What I've Been Reading

Edmund Burke: The First Conservative by Jesse Norman. When I moved to this country as a young man, I felt something was fundamentally amiss in this overly individualist society (euphemism for it's all about me, me and more me). It was nauseating until I found Edmund Burke via David Brooks. Now, I view the political world with a Burkean filter which unfortunately not very popular these days.

Burke gives us again the lost language of politics: a language of honour, loyalty, duty and wisdom, which can never be adequately captured in any spreadsheet or economic model.

Jesse Norman delivers as promised in his mission statement: 
My hope is to start to do for Edmund Burke what others have done for Adam Smith over the past thirty years: to recognize him publicly as one of the seminal thinkers of the present age.

Skin in the Game:

His private life was blighted by debt, which he was unwilling to relieve by the means of self-enrichment usual for the time. He offended King George III by his severe criticisms of royal influence, and by his support for a regency during the King’s period of madness. A man of enormous personal warmth and good humour, he lost friends and supporters by his near-obsessive insistence on the campaigns of the moment. Yet in intellectual terms the extraordinary fact is not that Burke was occasionally wrong, but that he was so often right. Not only that, he was right for the right reasons – not through luck but because his powers of analysis, imagination and empathy gave him an extraordinary gift of prophecy. Thus he anticipated many of the effects of British rule in Ireland; the loss of the American colonies; the overreach of the East India Company; and the disastrous consequences of revolution in France.

Adam Smith on Burke:

Among these institutions is that of the market, itself the object of increasing thought and study in the late eighteenth century, most notably by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Smith once remarked that ‘Burke is the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us,’

Ethics of Vanity:

According to Burke there is a deeper mistake in seeing people as mere individual atoms. In effect it is a denial of their collective identities as participants in the social contract or trust between the generations: a denial of the covenantal nature of society itself. Like Gulliver with the Lilliputians, it seeks to assert the primacy of the individual will, and sees all social constraint as fetters to be thrown off. Liberty becomes licence: the absence of impediment to the will. The danger, then, is that liberal individualism makes people profoundly selfish; that they slip from ‘enlightened’ to ‘unenlightened’ self-interest, in the words of the great political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville; that it actively encourages them to adopt a purely egoistic perspective on their own and others’ lives, asking simply ‘How am I affected? What’s in it for me?’ Instead of grasping the intrinsically social nature of their own selves and their own well-being, they see themselves as apart from others, or from the institutions around them. It may be no coincidence that a recent in-depth study found that young people in America now have great difficulty in identifying or describing moral issues. Lacking relevant moral concepts or vocabulary, researchers found, they default to a typical position of liberal individualism: the view that moral decisions are simply a matter of personal taste. This is the ‘ethics of vanity’, in Burke’s pungent phrase.

Six Lessons We Can Learn From Burke:

1. The first is that extreme liberalism is now in crisis. 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 an evolving social order which meets 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.
2. Second, many of the recent disasters of liberalism arose from failures of policy and leadership which a Burkean perspective might well have been able to avoid. None of these great political actions was necessary; all ignored local circumstances and the ‘temper of the people’; and all were or are proving to be disastrous in their effects. The same is true on a smaller scale with the many melancholy case studies of social capital destroyed by such things as out-of-town supermarkets and foolish inner-city renewal projects. But a Burkean perspective allows us to sense immediately what has gone wrong. It reminds us of the institutional centrality of the city and the nation state. And more deeply still, it offers an intellectual context within which to analyse and understand the deeper currents of ethnic, religious or ideological allegiance.
3. Third, Burke offers an important but undervalued model of political leadership. The purpose of politics for him is to preserve and enhance the social order in the national interest. Leadership begins in respect for the social order, and so in modesty. It demands a close study of the people, indeed all of the people, and their institutions and ‘manners’. It is therefore rooted in a sense of history, rather than one of science. Burkean leaders believe in slow government.
4. Fourth, as we have seen, Burke was driven throughout his career by a hatred of excessive power, and the arbitrary use and abuse of power. In his own time, he regarded as his greatest achievement his campaign to restrain the influence, greed and self-dealing of the East India Company , and to insist on the accountability of private power to legitimate public authority.Burke offers a profound critique of the market fundamentalism now prevalent in Western society. But he does so not from the left of the political spectrum, but from the right. A Burkean perspective would distinguish between conservative and liberal free markets. Understood conservatively, markets are not idolized, 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.
5. Fifth, Burke reminds us of the foundational importance of protecting representative government and the rule of law, as a bulwark against the abuse of power – whether that be corporate power or executive power within government itself. There is much here of which Britain can be proud, in its own distinctive history and institutions. But every country is different, in its traditions, its values and its pathologies of government. There is no single one-size-fits-all model of democracy, but every genuine democracy relies on effective public deliberation, and in every genuine democracy political parties have a centrally important role. They have never been popular, and often rightly so. They are often reviled today, and often in need of reform. It is hard to see a future for them in a world of e-petitions, plebiscites, referenda, single-issue campaigning, tribal ideology, bureaucratic inertia and consumerism.
6. Finally, Burke provides a context within which to understand the loss and recovery of social value. His message is a vital and timeless insistence on the importance of human culture, in its widest sense. As a politician, he was devoted to an ideal of public service, 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 an Orwellian detestation of those that would erase them. He insists on the importance of human connection and identity , and on manners, sentiment and ‘prejudice’, inherited and not invented, and embedded in social institutions and networks. He emphasizes the human self as an active social force, not the passive vehicle for happiness of the utilitarians, or the individual atom of much modern economics. For Burke, government itself cannot simply be a matter of utility and effectiveness. It must have some continuing purchase on our affections and allegiance.

 Genuine simplicity of heart is an healing and cementing principle . . . Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.