Friday 10 May 2013

Back To Burke

Jesse Norman writes:

Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, once summarised Disraeli’s life as “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure, ultimate and complete triumph”. The same might be said of the great 18th-century philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke. Despite a chequered career, 250 years later it is Burke who offers the deepest critique of politics today, and the greatest hope for its future.

Burke came to prominence in the age of Dr Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. Over his long career he fought five great political battles: for more equal treatment of Catholics in Ireland; against British oppression of the 13 American colonies; for constitutional restraints on royal patronage; against the power of the East India Company in India; and most famously, against the dogma of the French Revolution. Their common theme is his detestation of injustice and the abuse of power.

In these battles Burke’s record was mixed. He often over-reached himself, he rarely exercised real political power, and he was variously denounced as vainglorious, a blowhard and an irrelevance. A man of enormous personal warmth and good humour, he lost friends and supporters thanks to his near-obsessive insistence on the campaigns of the moment.

Yet the extraordinary fact is not that Burke was occasionally wrong, but that he was so often right – and not through luck, but because his powers of analysis, imagination and empathy gave him an extraordinary gift of prophecy.

Burke foresaw some of the greatest discontents of the modern era, including its extreme liberalism and individualism. Various disasters have gravely undermined conventional beliefs in the primacy of the individual will, in the power of human reason alone to resolve political and economic problems, and in the capacity of unfettered individual freedom to deliver personal or social well-being.

Thus the White House under John F Kennedy gathered together one of greatest assemblages of expertise ever seen in American politics, yet they took their country into Vietnam. Western policy towards Russia in the Nineties all but ignored the country’s low levels of trust and social capital, and actively assisted the loss of public assets at fire-sale prices to the new oligarchs.

The euro was introduced, and has been sustained, as an elite project that deliberately ignored, and ignores, long-standing concerns about the huge differences in the societies of the various nations involved, and the legitimacy of the euro’s own surrounding institutions.

Yet Burke also reminds us of threats within Western societies themselves. For there is increasing evidence that extreme liberalism causes people to lose sight of the true sources of human well-being and to become more selfish and individualistic, by priming them with ideas of financial success and celebrity.

In his own time, Burke regarded as his greatest achievement his campaign to restrain the crony capitalism of the East India Company, and to insist on the accountability of private power to public authority. In effect, he offers a profound critique of the market fundamentalism now prevalent in Western society.

But this critique comes not from the Left of the political spectrum, but from the Right. Markets are not idolised, but treated as cultural artefacts mediated by trust and tradition. Capitalism becomes not a one-size-fits-all ideology of consumption, but a spectrum of different models to be evaluated on their own merits.

As Burke shows us, the individual is not simply a compendium of wants; human happiness is not simply a matter of satisfying individual wants; and the purpose of politics is not to satisfy the interests of individuals living now. It is to preserve a social order which addresses the needs of generations past, present and future.

The paradox of Burke’s conservatism is thus that, properly understood, it is intrinsically modest, while extreme liberalism appears to promote arrogance and selfishness.

Burke’s conservatism constrains rampant individualism and the tyranny of the majority, while extreme liberalism threatens to worsen their effects. Burke tempts us to the heretical thought that the route to a better politics may not be through managerial claims – “we can do it better” – but through a deep change of viewpoint.

In his own life, Burke was devoted to an ideal of public duty, and deplored the tendency to individual or generational arrogance, and the “ethics of vanity”. His thought is imbued with the importance of history and memory, and a hatred of those that would erase them. He insists on the importance of human allegiance and identity, and social institutions and networks.

Finally, a Burkean conservatism would also question the self-image of modern media and politics, in which there is no truth, but only different kinds of “narrative” deployed in the service of power.

Instead, Burke offers principles that do not change, the sanction of history and the moral authenticity of those willing to give up power to principle. He gives us again the lost language of politics: a language of honour, loyalty, duty and wisdom, which can never be captured in any spreadsheet or economic model.

As the Western world now seeks to reset its political and economic course, it is this vision of human possibility and renewed social value that may prove to be Burke’s greatest legacy. It may also be the future of conservatism.

