Episode 151: Edmund Burke’s Conservatism

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 151 is something like what role should tradition have in politics? And we'll be discussing Edmund Burke's pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France from 1790. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in need of reformation but not revolution in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:45 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey Antient Lee in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Mark: So Burke, we covered Burke a few years ago. His aesthetics, one of his early things. This is one of his later things. And it was Wikipedia did say it's a pamphlet, but it's 200 pages or 300 pages depending on what version you have.

1:04 Dylan: It's 300 pages in a Penguin paperback.

1:07 Mark: And originally it was written as a letter in a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris. Is the subtitle one of the subtitles?

1:14 Seth: Yeah, that's not to be believed by me.

1:17 Dylan: Well, apparently he really corresponded with this guy.

1:20 Wes: Many corresponded with lots of people.

1:22 Mark: So this was written before the Terror, but it was after the French Revolution. He talks about 10-06-1789 and this came out about a year later. He actually finished it I think, but it was supposed to be a young person there asked him sort of expecting him to be in favor of it because he had. Well, he wasn't in favor of the American Revolution, but he had said things that were supportive of the rebels position before they actually rebelled of giving them more freedom and being more responsible empire.

1:51 Wes: And then also there, not just the American Revolution, but he's a Whig, the party traditionally that grew out of support for what they call the glorious revolution of 1688, which was a revolution that aside from kind of bringing back anti Catholic persecution and sort of an ongoing battle between the power of the Parliament and the power of the monarch in England, sort of established the power of the Parliament once and for all and established a Bill of Rights and things which looks very similar to the American Bill of Rights. So in a way, as a kind of pro Parliament Whig who's sort of pro Glorious Revolution, you would think that he might be pro French Revolution.

And in fact the kind of people he's going to be responding to associate the French Revolution with the Glorious Revolution and see it as the same sort of thing. And he's going to try and do debunk that idea in this pamphlet, especially

2:44 Dylan: the beginning of the book is an explicit reaction against it, particularly the idea that you can have a rational monarchy. You don't have to take it as divinely mandated and the powers of the king in that way you can have a principle of monarchy, including inherited monarchy as being perfectly rational and part of the constitution of Britain in a perfectly acceptable way.

3:06 Wes: Let me just add more to what the Glorious Revolution, King James II of England was a Catholic and they was okay as long as he wasn't going to start a Catholic dynasty. But when he had a son as an heir, it seemed like that might happen. And so basically the parliamentarians kind of invited William iii, William of Orange, a Dutch guy, to come invade England and become king. And that's partly because he was married to James daughter. So that there's some rationale for having him do that. That'll be relevant later on when we discuss Bur Burke's defense of hereditary monarchs in the sense in which the Glorious Revolution isn't like the French Revolution and so on.

3:49 Mark: All right, so why are we reading this as a philosophy discussion? What should you get out of this?

3:53 Dylan: Well, it's political philosophy, right.

3:55 Wes: He's going to start out talking about liberty versus consequences. So he's going to make this denial that liberty and ultimately rights are this unequivocal good that aren't sort of limited by other factors.

4:08 Dylan: And in fact, rights are not the foundation of good government in the sense of natural right.

4:12 Wes: Right. And then the other part of it, there's basically the people he's responding to, which includes this Reverend Dr. Price, who gave this sermon to which this pamphlet is a direct response to what they call the Revolution Society, which is the society in England which was sympathetic to the French Revolution and excited about its ideas and its implications for England. They sort of again assimilated this to the Glorious Revolution and established these three principles which they thought grew out of the Glorious Revolution, which were being reaffirmed by the French Revolution.

And in the reading we have today, Burke is going to respond to those three principles in succession. Those three principles have to do with we have the right to choose our own rulers and we can get rid of them when they misbehave, cashier them, and then we can, yes, cashier them from misconduct and then we can frame a government for ourselves. The reason why it's a philosophical interest is because he's going to challenge those three general principles in succession and then he's going to challenge the idea that rights in this abstract sense are what we should see as the foundation of government.

And he's going to champion things like religion and sentiment over rationality and tradition.

5:25 Dylan: Where you came from is the only proper route of a government. And the idea that you could found a government on abstract principles at all, he finds absurd and dangerous.

5:38 Seth: So it wasn't just that Burke was opposed to the idea of using abstract reason to found government. Some of the additional research that I did, he's really anti Enlightenment, you know, he's anti scientific in some respects. And so his whole project is this is not an expediency for the purposes of trying to justify a monarchy. It's more part of his overall approach, his resistance to Enlightenment rationalism that was starting to emerge, or that was in full bloom at that point.

6:10 Mark: Which means what exactly? What are the tenets of enlightened rationalism? We said you can't get principles like natural rights sheerly from reason.

6:19 Seth: No.

6:19 Mark: Is that essential to Enlightenment, this idea

6:23 Wes: of rights and their sort of preeminence? So the French Revolution, you know, you see a government completely overthrown whole cloth and eventually basically, they just destroy the church and confiscate all the land and basically tear everything up and start from scratch. And the idea is that you could do that if you. There's a great sort of intellectual confidence, you know, the philosophes and all of that sort of scientific activity in France, where you knew by reason you sort of had a design of the ideal government in your head, rationally you had established that, and all you had to do is put the right reasonable people in charge to execute that, and you're good. And of course, that's not what happened.

