of the British oak

A favorite Burke quotation from his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

.... Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour. ....

"Sceptical chiefly of conventional scepticism"

John Buchan on Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), "the greatest public figure of that time":

His character will be a puzzle to future historians, and it sometimes puzzled even his friends, since it united so many assumed contradictories. For example, he combined a real earnestness and a thorough-going scepticism. We find it in his philosophy. He approaches the world of simple faiths with reverence, and will never heedlessly disturb them, since he not only sees their practical value but shares in their spiritual appeal. He is sceptical chiefly of conventional scepticism. He has none of the poetry and the sudden high visions of the great system-makers; he is never exalté, his metaphors are never grandiose, he builds no cloud cities. But he does provide a rational basis for belief, and, speculatively, he clears the air and defines the problems which he leaves for later and more fortunate philosophers to solve. ....

He had none of the Victorian belief in progress. He saw no golden age in the future, and he doubted the existence of any in the past. Hope and dream, he seemed to say, but if you are wise do not look for too much; this world is a bridge to pass over, not to build upon. But at the same time he revered the fortitude of human nature, the courage with which men stumbled up the steep ascent of life. It was the business of a leader, he thought, not so much to put quality into his following as to elicit it, since the quality was already there. ....

But the most remarkable union of opposites was his devotion to what was old and his aliveness to what was new. He had the eighteenth-century sense of living in a world which was not made yesterday and emphatically would not be remade tomorrow, and he saw the long descent of the most novel problems. Like Burke, he would not destroy what many generations had built merely because some of the plasterwork was shaky. At the same time he was wholly in tune with his age and aware of every nuance of the modern world. He would never admit that there was any merit in a thing merely because it was new, but he gave it a judicial examination. ....

So unique a combination of qualities rarely combined made him a major force in public life, whether in or out of office. As I have said, he had none of the gifts which attract an easy popularity. He had his shortcomings too. Sometimes he used his powers on behalf of an obscurantism which was not his true creed. But he was a very great servant of the State and a great human being. To many there was something chilly in his aloofness from the passions of the market-place, something not quite human. Could he suffer and rejoice like an ordinary creature? Assuredly he could. I have seen him in old age show the light-heartedness of a boy, and he could mourn long and deeply, though silently, for the loss of friends. As the phrase goes, he "maximised" life, getting and giving of the best, and on his death-bed he looked forward to the end calmly and hopefully as the gateway to an ampler world.

John Buchan, Chapter VI "The Middle Years," Memory Hold-the-Door, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London, June 1940.

“There are no lost causes..."

About a book I first read in the '60s:

By reason of longevity alone, The Conservative Mind, as of 2023 a septuagenarian, is a classic. But “maturity” is more than a chronological marker. It describes a quality of mind, a force of habit, a disposition and refinement of what Kirk, following Burke, would not have been too shy to call “prejudice.” By that standard, The Conservative Mind is like some lexical Athena. It was born mature, fully-armed and ready for battle. ....

The philosopher Roger Scruton once observed that Kirk showed that conservatism is fundamentally not an economic but a cultural outlook, and that conservatism “would have no future if reduced merely to the philosophy of profit. Put bluntly,” Scruton said, “conservatism is not about profit but about loss: it survives and flourishes because people are in the habit of mourning their losses, and resolving to safeguard against them.” I think that is correct. ....

Kirk’s book helped restore conservatism’s patent of intellectual respectability. A brief introduction outlines the six touchstones of Kirk’s conservative vision: “belief in a transcendent order”; “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence”; a commitment to ordered liberty; a recognition that “freedom and property are closely linked”; faith in prescription against the putative expertise of the “sophisters, calculators, and economists” that Burke memorably anathematized in Reflections on the Revolution in France; and the understanding that change is not synonymous with improvement (Kirk would have liked Lord Falkland’s observation that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”). ....

Kirk was almost Chestertonian in his fondness for paradox. One of my favorite Kirkian observations is that he was a conservative because he was a liberal. What goes under the banner of “liberalism” today has so thoroughly cut itself off from such traditional animating liberal imperatives as free speech, disinterested inquiry, and advancement according to merit that it is easy to regard Kirk’s declaration as merely paradoxical. But it was not paradoxical so much as it was admonitory, recalling us to springs of freedom that only an embrace of tradition can nourish. .... (more)

Roger Kimball, "The Conservative Mind at 70," University Bookman, November 12, 2023.

Up to a point

This looks promising: Fusion: In the Tradition of Liberty. From an essay by Ryan T. Anderson at that site:

If we don’t want people souring on religious liberty and free speech, then we had better explain those limits. Instead, we see some on the Right embracing libertine libertarianism—support for license in the name of liberty. The most thoughtful libertarians agree that liberty needs limits. But apart from some liberty-maximizing procedural principle of protecting the maximum amount of individual liberty consistent with the same liberty for others, they have no substantive limiting principle. Some proclaim that the freedom to swing my arm ends at your nose—the so-called harm principle. But how about the freedom to twerk in front of children or help patients commit suicide? Apart from a theory of the good, it’s hard to have a theory of harm.

