Edmund Burke was born on January 1, 1730, in
Dublin, Ireland to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. His family was
descended from old English stock who came to Ireland following the English
invasion in 1171. Ireland during the entirety of Burke’s life was a British
dominion and Burke, while never denying his Irishness, would ultimately call
himself an Englishman. He also adhered to his father’s faith and became a
practicing Anglican unlike his sister who adhered to her mother’s faith.
Burke received a classical education at
Trinity College Dublin during which time he was a noted debater. His father was
an attorney and desired the same vocation for his son, so he sent Edmund to
London in 1750 to study law. But following a tour of continental Europe Burke
gave up his legal studies and devoted himself to writing. His various published
pamphlets, tracts, and books on political, social. literary, and aesthetic
issues attracted a following.
In 1765 Burke was elected to Parliament. So,
in addition to being a commentator on political philosophy, he became a
practicing politician. Henceforth, theory was to be grounded in the reality of
elective politics. Burke left Parliament in 1794 and died on July 9, 1797. From
his thoughts expressed in writing and in parliamentary debates he can inform us
about the nature of change, about liberty and rights, about good governance,
and about civility.
The life of a Member of Parliament (MP)
usually centered at the time on domestic policy issues like crime and property
rights and on imperial concerns like colonial relations and international
trade. But a balance of power issue arose in Europe that forced MP Burke to
take notice- the French Revolution beginning in 1789. After the fall of the
Bastille but before the Reign of Terror Burke wrote a letter to a friend in
Paris sharing his concerns about the French revolutionary fervor. His letter
got longer and longer and ultimately was published in November 1790 as a book
entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was Burke’s
greatest and best-known contribution to political philosophy.
While many European liberals and Burke’s
American friend Thomas Paine saw the revolution as progressive of democratic
ideals Burke understood it as retrogression. Through Reflections he
attacked the Enlightenment head-on and, in the process, ended his friendship
with Paine.
A superficial reading of Reflections would
infer that Burke was supportive of the French despotic monarchy because he did
not like revolutions per se. But was not the case. While Burke did not like
revolutions his disdain for them was because of their unintended consequences.
While the French Revolution promised more freedom to the populace the people
would end up with less liberty than before the revolution. This is because the
revolutionary situation in France rested on a shaky foundation of rationalist Enlightenment
principles for which the nation was not prepared. The initial revolutionary
goal of a parliamentary monarchy rather than the present absolute monarchy was
not sustainable because the French lacked a middle class (Napoleon would later
sneer at Britain as a “nation of shopkeepers”- i.e., a middle class.), lacked
property rights, and lacked legitimate authority.
Burke did not defend authority no matter what
but rather upheld authority when it rightly had popular consent and was based
on tradition. And tradition is the key to obtaining rights as rights do not
magically appear by the stoke of a pen through executive orders of a
revolutionary council but rather through the historic traditions of the people,
and rights differ from nation to nation because traditions differ.
Burke also rejected the social contract theory
espoused by Enlightenment thinkers as they felt human rights transcend time and
societal constraints. In contrast, he understood social contract as an
artificial construct and human rights pour forth over time from a legitimate
government based on longevity and tradition. Burke believed that the closest
ideal humans had with a contract was the relationship among the living, dead,
and future generations in which we take the best of the past of the past and pass
it on to the future. Thus, Burke advocated for reform, not
revolution. Small incremental gradual change was in his view keeping with the
human nature of change.
But how did Burke’s negative take on the French
Revolution square with his relative positive view of the American Revolution?
The revolutionary situation in the American colonies was based on principles
already present in British society going back as far as the Magna Carta of
1215. So, for example, the American cry
of “No taxation without representation!” was preserving an old principle of
governance and its violation by the British Crown and Parliament was harming
the common good. The American revolutionaries, therefore, possessed history,
tradition, and longevity which the later French revolutionaries did not. The American
Revolution cumulated in a constitutional republic while the French Revolution
ended with a military dictatorship. (Note- While Burke sympathized with the
Americans, he did not support their armed revolt.}
At home, Burke’s great cause was Catholic
emancipation. While he sympathized with the plight of slaves within the British
Empire, he did not see fit to join with his parliamentary colleague William
Wilberforce to actively fight the slave trade and then outright abolition. To
be fair to Burke, Wilberforce’s efforts to attack the slave trade were coming
towards the end of Burke’s political career and his approaching death. And
Catholic emancipation was very personal for him because of his Irish roots and the
faith of his mother and sister.