7:07 Dylan: There's a great line in mine, it's on page 152. It's in the. What's in the middle? And he's talking about the practicality of government and that we have to know about people. And. And he says at the end of the paragraph, in that deliberation, I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

7:27 Seth: Yeah, yeah. That whole section, those two paragraphs, are two groups. Right. There are really good. So Burke was preceded by Locke. And I think when I'm talking about Enlightenment and rationalism, the idea that Locke uses a reasoned approach to building up a theory of government based on rational principles and natural rights. So he ultimately argues in favor of acknowledging these natural rights. And then he builds through argument this notion of the social contract and the idea of agreement between individuals with adjudication by a third party as being the principle for government.

And that is not the approach that Burke is taking and it's not something that he would agree to. In other words, there's no justification for the specific government that he's intending to defend here, which is the English government. That comes from some sort of reasoning from discovered or abstract principles. It's more genealogical than that.

8:27 Dylan: Yeah, it's ancient. It's what you've had before.

8:29 Wes: Yeah. Not just because it's tradition, but basically because tradition is our best signpost for what's beneficial. He's making a consequentialist argument against a sort of rights based conception of government. It's a kind of conflict we've seen many, many times before. Our readings, our calculus, the thing. First and foremost, we have to think about whether we are benefited by civil society and by our government, and that to the extent to which any adherence to concept of rights endangers that, then we have to limit them.

9:03 Dylan: Part of what goes hand in hand is the idea of who should be the people running that government and making that government for the sake of the benefit of society as a whole. And, and that leads him down basically an anti democratic path, saying that, well, the people who are best equipped through experience and knowledge and role in society, those are the ones that ought to be running the government. And we simply can't expect that everyone can do it and we can't expect that people in general will be able to choose those people well. And he spends a lot of time criticizing both the members of the French national assembly and the composition thereof as being basically incompetence and warning of the dangers of that.

9:53 Mark: He talks about rights specifically on pages of 49 through 50 of my version. So he's first talking about rights as these people. He objects to use it, which is sort of what's familiar to us. The abstract rights of men, rights of people. He says, against these there can be no prescription. Against these no argument is binding. These admit no temperament and no compromise. Anything withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice right. According to the other position, against these, their rights of men. Let no government look for security in the length of its continuance or in the justice and leniency of its administration.

The objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or, or the greenest usurpation. They are always at issue with governments not on a question of abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title. I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtlety of their political metaphysics. That's one of his many tirades. So what does he mean there specifically? I mean, he earlier had been saying, well, just to make this clear, again we've.

The full title is Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. So he's both criticizing what's going on in France and what might happen, what some people are proposing to happen in England.

11:10 Wes: I don't think the revolution society was proposing that things concretely change. In fact, I think they were trying to sort of rationalize English government as already exhibiting many of the virtues that were going to come about by the French Revolution to the French.

11:26 Mark: Right. But one of the ways they describe it, which Burke says is wrong, is that we have these rights that the French were claiming to choose our own governors to cashier them for misconduct, to frame a government for ourselves. And because, you know, it was a constitutional monarchy in Britain and there were a lot of protections, these people were describing that, as you say, Wes, as already fulfilling these goals. And Burke points out right away, like, wait a second, that doesn't seem to describe our monarchy at all. We don't have the right to get rid of it. Seems like it casts our entire. It says every single king that we've ever had has been illegitimate.

12:00 Wes: Right.

12:00 Mark: It says it because they're not elected. There might be some far off in. Burke engages in this himself. Like to say somehow that the social compact, the, the original social compact somehow was an agreement among people. And so that kind of got the kings and their succession in line. But that's not the same obviously as an election. So it seems like the way things are going, if you believe in these rights, then you can point to any given thing and say, oh, you know, people have a right to. Seems some of the things they were putting forward as like having a right to medicine, having a right to food, having a right to an equal share of riches, Pointing out the. The way things are and saying that's illegitimate. And it's not a matter of it's illegitimate because the monarch or whoever is abusing their authority, but just because of the way things are.

12:47 Wes: Burke does think there are rights.

12:49 Mark: Right, that's the next page. Yeah. The real rights of men as opposed to these abstract ones.

12:54 Wes: So far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice If I were of power to give or to withhold the real rights of men in denying their false claims of right, that is the false claims of the revolution society, I do not mean to injure those which are real and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. In other words, these abstract rights, the idea of them could destroy our real rights. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence.

And law itself is only beneficence. Acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule. They have a right to justice as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making the industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself.

And he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force can do in his favor. In this partnership, all men have equal rights, but not to equal things. So then he will go on to say specifically, we do not have an equal right to govern ourselves, to judge our own cause. Well, yeah, that's sort of a higher principle that he's appealing to. But he says, but he is not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock. And as to the share of power, authority and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man and civil society.