Rightly rejecting libertinism, others on the Right veer toward authoritarianism. They focus so much on the good they seek to promote that they overlook or downplay the contribution that liberty itself makes to the common good. Our task is to defend liberty and limits without embracing libertinism or authoritarianism. Conservatives used to know this. In his 1983 classic, Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will argued that “The most important four words in politics are ‘up to a point.’” He went on to explain: “Are we in favor of free speech? Of course—up to a point. Are we for liberty, equality, military strength, industrial vigor, environmental protection, traffic safety? Up to a point.” Just so. ....

Liberty’s defenders need to see that liberty isn’t the only thing that needs defending, including in law. Defenders of liberty also need to be defenders of true norms of justice and the common good—including public morality. No political community can sustain itself, especially across the generations, without attending to the moral character of the people. So while liberty matters a great deal, it’s not the only thing that matters.

We should not flinch from promoting true norms of public morality out of fear of “imposing our morality on others.” All coercive laws “impose” morality on citizens, if that means regulating people’s conduct in the name of a particular vision of human goods and harms, and moral rights and wrongs. This is true of property-rights enforcement just as much as wealth redistribution. The question isn’t whether law will reflect an understanding of the human good—a moral vision. It’s whether law will reflect sound morality. Moral neutrality is impossible. Relativism is untenable. ....

Liberty’s defenders must also defend the civil society institutions and practices that shape people toward true freedom. None of us is born ready for liberty. We have to be trained to exercise responsible self-government as members of families no less than of states. To distinguish liberty from license in our personal lives—and live out that distinction, by using freedom for excellence—is essential. For the best laws in the world are insufficient if people cannot exercise freedom responsibly. And, again, the Founders got there first, recognizing that our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. .... (more)

This seems very Burkean:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

(Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, May 1791)

Ryan T. Anderson, "To Defend True Freedom, We Need to Know the Truth," FUSION

"The political benefits of religion..."

Burke on the proper place of politics:

During his first few years in England, Edmund Burke compiled essay sketches and fragments in a notebook published only in the mid-twentieth century. One of the entries in that notebook, possibly co-written with his distant cousin William Burke, is entitled “Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine.” ....

The premise is simple: Religion has salutary benefits for social and political life. But once it is seen primarily in a political context—when it becomes merely a “state engine”—it fails to provide those benefits.

If you attempt to make the end of Religion to be its Utility to human Society, to make it only a sort of supplement to the Law, and insist principally upon this topic, as is very common to do, you then change its principle of Operation, which consists on Views beyond this Life, to a consideration of another kind, and of an inferior kind.

.... In his later life...Burke would identify the social benefit of religion as its ability to overawe all other social calculations and considerations. It reminds us that all we say and do has cosmic significance. Placing all human endeavors next to the sublimity of God, as he noted in his Philosophical Enquiry, has the effect of diminishing our opinion of ourselves and our capabilities: “Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him.” ....

The political benefits of religion, then, rely on the humility that true religion ought to produce. And, as the young Burke suggested, it could only come as a side effect of a religion that was not focused primarily on political and social affairs. ....

As Burke would eloquently argue throughout his life, unity around a genuine religious tradition can have great social benefits insofar as it places politics in a context that reveals its own insufficiency and limits. But his observations are a reminder that the question of public religion is much more complicated than a matter of whether, abstractly, religion is good for social life. Also at stake are the substantive teachings of the religion itself, the public perception of it, and its effects on the souls of those wielding it.

Minds shaped by the pulpit may, depending on what is taught there, lead to better citizens and better statesmen. But pulpits focused mostly on political matters are necessarily degraded from their true purpose and therefore self-defeating. .... (more)

John G. Grove, "A 'Religion of No Efficacy'," Law & Liberty, March 24, 2023.

"The general bank and capital of nations, and of ages"

When I used this quotation from Burke in a class I had to explain that "prejudice" as used here needed to be understood as traditional wisdom rather than in the purely negative sense the word has acquired. From Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. (my emphases)

I might be an extremist

Douglas Murray has been reading the report of Britain's "Research Information and Communications Unit" (RICU), part of a governmental organization called Prevent. What is to be prevented is extremism.

...I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop ‘extremism’ in these islands.

There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.

Douglas Murray, "Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?," The Spectator, Feb. 18, 2023.

"Liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened"

Re-posted:

Edmund Burke in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol:

…. The extreme of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains nowhere, nor ought to obtain anywhere. Because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment. Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed. The degree of restraint is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise, publick council, to find out by cautious experiments, and rational, cool endeavours, with how little, not how much of this restraint, the community can subsist. For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened. It is not only a private blessing of the first order, but the vital spring and energy of the state itself, which has just so much life and vigour as there is liberty in it. But whether liberty be advantageous or not (for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence and toleration at least to liberty. ….