And Charles Moore adds:

Since politics is, inevitably, a rough old trade, its theorists are often uneasy practitioners. The intellectual in politics finds it much harder than most to admit that he seeks fame, office and power: he cannot be content unless he also feels he is in the right. This greatly annoys his colleagues. The self-righteousness can be unbearable. As someone said of Gladstone: “I don’t mind it when he has the ace of clubs up his sleeve; but I wish he wouldn’t pretend that the Almighty put it there.’’

Edmund Burke, as Jesse Norman admits, could be self-righteous, and his intellectual passions sometimes led him, as, in modern times, they sometimes led Enoch Powell, to be too violent in his assaults on his opponents. He was not successful politically, and he never rose above the rank of paymaster-general. When he died in 1797, he could enjoy only the most melancholy of satisfactions – that, in the main argument of his public life, he had been right.

Norman himself is a practising, indeed a rising politician, and so he is clear-sighted about Burke’s practical failures. But he is also a subtle historian of ideas. He does an excellent job of extracting from his subject’s speeches and writings why, in his view, Burke is the first and most important conservative thinker.

Usefully, he divides the book into two parts. The first and longer section tells the basic story. How Burke, the educated but outsider Irishman, made his way in the world; how he boldly identified injustice in Britain’s treatment of its American colonies; how he assailed the East India Company for its greedy “too big to fail’’ nabobs who had as much hold over Parliament as big banks do today.

The author shows how Burke suffered more than he gained from the shifting aristocratic coalitions of the period. He was brave and right in his assault on the excessive power of the Crown, but went too far and attacked George’s III’s madness in personal and offensive terms. And Norman tells the story of how Burke fell out with Charles James Fox over the consequences of the French Revolution.

The second section distils Burke’s philosophical and political wisdom, and applies it to what has happened since. Norman tackles head-on the charges of inconsistency against Burke, and for the most part refutes them.

The lack of neatness is a good thing, he argues, because Burke developed his ideas from the study of history rather than the brutal imposition of theory. Burke had an anti-theory theory: “Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.’’

He therefore assailed the then fashionable idea of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that man had a natural state in which he was good and free, which political society had stolen from him. For Burke, almost the opposite was the truth – only through the social endeavour of civilisation (which includes a good political order) could human beings acquire rights and dignity and do justice. Rousseau’s were “the ethics of vanity’’. People were not naturally virtuous in their savage state. They became so through manners, tradition and mutual obligation. If they destroyed their inheritance, they would destroy themselves.

The French Revolution of 1789 involved just such destruction. Its false appeals to reason gave bogus moral cover to mass murder. It exploited the deceitful idea of the ''general will’’. The '“rage and frenzy’’ of the mob could tear down in an hour what it had taken centuries of prudence to build up.

The Revolution trampled on real existing rights, such as those of property, and replaced them with delusory universal ones (a tradition sadly perpetuated today by the European Court of Human Rights). It sought to rule by what Burke called an “armed doctrine’’, which concealed its own shortcomings by exporting revolutionary violence.
Burke predicted the result of revolutionary chaos: a dictator strongman would emerge – “some popular general shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account... the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master.’’ He had not heard of Napoleon when he wrote this, but his prophecy was wholly accurate.

Jesse Norman argues that it was Burke who defined what we have ever since meant by revolution. He saw that what Rousseau – and, in succeeding centuries, Marx and Lenin and Hitler and Mao – all admired for its purifying power to bring a new era of right rule into the world was the most horrible thing that could happen to a nation. This was a conservative insight, as opposed to a merely reactionary one.

As his struggles for America, Ireland and Corsica showed, Burke was no automatic defender of existing authority. But what he understood, and expressed with immense rhetorical power, was how human beings stand in relation to one another. Although they are morally autonomous individuals, they do not – cannot – live in isolation. In our language, laws, institutions, religion, and in our families, we are part of a continuum.

Society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’’. It is not society that keeps mankind in chains, but the pretence that now is the only time that matters.

Almost every piece of rot you hear in politics comes from those who wish to lock man into what WH Auden called “the prison of his days’’. It is comforting that the Burkean Jesse Norman is in the House of Commons to tell them when they are wrong.

They had both better join the Labour Party, then.

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