Prejudice against Catholics was not just in
Ireland. Catholics throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
faced onerous restrictions- could not hold public office; could not buy land
except for leases under 31 years; and forbidden to vote, teach, intermarry with
Protestants, and own firearms or expensive horses. Irish Catholics also
suffered from punitive trade laws. Burke had limited success with Catholic
emancipation, and it was not until 1829, more than three decades after Burke’s
death, that Parliament passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act which eased many
restrictions. This action was not entirely an enlightened one; there was also
fear by British leaders of Irish civil strife, if not open revolt, if no action
was taken,
Perhaps surprisingly, in his own mind, Burke
did not consider himself pro-Catholic for his stance. He wanted the same rights
and legal protections for Presbyterians and even Jews and Muslims. He just
hated injustice and the abuse of power directed at any religious faith. But
Burke held his line for atheists as he considered these people in denying the
existence of God had placed themselves out of society’s protection.
Burke’s great cause in imperial policy was the
impeachment trial of Warren Hastings in which Burke was the lead prosecutor.
Hastings had risen through the ranks of the quasi-governmental East India
Company to become Governor-General of Bengal in 1773. When Burke became in 1781
the chair of the House of Commons Select Committee on East Indian Affairs, he
began an inquiry into the operations of the East India Company and concluded
that Hastings was guilty of mismanagement and corruption while serving in
Calcutta. Burke filed articles of impeachment against Hastings and the trial
began in 1788 which lasted until 1795. While not a continuous trial it is
considered by many to be the most famous and longest political trial in Great
Britain.
The foundational issue in the trial was
competing visions of empire with Hastings’s alleged misconduct only the tip of
the proverbial iceberg. One side of the general argument emphasized the
conquest and suppression of native peoples for the colonizer’s benefit while
the other side, of which Burke was a part, stressed that the sovereignty of the
colonizer rested on the recognized rights of those colonized. The trial was
highly publicized and, in the end,, Hastings was overwhelmingly acquitted. Yet
the outcome did not stain Burke’s reputation.
The question must be asked here why Burke
empathized with the American colonists and the native peoples of India when he
had never traveled to North America or South Asia. We know why he pressed for
Catholic emancipation but why did give his time, skills, and energy to colonial
affairs in those regions? The British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay
provides an answer. Writing in 1841 Macaulay notes that Burke had a great
capacity for empathetic imagination in that “Oppression in Bengal was to him
the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.”
Now we come to what I consider to be Burke’s
most philosophical point- humans as social beings- which is foundational to his
arguments against the French Revolution and for American liberties; for
Catholic emancipation; and for the rights of colonized native peoples and also
directly attacks the Enlightenment ideal of the solitary individual.
In Reflections Burke makes an obscure
reference to the “…little platoon…(which) is the first principle…of public
affections.” The context of this
reference appears to be, according to some commentators, social class. Other
commentators have lifted the “little platoon of affections” out of this
original context to include local communities of families, friends, churches,
etc. and even volunteer associations an individual may join (see Alexis de
Tocqueville). That is my own interpretation. Regardless, Burke is making the
point that humans are not solitary individuals but social beings.
To belong to any social group (or platoon) is
to ascribe to a set of expectations and obligations for being a member. While a
person may change their group(s) that person will encounter a new set of
expectations and obligations. What helps make our group memberships as smooth
as possible are our manners. According to Burke, manners are more important
than laws to guide our group behaviors. This is because laws depend upon
manners, manners are a constant in our lives whereas laws touch us only
occasionally, and manners define who we are as humans.
Manners are foundational to civility and civil
discourse which in turn leads in the development of trust, or social capital,
in society. Trust is a key ingredient in the building of strong reliable
institutions which safeguard our freedoms (see Peter Drucker) and which enable
the present to transmit the best of the past to future generations and to make
the necessary reforms along the way.
So, inevitability, we come to the question of
what Burke means for us today. In this essay I have highlighted his value for
history and tradition, his view of change, his hatred for corruption and abuse
of power, and his emphasis on manners and civility. Bret Stephens (“Why Edmund
Burke Still Manners”) mentions all of the above although in a different
perspective. Modern biographer Jesse Norman (Edmund Burke: The First
Conservative) lists six key lessons from Burke for today:
The purpose of
politics is to preserve an evolving social order not to satisfy the interests
of individuals living now
1. Burkean perspectives
may have corrected may have corrected recent policy failures- Vietnam, Iraq,
Afghanistan, etc.- because policy makers ignored local circumstances and the
“temper of the people”
2. Burkean leaders are rooted in a sense of
history rather than a sense of science sacrificing the future by current
popular actions
3. As Burke hated excessive power and its abuse,
the important ideal of market capitalism must be contained
4. 1.
