Posted on 10/17/2002 6:48:21 PM PDT by William McKinley
!
: <
See you all later.
The paucity of serious thought is highlighted by the way in which the universities have been filled over the past 30 years with fashionable leftists who have substituted jargon for thoughtful discourse and an ersatz marxism for intellectual inquiry. Although my own training was primarily in history and economics, I often feel more at home with the scientific types who have no patience with the nonsense that has overtaken the humanities in many places.
"Never think that you have made a reply, when you have only failed to remain silent. For there is nothing more loquacious than vanity." -St. Augustine
I will risk a little vanity now.
Thus it was that while he believed in the rights of Englishmen and in certain natural laws of universal application, he despised the "Rights Of Man" which Paine and the French doctrinaires were soon to claim invoilable.
I have taken to thinking of our constitutional rights as the rights of Americans, yet I worry that such an attitude is contrary to the universal spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Is Burkean conservatism then in tension with the American founding? Perhaps not:
Edmund Burke believed in a kind of constitution of civilized peoples; with Samuel Johnson, he adhered to the doctrine of a universal human nature. But the exercise and extent of these rights can be determined only by prescription and local circumstances
There seems to be something missing between these two sentences. I think both Burke and Kirk would eschew framing political involvement as merely the exercise of rights. But I'm not familiar enough with their thoughts to know if they avoid the similar trap of framing politics as the fulfillment of duties. Would they have followed classical political theory in viewing politics as part of the ethical quest for human excellence?
I disagree with the sentiment of "innovation" as an unworthy objective. Obviously, a conservative is against change for change's sake, but the idea that he should be against innovation, or that it is somehow nefarious, seems a bit of an insult. There is nothing wrong with learning and improving. Should I be against the innovations that resulted in this online forum? Should I be against the innovations that allow us to feed more people with less work? That allow us to cure disease, to allow my parents and my future (god willing) wife and children to live healthier lives?
Maybe I am misinterpreting someting, but the idea that innovation is the the result of an "uprooted man" seeking a "new world" seems a bit cynical and shortsighted.
I've been cultivating an idea in my head for a while now. As the requirement of a society's (or an individual's) physical (or practical) effort is lessened, so is their intellectual interest. Take the example of people's lack of historical knowledge. Most just assume the benefits of the Constitution, without bothering to understand why or how it gives them their freedoms and what it is meant to guard against.
As for the part about cities, it is merely a statement of a truism- that most innovation has tended to spring up from the cities. Perhaps the cause of this is not correct, but I do believe the assertion that most innovation comes from urban, not rural, areas to be valid.
There is nothing wrong with learning and improving.I have found a quote as I have read on further that I believe supports my supposition that you have read too much into Burke's criticism of innovation.
"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. The has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation. This mode will, on the one hand, prevent the unfixing old interests at once: a thing which is apt to breed a black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all their influence and consideration. This gradual course, on the other hand, will prevent men, long under depression, from being intoxicated with a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with a licentious insolence."
My brief observation is that I can't guess how Straussian Burke was! The long answer, well -- I'm going to my bookshelf -- is that if he was much read in Aristotle then the missing part must be found in other sentences, if not in Aristotle himself.
From the part that is missing there would be no demerit for his endorsement of duties, provided that he recognized that duties, or any law, must be in some way grounded in something outside itself--this is what Kant did not consider. In true Enlightenment style, he was enamored with the Deism of the a-priori grounding of all human endeavors, a deism which, needless to say, ended with the enthronement of Reason in the French Revolution. So it may be that Burke rather understood duties as Voegelin had, and even St. Paul had, namely that law or duty is a symbol grounded beyond the law itself. But I can't speak for Burke, this is merely a favorable conjecture based on Kirk's claim that Burke knew his Aristotle. But certainly, Burke's prime modus operandi was against the principles of revolution that threatened England from the Continent.
But, says Burke, "we must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the mans perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees . . . " And then says Kirk, "All this is radically different from the "natural rights" of Locke, whose phraseology Burke sometimes adopts; and Burke's concept of natural right, obviously, is descended from sources quite separate from Rousseaus's. Rousseau deduces natural right from a mythical primeval condition of freedom and a psychology drawn chiefly from Locke; Burke's natural right is the Ciceronian jus naturale [Have you read Frederick's Wilhelmsen's Christianity and Political Philosophy? He treats Cicero on natural law--Voegelin dismisses Cicero] reinforced by Chrisitan dogma and English common-law doctrine. Now hume, from a third point of view, maintains that natural right is a matter of convention; and Bentham, from yet another, declares that natural right is an illusory tag. Burke, detesting both these rationalists, says that natural right is a human custom conforming to Divine intent
I suppose we could take Kirk's word for that.
The last two decades or so have seen a marked resurgence of interest in natural law thought. Russell Hittinger has been a major figure in this movement. The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World reveals the power and subtlety of Hittinger's philosophical work and cultural criticism. Hittinger first defines the natural law, considers its relationship to the positive law, and explains how and when judges are to be guided by natural law considerations. Then, in the book's second section, he contends with a number of controversial legal and cultural issues from a natural law perspective. Among other things, he shows how the modern propensity to make all sorts of "rights claims" undermines the idea of limited government; how the liberal legal culture's idea of privacy elevates the individual to the status of a sovereign; and how the Supreme Court has come to see religion as a potentially dangerous phenomenon from which children must be protected. Throughout, Hittinger convincingly demonstrates that to oppose freedom and law is to misunderstand the nature of both.
I also hope to read Hittinger's book. This passage particularly reminds me of Servais Pinckaers' The Sources of Christian Ethics, which traces the opposition between freedom and law back to medieval nominalism. I scribbled a few notes from Pinckaers' book online here and here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.