14:47 Dylan: The last sentence in there is also important. It says it is a thing to be settled by convention. So part of this is the rights that he's describing. They don't seem to me to be natural rights. He doesn't seem to be arguing that they're natural rights born out of us as human beings, but they are the real rights that are born out of our traditions, our conventions.

15:12 Wes: Right? So he does think there are natural rights. But those are the Hobbesian natural rights that we give up in civil society, society, like the right to defend ourselves, to kill people willy nilly, to do all the nasty, brutish and short types of things. Those are natural rights. It's the same section where he talks about this, actually. We give up those things for the rights that come from civil society and those are the real rights. Those are the rights which he will talk about as sort of being the relevance of tradition here is that we sort of inherit those rights.

15:43 Dylan: In the next paragraph, one of the first motives of civil society, which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this, each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man. That is to judge for himself and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively and in great measure abandons the right of self defense, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together that they may obtain justice. He gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him that he may secure some liberty. He makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.

16:32 Unknown speaker: Right.

16:33 Wes: So this is like a summary of Hobbes there.

16:35 Dylan: Yeah. And he's emphasizing that in particular that the only way we get justice is by giving up rights. At least the right to take it in our own course and judge for ourselves. And in that way, it sort of reminds me of something we brought up a number of times is in the end of the Oresteia. And the whole idea that you have a government or a civil society in which you no longer have an eye for an eye and individual revenge. In order to make the civil society work, you give up the right to be judge and jury for the things that happen to you. He says next, government is not made in virtue of natural rights.

And a little later, government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by his wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want out of civil society of a sufficient restraint upon the passions. In this sense, the restraints on men as well as their liberties are to be reckoned among their rights. So that's an interesting turn that we have the right to have other people restrained.

17:46 Wes: We have the right to be nanny stated.

17:49 Seth: I think actually there's something to be said about the use of the term civil society. This is ultimately a justification of government, but because it's not a treatise where he's trying to justify the existence of any particular government or a particular form of government using abstract principles, it's not really an argument per se. And we should pay attention to his concept of civil society. It's less about the idea that government itself or this government or that government. It's More about the community of human beings that are coexisting in a civil society.

Government is a mechanism, but it's the order of the civil society that he's most concerned about. What horrified him about the French Revolution when he wrote this, even before the worst atrocities had happened, was terror, chaos and terror, not, well, tyranny of sort. He sort of doesn't acknowledge the notion of tyranny, you know, in terms of a traditional notion, a tyranny of the majority or tyranny of the mob versus tyranny of a king or a queen. But what's underlying this discourse here is a concern to maintain order. And insofar as government is the organism by which that happens or the mechanism by which that happens, then he's talking about government.

But he's really much more concerned about not completely disrupting the fabric of civil society, which goes far beyond, I think, government.

19:19 Wes: Yeah. And all the good things that come with that. So it's not order for order's sake, but it's. There are all these good things that we take for granted that are predicated on that order.

19:29 Dylan: And in that way, it seems to me that the form of that order he's not going to fall on a sword for. And so in defending the monarchy, he's not defending it in principle, he's defending it in existence right now.

19:46 Seth: Right, Yep.

19:47 Wes: Yeah. He's defending it as its own sort of inheritance. He's defending it as a custom that's been passed down to us and that through the test of time, has been shown to be functional, at least in his, you know, revision.

20:02 Mark: Yeah, well, admitted revision has been revised.

20:05 Seth: Yes.

20:06 Mark: So there's a constitutional monarchy.

20:09 Wes: Right, right. The irony of this is, of course, was the English monarchy really that functional? I mean, the history of chaos and war, I mean, you could look at a lot of English history as sort of this centuries and centuries of bloodbath, much of which involved this tension either between the king and nobles or eventually between the monarchy and the parliament. But ultimately trying to settle, like a balance of power between rulers and people, between monarch and parliament are the representatives of the people. And yeah, they had a good thing, you know, after the Glorious Revolution, they were doing well. But you can't ignore the centuries of terror that preceded that. So that's one little side commentary there I think, that people ought to think about.

20:54 Dylan: And also how great and just was it for ordinary people. Yeah, right. I mean, there's a little bit of through rose colored glasses going on.

21:06 Seth: He's writing this from the perspective of somebody who's benefited from that order. And the criticisms that he got afterwards were, you know, people defending the French Revolution, talking about the state of the peasants and a variety of the terrible things that were going on at the time. So I don't know if we want to get into talking about that as validating or invalidating his claim, but it has to be acknowledged that that's the perspective from which he's having this conversation.

21:31 Wes: Well, I think he could admit that there are lots of things wrong and still, really, this isn't about whether a constitutional monarchy is ideal or it may not even be the best form of government. Right. It may be a terrible form of government, but it belongs somewhere on that Aristotelian scale of governments. But the question is how you get from A to B. The question is how you institute reforms. And in that sense, he's going to be on the side of gradualism. And this is sort of, I think, something we saw with Crito as well, under my interpretation.

But, you know, even if there are bad laws, there's something to be said for obedience to those laws. And even if our government is not ideal, there's something to be said for reverence and respect for that government, and not simply throwing it to the wayside to start from scratch, but starting with what you have and trying to reform gradually from within. So it's really an argument about the circumstances in which revolution are allowable. And it's not even like he's saying that revolution is never allowable. That's the interesting thing here.