Burke provides a
context within which we can understand social value through public service,
history, memory, human connection and identity as well as manners, sentiment
and prudence (my addition)
A final thought on Burke’s meaning for today
would be Burke would be aghast at the current dysfunctional state of civil
discourse in the United States from all parties and at those seeking to erase
history from the American collective memory.
In closing, it must be noted that Burke, like
all extraordinary persons, had his weaknesses. He was often contradictory,
short-sighted, and a snob. History is messy, complex, and nuisance, and so are
historical figures. Yet we can appreciate Burke for his enduring contribution
to our contemporary political, social, and moral systems.
Addendum: Geographical Morality
Recently, as I was reading a
book on British colonial history, I came across a new term for me- geographical
morality- which the author claimed is associated with Burke. So, I researched
the term further and found that geographical morality is indeed Burkean but not
exclusively his. Nevertheless, Burke used geographical morality in two related
ways.
The first use of geographical
mortality for Burke was in his harsh, but right, criticism of the French
Revolution. Burke believed that the foundation of any nation or society rested
in traditions, customs, and institutions developed throughout its history and
are expressed in its moral and political values. Thus, he found the radical and
abstract reforms occurring in France to be repulsive which he expressed in his
book Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke understood the
difference between the American grievances and the French actions as Americans
were protesting what they considered deviations from historical rights while
the French were engaging in societal upheaval by completely jettisoning their
long-established political and moral foundation.
For Burke, geographical
morality shifts from abstract political theory to a concrete manifestation of
the term. The specific case here is the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings
for corruption. Hastings was a chief agent for the East India Company, chartered
by Parliament as an early version of a public-private partnership, which
governed most of contemporary India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar in the
name of the British Crown. In such an arrangement, Hastings was Governor
General of Bengal.
Burke as the chief prosecutor
against Hastings during the trial accused Hastings of cultural relativism in
that he conspired to “…to have formed a plan of geographical morality, by which
the duties of men, in public and private situations, are not to be governed by
their relation to the great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to
mankind, but by climates…latitudes; as if, when you crossed the equinoctial,
all the virtues die…by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they had
learned in Europe…This geographical morality we do protest against…”
Burke further added, “…that
the laws of morality are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which
would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of
oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery,
and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over…”
To counter the claims by many
that Burke’s argument was some case of Western imperialist thought, Matthew
Stephenson of Harvard Law School counters, “Now, there is of course some truth
to the claim that the meaning of corruption varies across times and places, but
I’ve always thought the claim that corruption is a modern Western notion, with
minimal applicability, to developing/non-Western societies, was both factually
inaccurate and hinged with a bit of cultural condescension masquerading as
cultural sensitivity”
Although Hastings was
acquitted of all charges, Burke’s wisdom on avoiding geographical morality in
the 18th century is applicable not only to contemporary colonial and
imperial administrators but only to business executives, missionaries, and NGO
leaders. There is yet another area of application of Burke’s wisdom on this
matter.
As I began my research on
geographical morality, I immediately thought of a concept I learned from my
American history textbook in Afton (OK) High School (yes, high school!) and have
since found nowhere else. That concept is posed in the form of a question-
“Does the Constitution follow the Flag?” And it deals with the dilemma posed by
American expansionism beyond our continental borders with new territories such
as Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and American Samoa and whether
constitutional rights and protections such as the Bill of Rights automatically
applies to those inhabitants or must these rights and protections be explicitly
granted to them by the Congress.
While most of the debate has
focused on territories acquired during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, I also now believe through the influence of my long-passed mentor
Edmund Burke the Constitution should also follow the Flag in countries such as
Afghanistan and Iraq when they are occupied by US forces such as they were in
the early 21st century.
With no formal declaration of
war, the issues can become quite complex. But not so complex we cannot do the
right thing by jettisoning the concept of geographical morality rightly hated
by Burke and others centuries ago and extend constitutional rights and
protections to folks through no fault of their own find themselves under
American control, even only temporarily. We cannot repeat our failures from the
waterboarding of Filipinos in the early 1900s to the humiliations suffered at
the Abu Ghraib Prison in the early 2000s.
Lessons learned:
1. History,
traditions, and precedent are the guardrails to our lives.
2. Being
conservative does not mean being reactionary.
Do what is right, not
what is convenient.