Posted on 02/04/2003 10:13:26 PM PST by JohnHuang2
I confess I'm playing hookey from my reading of Penrose and Walker this weekend, to get up to speed on certain of beckett's and KC Burke's recent posts. That is, I'm finally getting around to reading Burke's Reflections. It's been sitting on my "primo" bookshelf for years now, just waiting for me to get to it. But the aforementioned "orthography" seemed so daunting, that I didn't feel up to the "fuffering" it would require to read the edition I have in my library. (In that day and age -- as can be seen in the Framers' own writings -- "s" is spelled as an "f", unless it is an initial capital, or the terminal letter in a word.) But I gather that one can get used to anything that doesn't cause too much "fuffering".... :^)
Anyhoot, this work is amazing, wonderful; it speaks to the ages, and is particularly timely and instructive to our own age. IMHO. It helps one understand how a phenomenon like Hitler, or Stalin, could ever arise in the first place....
On Burke's view, the correct understanding of how these enormities ever got into the position of seizing absolute tyrannical power -- with public approval, at least in the first case, at least once -- all boils down pretty much to this:
"History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
'troublous storms that toss/The private state, and render life unsweet.'
These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which the fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise, you will be wise historically, a fool in practice. Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigor of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilst you are gibbetting the carcass, or demolishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourself with ghosts and apparitions, while your house is the haunt of robbers. It is thus with all those, who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under color of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse."
A voice of wisdom, speaking to us in our time....
Thanks so much for your kind words, Phaedrus. I'm sure I don't deserve such high praise; though I think beckett does! One last thing: You ain't no "Redneck." :^)
Good night, my friend.
. . . who writes to make us covet his pen. Although Scruton's muse is busy in this piece as well. Reflections borne out of lengthy meditation are always of such a kind.
(Just out of curiosity ... what else in on the shelf?)
touche
A mask for evil it was and a mask for evil it remains. Good thought!
In contrast to the French, Henry the Eighth had the grace to acknowledge his humanity by also acknowledging the immorality of his acts (and, yes, I do believe that human beings are, by nature, moral).
Most of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue liberty, equality, and fraternity ... Nevertheless, a form of collective rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war.
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" is an adolescent formula, perfectly stylish but without substance, so like this Postmodern Age and so like the French, I 'm sorry to say.
Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion ...
Yes.
The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula.
Yes.
Law is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it.
Far less true in America today and thus a threat to civilization itself. Law is supposed to operate at the margin of society and to be boring but reliable. It is supposed to codify social wisdom, not be a playground for social experimentation. We lose reliable law at our peril. "The Law" today has become a perversion.
... aesthetic judgment matters ...
Here is a point that is vastly underappreciated IMHO and before we emerge from this Dark Materialist Age I believe we must come to understand that God in not only Truth, "He" is also Beauty. I am going to be accused of great pomposity for saying this, but I believe that a combination of careful thought, reasoning and acknowledgement of all that it means to be human will get you there.
He persuaded me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress...
Reductionist human plans and planning are not adequate, I would agree, but I do believe there has been spiritual progress (and this Intellectual Redneck will probably get beat up bigtime for saying this -- I do think I can defend it, though).
Most of all he emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue liberty, equality, and fraternity ... Nevertheless, a form of collective rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular name is war.
Society, [Burke] argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority—by which is meant the right to obedience ...
I see society more as organic, growing in accord with seminal ideas and adopting such forms for control of the aberrant as are necessary, but when the means of control are manipulated by those in control to tighten their contol and satiate their greed, we have tyranny. "Right" authority is selfless. American history is testimony to the power of right ideas.
The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Yes, exactly and precisely. This is what the Liberals are foisting upon our children and upon society.
Burke’s provocative defense, in this connection, of “prejudice” —by which he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that arise instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life—was a revelation of something that until then I had entirely overlooked.
... people distinguish seemly from unseemly conduct, abhor explicit sexual display, and require modesty in women and chivalry in men in the negotiations that precede sexual union. There are very good anthropological reasons for this, in terms of the long-term stability of sexual relations, and the commitment that is necessary if children are to be inducted into society. But these are not the reasons that motivate the traditional conduct of men and women. This conduct is guided by deep and immovable prejudice, in which outrage, shame, and honor are the ultimate grounds. The sexual liberator has no difficulty in showing that those motives are irrational, in the sense of being founded on no reasoned justification available to the person whose motives they are. And he may propose sexual liberation as a rational alternative, a code of conduct that is rational from the first-person viewpoint, since it derives a complete code of practice from a transparently reasonable aim, which is sexual pleasure.