He has conditions under which revolution is a legitimate way to go. But I think in the specific case of France, he thinks that it was not the way to go, and its consequences were bound to be terrible, in his view. So that's one of the most important measures of whether or not you're going to have a revolt, not whether your rights are being trampled upon, but whether you can actually improve things by having the revolution.

23:02 Mark: Yeah, and the revolution should be a matter of removing the abusive element, not changing the system. Like, if you're going to change the system, it should be when things are otherwise calm and you can sort of have a very slow evolution, a tweaking of introducing things. You don't use the opportunity when a particular ruler is being abusive. If you're going to chuck him out, then the justification to that, as he thought in the 1688 Revolution, should be, we're fixing something that has gone awry. We're actually returning to something more ancient, perhaps.

23:36 Wes: He uses this word necessity. So Mark you're referring to the point where he's basically addressing the choosing your own governor's principle, choosing your own rulers. And he's trying to point out that the Glorious Revolution wasn't predicated on this right to choose our own rulers, but really it was just settling this question. It was reaffirming the whole principle of succession among kings, but it was kind of settling a question in succession, which is basically whether a Catholic could continue to inherit the crown, because people didn't like that, you know.

And then he uses this phrase for the peace, quiet and security of the realm and the necessary for the certainty in succession. So in other words, it's this pragmatic practical problem. Basically everything's going to go to shit if you don't have a revolution. And that's the necessity that bears down upon you. And then he'll later on say in the right section, at that point, you're not even within the realm of law anymore. It's not about the King has done something unlawful or they've trampled on my rights. And I'm responding by reasserting the law and my rights.

You're in a state of war now. You're completely outside of the realm of the law. You're in the realm of necessity and you're acting to reestablish the realm in which the law is relevant. You're in the chaos now and you've got to re establish order. And that's when revolution is the right way to go, but not when you already have order and you're just going to create chaos.

25:03 Mark: Right. So if the King were to try to abolish Parliament, something like that, like that is going too far, or Parliament should vote to abolish itself. He thinks they just can't do stuff like that. That would throw things into chaos.

25:17 Dylan: That's what he's saying. But is it as simple as. I mean, isn't one man's order is another man's chaos?

25:24 Wes: Right.

25:24 Dylan: I mean, let's take seriously the idea that somebody's genuinely being subjugated. But there's order. If you're under the boot heel, but there's order in society, how does that make sense? I'm not saying that that's what the condition of the French Revolution was. I mean, I think that's a separate question now. To me, part of his point was also, if you have a revolution, it can't be just to break the government that's there. It has to be to put something else in its place. Otherwise all you'll get is chaos. But I think that's going to be a hard challenge, especially if you are in a deeply subjugated position where just breaking the government is going to be about all you can think about.

And I think that's one of the reasons why you have so many areas of the world that often just have one kind of revolution and period of chaos after another is because they're just trying to end what's oppressing them, but they don't have a plan for how to sort it out afterwards.

26:21 Mark: So this goes to what, the rights of the. You know, he thinks that stratification of society is natural. If you tried to equalize, it doesn't work. So you just put the wrong person on the top. If you get in there and manually mess with the outcome of this natural process.

26:38 Wes: Yes, those who attempt to level never equalize.

26:41 Mark: He says, I think we should talk more about the social contract, because that's what it comes down to. That he thinks that, as with Hobbes, even if you come out with the short end of the stick in society's lottery, you still have in some sense agreed to it, you are committed to it. And then the thing that he's adding here is it's not just that we have the right to be protected and, you know, whatever pitiful amount of property we have, we have the right to keep that and not have it stolen from us or not have it taken away by the government. But if there really was a terrific, horrible distinction between rich and poor, such that people are actually starving, I think he's going to say that as long as the government is.

Can do something about it, then everybody, he said, you have the right to the share of what the government, of what the society can bring out. So it seems like there are going to be limits to how bad the disparity can be.

27:35 Wes: I don't know. I think the way to frame the question is suppose you have horrible poverty. The question is whether you try and solve that through legislation, through the mechanisms already present in society. Well. Or whether you think that there's no way that that can be done anymore and that revolution is the only way you're going to get there. I think he'd probably come out strongly in favor of the idea that you're never going to have perfect enough knowledge to say that the existing mechanisms within a society aren't there ultimately to solve a problem like desperate inequality. Now, you're right. He does think that a certain amount of inequality is inevitable and the need

28:16 Dylan: to have order is going to trump an awful Lot of inequality, in his opinion.

28:22 Mark: Right, Right. Yeah. So, again, what have we agreed to when we agree to the social contract? That if we read Hobbes, it sounded like anything is better than the state of nature? It seems that Burke wants to say something more robust from that and the place in the text where he talks about this, this is on page 80. It says, Society is indeed a contract. So right before that paragraph, he actually gives a nice metaphor about revolution to avoid the evils of inconstancy and versatility which he thinks that the French assembly is guilty of 10,000 times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice.