Recovering and restoring

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

.... In this unsettled age, conservatism is the work of recovering and restoring a home in this world—a place of consolation, a sanctified somewhere that connects us to the dead, the unborn, and our neighbors through love, memory, and sacrifice. This work can never be done perfectly, not only because we ourselves are fallible, but because this world is not our final home. We take up the work because we want to provide for our children. And our faults in this work become a burden for them. They in turn must repair and improve on what we did, at first appalled by our faults but, we hope, eventually inspired by our successes too. The sum of this process is a national tradition, falling into disrepair and then renewing itself across generations.

This attempt at making a home—a place where no one is merely useful, and no one is merely familiar—implants in us a longing for the true home that can never be destroyed. We put in our labors to preserve freedom, decency, and our culture, so that our children receive this somewhere as a place prepared for them by their fathers.

Conservatism Recovers and Preserves for the Future | The American Conservative

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe"

Received Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797 this afternoon, an edited collection of Burke's writings. The following is from the first entry, a "Letter to Charles-Jean-Francois Depont" (November, 1789):

You hope, sir, that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think that all men who desire it, deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit, or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species.

Permit me...to tell you what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men entitled. This is the more necessary, because, of all the loose terms in the world, liberty is the most indefinite. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions. I am sure that liberty, so incorporated, and in a manner identified with justice, must be infinitely dear to every one who is capable of conceiving what it is. But whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe. I do not believe that men ever did submit, certain I am that they never ought to have submitted, to the arbitrary pleasure of one man; but, under circumstances in which the arbitrary pleasure of many persons in the community pressed with an intolerable hardship upon the just and equal rights of their fellows, such a choice might be made, as among evils. The moment will is set above reason and justice, in any community, a great question may arise in sober minds, in what part or portion of the community that dangerous dominion of will may be the least mischievously placed. ....

A positively vicious and abusive government ought to be changed—and, if necessary, by violence—if it cannot be (as sometimes it is the case) reformed. But when the question is concerning the more or the less perfection in the organization of a government, the allowance to means is not of so much latitude. There is, by the essential fundamental constitution of things, a radical infirmity in all human contrivances; and the weakness is often so attached to the very perfection of our political mechanism, that some defect in it—something that stops short of its principle, something that controls, that mitigates, that moderates it—becomes a necessary corrective to the evils that the theoretic perfection would produce. I am pretty sure it often is so; and this truth may be exemplified abundantly.

[P]rudence...will lead us rather to acquiesce in some qualified plan, that does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea, than to push for the more perfect, which cannot be attained without tearing to pieces the whole contexture of the commonwealth, and creating a heart-ache in a thousand worthy bosoms. ....

Daniel B. Klein, Dominic Pino, editors, Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789-1797, CL Press, 2022.

"A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve"

The current print edition of National Review includes an article by Daniel B. Klein and Dominic Pino, editors of a recent book about Edmund Burke's politics. From the article, "Edmund Burke’s Conservative Liberalism":

“Conservative liberalism” is a suitable name for Burke’s outlook. In that expression, “liberalism” is the noun. It is primary. It communicates something about the house people are to make their homes in. The adjective, “conservative,” curbs the enthusiasm of liberalism but enhances its wisdom. Conservatism makes liberal principles more practical, pertinent, and robust. It grounds the arc of liberal civilization; it spans continents; it can endure. ....

When thinking of liberty in policy, it’s helpful to consider what we’ll call the “liberty principle”: In a choice between two reforms (one of which may be no reform at all), the one that rates higher in liberty should be adopted. But, like Adam Smith, Burke did not maintain the liberty principle as an axiom, as doctrinaire libertarians might. Burke gives liberty a presumption, which like any presumption can be overcome. ....

There are general arguments for polity conservatism: (1) Established ways and customs have been through a process of selection and survival and adaptation, reflecting goodness, however imperfectly. “Our patience will achieve more than our force.” (2) To some extent, goodness lies in familiarity. To some extent, customs are good because people are accustomed to them. (3) Knowledge is slight and highly conditioned by experience and practice. The consequences, even the true nature, of a proposed polity innovation are scarcely known. Rampant delusions bring hazards of collective foolishness and opportunistic abuse. (4) Happiness depends on tranquility, which depends on confidence. Confidence in living depends on rules, certainty, and stability. Every reformation arouses and inspires a next reformation, reducing certainty, stability, confidence, and the quality of life. (5) Bad reformations are not easily corrected: Their badness enjoys plausible deniability, and they breed interest groups that stoutly defend them.