Yes. Convention is codified social wisdom. Note that Scruton is also saying that individual morality is innate.
This substitution of reason for prejudice has indeed occurred. And the result is exactly as Burke would have anticipated. Not merely a breakdown in trust between the sexes, but a faltering in the reproductive process—a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each other, but also to their offspring. At the same time, individual feelings, which were shored up and fulfilled by the traditional prejudices, are left exposed and unprotected by the skeletal structures of rationality. Hence the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits have replaced common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of “date-rape” take the place of pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive are routinely penalized as “sexual harrassment.” This is an example of what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in the name of reason, without regard for the real social function that prejudice alone can fulfill. And indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of sexual liberation, and the joyless world that it has produced around us, that I came to see the truth of Burke’s otherwise somewhat paradoxical defense of prejudice.
Yes, and the decline is real.
Rightly understood, [Burke] argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.
"Trust" is the stunningly appropriate concept.
With apologies for the length of this post, Burke and Scruton, as you see, did resonate.
What a beautifully crafted paragraph! The underlined sentence is an absolute masterpiece!
So right- not only does social experimentation undermine the foundations of law, it serves to wriggle the tooth until it can be extracted and replaced with a foolish but deadly globalist tyranny.
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" is an adolescent formula, perfectly stylish but without substance, so like this Postmodern Age and so like the French, I 'm sorry to say.
Was it ever meant to have susbstance? I think not. It was as meaningful as the Communist promise to liberate the worker, the Nazi claim to create the super human.
You know that I find Evolution to be beneath contempt as science. Foucault would have been proud ... IMHO, of course, since in this PostModern Age all is a matter of opinion ... ;-}
Right you are. I should have known better than to interject that flawed product of a faulty worldview in hopes of luring one of them to foolishly try to defend it. There are too many sharks in the water.
Export Nihilistic Liberalism as a Weapon of Mass Cultural Destruction.
Hollywood= WMCD
IMHO, this work is indispensable reading for political and cultural convervatives. It is (among other things) a devastating attack on the essential logic of the "Gallican" concept of liberty. Edmund Burke explodes the insane asylum that was revolutionary France -- its "pure democracy," its vaunted National Assembly, and the Terror and sheer national devastation that body wrought. And also details the means by which this enterprise was effected, and speculates as to its purposes.
This stuff was "mother's milk" to Marx. If you want to/need to converse with "liberals," socialists, and/or "progressives," arm yourself by reading Burke first. JMHO FWIW
Phaedrus, you say, "by nature." How is this concept to be conveyed to, say, a Darwinist (let alone any other species of materialist or utilitarianist or "formalist") in any kind of intelligible way that would be consistent with what you mean by this statement?
The search for a common language seems to be the main challenge these days. And the search is made more difficult, given the increasingly polyglot and "multicultural" character of our native nation, not to mention the sheer impermeability of the reigning political orthodoxies with respect to the reception of new insights, experiences, or information....
Burke and Scruton make the point well, I think, but there is a fairly large class of people in this culture and in this time who are in denial and I further think they have removed themselves from reachability by discourse.
You know that I believe truth to be a "felt thing", and an example I would give is your earlier post recounting a vivid, compelling, enlightening dream, a moving experience having everything to do with truth.
The search for a common language seems to be the main challenge these days. And the search is made more difficult, given the increasingly polyglot and "multicultural" character of our native nation, not to mention the sheer impermeability of the reigning political orthodoxies with respect to the reception of new insights, experiences, or information....
The human experience is remarkably unform in many ways and the same "general rules" of conduct, the Golden Rule for example, seem to be more-or-less consistent across cultures.
You are asking, though, a very large question, bb, and I know you have your thoughts, but I don't believe the answer is to be found in improved communication for a large minority of our culture. Most do not think and are thus led apathetically toward vague "conclusions". The "Elite, Liberal" academic contingent, though, cannot be blind to their fundamentally erroneous Materialism and Atheism. They are too bright. I believe that they exhibit psychological dysfunction, severe insecurity and arrested development, by virtue of their eternal dependence upon others for their sustenance. They are cowards through and through. They are unreachable in the present institutional context.
Your take?
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