We have consecrated the state that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions, but with due caution, that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion, that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father's life.

So I just thought that was a great formulation of that reform, not revolution. So right after that, he says, society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure. But the State ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee or some other low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest and to be dissolved by the fancy, the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.

It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes 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. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath, which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.

30:41 Seth: This is completely unsupportable. Why, it's the boldest statement with absolutely no justification. I mean, if you're going to use the term contract. Now, granted, when we talk about Hobbes and we talk about Locke and you only have to rewind seven years to go listen to those episodes, folks. We always had this idea of the question about whether you could opt out of the contract. You're born into a society. Do you have the option to opt out of the contract? And in this context, Burke is thinking about what took place in the United States, where in essence, the American Revolution, which he sanctioned, was an opting out of the contract with the sovereign.

31:27 Mark: He actually didn't sanction the revolution itself anyway.

31:30 Wes: But also the argument would be that if you were to support the American Revolution, you say the sovereign opted out first.

31:35 Seth: Sorry, I was under the impression maybe I misread. I don't want to have a conversation with him about.

31:40 Mark: It's not in the current reading.

31:42 Dylan: So it was.

31:42 Mark: Yeah.

31:44 Seth: The point is, though, to say that you're born into a contract, the contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born is. And simultaneously to say earlier that it's essentially contingent because it's not founded on abstract principles or reason. It's just merely a fact of the way things have happened to unfold, which is tradition. He has no justification. He's not trying to even justify it. He's not trying to claim that, yeah, this is the way it is, but it's the right way.

32:14 Dylan: He rejects that out of hand. Right. He rejects the notion that there would be a justification of those kinds of principles. He says there is no such justification.

32:24 Seth: Right.

32:24 Dylan: Government is a convention. It is a practical endeavor.

32:27 Wes: There is a justification. That's just consequences, good or bad consequences. It's a kind of proto pragmatism at work here.

32:34 Seth: It's a convention you're born into and you must accept that you have no right to question.

32:40 Wes: So let me defend this idea, because I think I've been fascinated by this idea since the Crito, that in some sense you've made an agreement just by being born into situation. And I think, Seth, on one level, you're completely right. But if we try and look at this in a more sophisticated way, and I think it's consistent with Burke because he's thinking about some of these things in the text. On the one hand you say like Socrates did, well, you've made this tacit agreement because you enjoy the benefits of the society and you don't leave, even though you could leave.

So sort of love it or Leave it, or as we saw, persuade it, or leave it. Because you also have the opportunity to persuade society to change without simply revolting or disobeying the law. But the more subtle way of understanding agreement is the whole idea of being constituted by society. And that's where tradition becomes very important. We aren't just blank slates, little individual atoms in society. We are constituted by our customs and our mores and the sort of things which ultimately feed into the laws. In a way, it's sort of like the laws are valid to us because we are constructed beforehand via those laws.

Those laws go into creating us, into making us who we are. And there's some sense in which that's the way we have agreed to them, even though we haven't agreed as a conscious matter, but we've agreed in our constitution. We have agreed in the sense in which we are preconformed to them in that rational way.

34:18 Dylan: They would also always be up for constant revision in the language that we just read. I share some of Seth's indignation in that he's going very strong for the inviability of it as opposed to the conventionality of it, which would admit of constant pragmatic revision. It's very different emphasis.

34:42 Wes: Well, it's in the same paragraph, though, that he allows for revolution. Should I read?

34:46 Seth: Yeah.

34:48 Wes: It is the first and supreme necessity only. A necessity that is not chosen but chooses. A necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This is where I said you're outside of the domain of law. Once you reach the point of revolution, it's not a matter of, oh, I'm asserting my rights and you've done something illegal to me. You are in the state of war. This necessity is not exception to the rule, because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force.

In other words, necessity is his own sort of law. But if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth and exiled from this world of reason and order and peace and virtue and fruitful penitence into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow. Yeah, so even in revolution, there's a sense in which we are subject to a certain kind of law.

35:55 Dylan: Weirdly enough, you mean necessity and the world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing Sorrow.

36:03 Wes: No, the necessity is not an exception to the rule or the law because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which we must be obedient by consent or force. In other words, this is the whole analogy between moral law and natural law. So there's a sense in which when we are pushed to the point of revolution, it's not a matter of choice. It's a determined moment. It's not a matter of reflection. In a sense, it simply happens to us. Things have gotten that bad. The moment of necessity is the moment of revolution.

36:37 Dylan: I just feel like he's also saying that at that moment, law is broken. You're in sort of a different category of things. You're outside of the world of reason, order, peace and virtue.

36:46 Wes: The law is only broken if the revolution is a matter of choice rather than necessity. So if your revolution is a matter of necessity, there is no exception to the rule. If it's a matter of choice, the law is broken.

36:58 Dylan: Well, I think he's being confusing there because he is contrasting necessity and law. Where law is on the one hand a natural law a la Hobbes, and that's where necessity is coming in. Or law is a convention a la the government that we have. And if you have a revolution, you're certainly breaking that law, but you may be obeying the law of necessity.