Burke lamented of his age “that every thing is to be discussed; as if the constitution of our country were to be always a subject rather of altercation than enjoyment.” ....

Burke understood that tradition and just reform depend on each other and form an essential tension. “A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.”

Polity conservatism has a stark contrast in polity radicalism. “He that sets his house on fire because his fingers are frostbitten, can never be a fit instructor in the method of providing our habitations with a cheerful and salutary warmth.” ....

Factions working toward greater governmentalization of social affairs are a permanent feature of our world. The battle against them is perennial. Burke’s conservative liberalism is as relevant today as it was in the 1790s: “It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself. It must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men. These are what no constitution can give. They are the gifts of God; and he alone knows, whether we shall possess such gifts at the time we stand in need of them.”

I've ordered the book.

Daniel B. Klein and Dominic Pino, "Edmund Burke’s Conservative Liberalism," National Review, Aug. 15, 2022.

The greatest possible good

Nathan Schlueter asks "Is Compromise Evil?" Using positions on abolitionism before the Civil War, he argues we should avoid some approaches to compromise but that there is a correct, but difficult, kind of compromise (below I've bolded or italicised sometimes where the author did not):

...[A]lthough compromise is not likely to inspire our most heroic impulses, it is integral to political life. Like other basic human needs, it is low but necessary, and it will have its revenge on those who abuse it or treat it with contempt and refuse its humble office. That office is to achieve the greatest possible good in circumstances that are less than ideal, without sacrificing truth or integrity. The lowness of this office makes compromise an easy target for demagogues who seek to leverage their own status by sacrificing achievable goods with the intoxicating promise of impossible perfections. ....

We might distinguish three attitudes toward compromise. Call them Purism, Pragmatism, and Prudence. .... The Purist regards all compromise as immoral. He therefore makes the perfect the enemy of the good. In practice this often has the worst results, but for the Purist good intentions are more important than good results. ....

If Purists overestimate evil, Pragmatists underestimate it. Pragmatists are completely transactional about the good. They are willing to compromise everything in order to diffuse conflict. ....

Prudence shares Purism’s commitment to objective principles, but it always seeks ways to promote and protect those principles in imperfect circumstances. It seeks to be as shrewd as a serpent while remaining as innocent as a dove (Matt. 10:16). Prudence depends on a crucial distinction acknowledged by both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas between permitting evil and committing evil. The Pauline Principle (Rom. 3:8) states that we may never do evil to achieve good. God sometimes permits evil for the sake of greater goods, but He never commits evil. Human beings should do the same. The effort to achieve the greatest possible good without committing evil does not make one a consequentialist. It makes one prudent. .... (more)

Nathan Schlueter, "Is Compromise Evil?," National Review, July 10, 2022.

The loud and troublesome insects of the hour

I've posted this Edmund Burke quotation before. It's a good reminder, not only about politics, but for anyone, including pastors.

From his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

.... Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number, or that, after all, they are other than the little, shriveled, meager, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour. ....

Esperanto for measurement

I love this:

The British government has announced that U.K. businesses will once again be allowed to sell their products in traditional, British units of measurement, like pounds and ounces, instead of the metric system.

This move is a win for freedom-loving people everywhere, and the restoration of customary units should be a cause for jubilation in the streets.

The metric system has its origins in the French Revolution....

The French Revolution was a time when men were, in the words of Edmund Burke, “pull[ing] down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years.” The top-down imposition of the metric system did just that by erasing customary units.

By “customary units,” I don’t just mean the U.S. customary system, but any unit of measure derived through custom. If you read about the origins of customary units, you’ll find that many of them are based on specific occupations, like brewing, farming, and surveying. They were invented by people doing their jobs who needed a way to measure things. They developed units of measure that were useful to them and persuaded others to adopt them for ease of commerce. Customary units eventually became standardized through a bottom-up process. They represent the wisdom of our ancestors, the accumulated experiences over the centuries. ....

As Burke said, “it calls for little ability” to point out “the errors and defects of old establishments.” Indeed, it calls for little ability to say, “Base-ten would be easier.” Never mind that we tell time on a non-base-ten system and it works just fine. It’s not for lack of trying other systems, either: The French tried a ten-day week and ten-hour days for a while, but it didn’t stick.

Or consider that the computer or smartphone on which you’re reading this post measures information in bits, a base-two customary unit derived from the days of punch cards and vacuum tubes. And there’s eight bits in a byte, oh no! ....

The metric system is Esperanto for measurement, except many more people have been seduced by its scientistic allure. The metric system is based on the utopian idea that everything old is bad, and that humans have the power to create a better world by severing all ties with custom and tradition and imposing contrived, rationalistic systems on people, whether they like it or not.

By allowing customary units again, the British are striking a blow against that nonsensical and destructive worldview. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with a cold drink — from a twelve-ounce can. (more)

"Britain Delivers a Welcome Blow to the Metric System"