37:22 Wes: Well, I think he sees them as belonging on a spectrum. Right. So where we might think of the law and rights as sort of these abstract things generated from wherever you might think they come from, for him, they're part and parcel. When we're thinking of tradition, we're thinking of necessity. We're thinking of a kind of determinism at work. And so our, what we call rights and laws, those are just things handed down to us and they are just riding the deterministic wave. And they are laws for us not because they're necessarily abstractly the perfect thing, but because they're just the things that were handed down and that we suspect have some relationship to good consequences. Because tried and true experience develops that kind of correlation over time between practice and consequence.

38:16 Dylan: Yeah, but I thought he was very clear that that correlation is not necessity. That correlation is convention. He's making a very strong argument that convention is a very strong force and it has all kinds of things that are good about it.

38:33 Wes: Yeah, I see convention as a form of necessity.

38:36 Dylan: Well, okay, so that's, I guess, where I'm disagreeing. It seems to be that he's distinguishing those two things.

38:42 Wes: So Take, for instance, the existentialist contrast between, you know, the ambivalence that Beauvoir talks about between the necessity of character and the things that grow out of character, habit, and then out of habit, custom out of custom, law. Those are all within the realm of necessity. And then choice, necessity or consequence. Necessity in the sense of determinism. You know, our characters are not a matter of our choice. We are bred in a certain way, and our genes and our environment determine who we are customs grow out of.

39:15 Dylan: Yeah, necessity is a terrible word for that. Then consequence, there's an entanglement that makes sense, but necessity is a terrible word for that.

39:23 Wes: Well, it's just the lingo that they used, because it's necessity in terms of one thing must follow another. So a certain kind of consequence must follow a cause. And that shows up again in character. It shows up in custom. It shows up in the law. So in other words, in a weird way, our laws, you could think of them as coming from on high, from God or truth or something. But you could think of them as simply the effects of necessity in the sense of the deterministic forces of the universe, as opposed to law, thought of, again, in the more rational Enlightenment sense, as these truths that we can sort of pluck from the heavens or from our reflection. And the same thing with rights.

40:06 Dylan: You're making me want to go back and revisit this form of necessity that you're talking about. I see how Burke may be doing that, making a claim of natural necessity along the lines that you're talking about, but it does seem to be in tension with the very pragmatic accretionist entanglement that he's talking about, which has some features of cause and effect, but they're not, strictly speaking, cause and effect that way.

40:35 Wes: Well, let's agree that the primary sense of necessity here is when push comes to shovel and revolution becomes inevitable. Let's just put it that way. And then the other rest of it we can interpret, but it gets more complicated.

40:47 Dylan: Go ahead, Mark.

40:48 Mark: So the laws that a government makes do not happen by nature. They are the choices of human beings. So in that sense, I mean, I looked up the phrase rule of law, and it only occurs once very early on, where he's talking about, you know, when revolution does happen. It did happen in the 1688 Revolution. It was wise of them not to turn this case of necessity into a rule of law, into saying, okay, well, every time something like this happens, we're going to replace the ruler. Every time they do something, we don't like. We're not going to have articles of impeachment written into our law books.

41:24 Dylan: Not just articles of impeachment. The idea of revolution. Right. Which Price and company seem to be supporting. The idea that if you're upset with your government, take up arms and overthrow it. That's the right of the people always to hold the.

41:40 Seth: What other mechanism do they have in this context?

41:43 Dylan: Well, I think this is where the whole issue of spectrum comes along.

41:46 Unknown speaker: Right.

41:47 Dylan: I think it's pretty easy to see that there are cases where there would be little option but to do such a thing. And there are plenty of cases to see where just because you disagree with your government doesn't mean that you ought to be taking armed revolt. I mean, the American government's one example, but there are other governments where the whole idea is to come up with a way to transfer power from one vested interest to another in a way that doesn't lead to total chaos and anarchy and bloodletting. And that's the trick. But it makes demands both on the government, but also on the society as a whole.

42:25 Wes: I mean, the condition which he says explicitly, I haven't been able to find it. There really are cases in which the government can violate the contract.

42:33 Dylan: Sure.

42:34 Wes: The difficulty becomes that's such a vague criterion. Right. And when is it just. How do you know you're right and you're rationalizing your revolutionary activity? How do you know that this is really the case in which the government is basically violated, is no longer a government, in a sense, and so revolt is a necessity. How can you know that you're right about that and that you're not. Just don't just have grievances which might ultimately be resolved within the mechanisms available within the state, within the society, I

43:06 Mark: think, you know, because you try to use the existing mechanisms. And he thinks that even if you can't, for instance, the common people. There's the House of Commons now, they don't vote for the Representative in the House of Commons. He talks a little about how the Representatives were in there, and he describes it as some sort of meritocracy that somehow, you know, the most landed people among the commoners. I don't know exactly how it was chosen, but in any case, it's the job of that body to represent the common people. And if they are not doing that, there's something wrong.

And the first way of addressing that would be, well, to point out that their behavior is wrong. And he really relies a lot on. On there being a common ethic that you need not just laws, but you need religion, because there's a common morality and practices based on tradition that so much of this law, what makes society work, is unwritten. It's a shared thing. You should be able to point to the tradition and make an argument in whatever the house is. So everybody has their own duties. And he talks about how the people, with more responsibility, with more power, they need to be even more holy, more under the thumb of the teachings of the Church to ensure that they are doing their duty properly.

44:25 Dylan: And this is where he's so sanguine, right? In a kind of rosy understanding of the nobles will exercise their obligations to civil society appropriately and not just be rapacious thugs. His view of nobility is. Is one that you hear all the time when people talk about a great ruler who's taking the concerns of the people in mind and being the father of the country and so forth. But it just seems to fly in face of the actual experience of over and over and over again nobles just being some version of thugs who manage to get more than everybody else has.

45:07 Mark: However, I mean, how much real experience do you have of nobles? I think this is part of what. There's a quote here about how when you argue that all priests are bastards and we should hang them all, which is one of the arguments that was made by these people in the French Revolution, or that all the nobles are rapacious and oppressive, it's like you're reacting to a satire that you've heard. You know, you read Moliere, or in our case, you know, this is exactly what we often do, is that we revel in these stereotypes of the worst kind of illiterate hick who just has his gun and it's going to, you know, or the most incompetent bureaucrats.

They're all just lazy and. But no, if you actually work in government or you live in the south and deal with people, no, you find for the most part there's some bad apples. But people are. It makes sense for them to try to be good for exactly the reasons Aristotle pointed out. They have to live in this society. The parasite is of necessity an exception. And he thinks, yes, you could have a society that is so dysfunctional that the nobility. I think he would say this about the Wall street people now. I mean, he makes these kind of predictions about if you get rid of nobles, you know, who's going to be the nobles of the future.

It's going to be like the money lenders. Like, he kind of predicts the current nobility that we have here. And he might say that that kind of class, just the structure of what they do is so screwed up and not founded properly in traditions and religion and the sense of them having a duty to the rest of society because they're rich or anything.

46:54 Wes: Yep. The idea of honor instead of just self interest.

46:57 Mark: It could be that. Yeah. That those guys really just are corrupt in virtue, not because they're all bad people, but just because of the incentives in the structure of the social place that they inhabit.

47:07 Dylan: Yeah. So he says later on, towards the end of what we read that the foundation of civilization is the spirit of religion and the spirit of a gentleman.

47:15 Mark: Yeah. And talk specifically in. In France about, like, look, I knew some of the nobles there. I know. You know, I'm sure there was some rapacious thugs.

47:22 Seth: Some of my best friends are nobles.

47:24 Mark: Some of them were obviously honorable people and has a similarly long defense of the clergy and to just dismiss them and, you know, whatever the individual abuses might have been. And surely there were some. Isn't it better to have some abuses than to just trash the whole thing and have chaos?

47:42 Dylan: So I think that one of the rubs there. I think you're making a lot of sense. Mark slash Burke. Slash Burke.

47:48 Seth: Yes.

47:49 Dylan: Yeah. No, that's right. But one of the challenges there is the complicity that even if you have a whole bunch of nobles. You know, one of the challenges, if you are under the thumb of the one or two rapacious nobles, which I don't know if there was only one or two. Right. But that the other nobles know about it and they don't do anything. Right. It helps a lot to have people who are in power, let's say a big group of them are doing their best and really making pretty reasonable judgments about these things. But then they also don't take care of the people who aren't doing such things.

They aren't fixing that all the time. Now, Burke might be an example against this. Right. Because he made this big suit against this guy, Warren Hastings, the East India Company in India, and that he was ruining India. I don't know the details. I just read a little bit about it in Wikipedia. But it seemed like the kind of thing where he was saying, look, you're being a bastard. You are not fulfilling your obligations to the role that you have. Burke put his money where his mouth was.

48:52 Seth: Yeah.

48:53 Wes: I thought Mark's talk of incentives was spot on, because when Burke is criticizing the composition of the French national assembly and all the sort of lowlifes that are brought in. So it sounds very elitist. And he talks about average lawyers and sort of country clowns and your average professional who he thinks are poorly suited to that job. Because really their incentive structure in society, the way they're sort of conditioned, is to be self interested. And he thinks that the landed interest in the nobility actually have other incentives. Oddly enough, they already have the property and money and don't have to worry about that.

And what they're interested chiefly in is their honor. That's a completely different type of incentive, which I think Burke thinks is a really good thing for society to have people for whom honor is this big, big deal. It affects the structure of society and its mores at a very deep level. So when we lose that, even though there are some rapacious thugs among the nobility and there's all sorts of abuses, and as a part of the structure of society, to lose that is to

50:06 Mark: lose something profound and posterity, that part of honor is passing on your holdings, passing on your family name is this connection between generations past and future, which is a good incentive, he thinks.

50:19 Wes: Yeah, so no death tax, no estate taxes, no confiscation of the estates of rich people instead of letting them leave to their children. Because there's a sense in which that's odd and unjust, just patrimony. I think he thinks that continuity of inheritance that he mentions a few times, and the importance of property. Maybe that's what we should talk about, since he mentions that so frequently. The word inheritance, as you trying to search on that, is not productive. Because he's usually using that to refer to inherited titles from one king to another, or the inheritance of our rights, the inheritance of our customs.

But there's also a few points in our reading where he talks about the importance of property. Interestingly enough, on my page 51, the context for this is criticism of the assemblies, including all these unpropertied people. Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state that does not represent its ability as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert and timid, it never can be safe from the invasion of ability unless it be out of all proportion predominant in the representation.

In other words, the only way the propertied classes are going to protect their property is if they have control over the representative bodies. Otherwise they're going to get pillaged.

51:45 Mark: See, originally I read this as a positive thing because he's just done saying how come on. I'm not just saying only the rich can get in power. Yeah, somebody with enough ability can get the upper hand can get a hold of your property or gain political power despite lack of property.

52:04 Wes: No, he's saying it can never be safe from the invasion of ability unless it be predominant in the representation. But maybe. Let's just read on and we'll see. It must be represented too, in great masses of accumulation or it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. So, in other words, just the fact of property is. I mean, it's going to be inequality. The great masses, therefore, which excite envy and tempt rapacity must be put out of the possibility of danger by being excluded from the representative body.

They then form a natural rampart. This is beginning to sound like a Monty Python sketch. A natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property, which is by the natural course of things divided among many, has not the same operation. The plunder of a few would indeed give but a share. So it's of no use to take what the rich have and divide it up among the many. It wouldn't give them much. The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself, self.

This is what I was thinking of, which I thought was odd and interesting. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue. It grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possessors of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession as most concerned in it, are the natural securities for this transmission.

53:32 Seth: I hope the listeners, as they listen to all these long quotes, get a sense of how painfully difficult it is to read this.

53:41 Wes: How syntactically lush is the syntactically lush?

53:45 Seth: Nice. That's a nice way of putting it.

53:48 Wes: It's a phrase Burke might have used himself.

53:50 Mark: Yeah, I had a lot of difficulty reading it. I actually just listened to the entire book, including the really boring parts that we didn't formally assign as an audiobook. And then when I went back to take notes for part of it, I actually still play the audiobook while following along with my eyes, so. So that my brain did not have to actually stop at every sentence. And then I would just stop and take notes or copy things out.

54:15 Wes: It helps if you put on a pair of tights and a white wig

54:21 Seth: and dust yourself with privilege.

54:27 Wes: Yes, it all becomes much, much clearer

54:30 Mark: that the audiobook, even at double speed and Read by the person who's not that great, who reads the Librivox recording in this case, that it was all very understandable. I barely ever had to kind of skip back and like, what did that sentence mean? So despite the syntactic density, I feel like it is mellifluous in a certain way.

54:49 Dylan: I just imagine Patrick Stewart reading it.

54:51 Wes: To me, he's repetitive enough that he

54:56 Dylan: could have used a good editor, any editor.

54:58 Seth: A bad editor would have been helpful.

55:01 Wes: I don't know. No, I like this kind of writing.

55:02 Dylan: It's too long.

55:03 Wes: It is. You're right. You're right. This could have been boiled down to a blog post. No, not a blog post.

55:09 Dylan: No. It could have been made a third the length, a good 80 or 90 page essay. Easy.

55:14 Wes: Nah, even less.

55:15 Mark: Well, and there are, you know, we could have read an excerption of this because some of the parts that we didn't read are very obviously because they're like, Now I'm going to in detail criticize the monetary policy of the new French government. Now I'm going to criticize the. The judiciary that they proposed of how they're going to do like going through in painstaking detail. No, that's not relevant to us. We just let it pass. However, at the time, it was probably a fine level of detail.

55:44 Dylan: Well, it was like a bestseller, right? It was a huge selling book.

55:47 Mark: Yep.

55:47 Seth: One of the things that I think is interesting about the legacy of this thing is that I was under the impression that Burke is somehow an ideological pillar of conservatism. But most of the people who reach canonical status like that get reprints. They get some kind of like, you can find decent editions of Hayek or other conservative theorists. Every online copy, Kindle version. They're all weak. So just so you know, Wes gave us a link to which archive is like of the university of archive.org, but it's a university copy or something like that. Anyway, the Kindle version, which at least doesn't have the use of the letter F instead of S, you know, like all that old school, old English stuff, you can't search in it.

Search is not enabled for this copy. So you have a 300 page political document you cannot search. If you try to read this thing on an iPad with these sentences that he writes and these insane paragraphs, it's like almost unreadable. And I would have thought if this was such a critical work of theory that underpins modern political movements, that somebody would have taken the time to try to make something authoritative that would be Useful to us off slash rant.

57:04 Mark: Well, I think these things have been passed down the non searchability. It's part of the tradition.

57:11 Dylan: You haven't gotten the scroll edition.

57:13 Wes: It'll make you better man. Seth.

57:16 Seth: Oh yeah, those days are over.

57:19 Mark: So since we just talked about how it's okay that there are rich people compared to poor people and that the

57:27 Seth: poor people should be protected from hereditarily rich people.

57:31 Dylan: Yes.

57:31 Seth: He has very little to say about people who come up through merchant class and all that kind of stuff.

57:36 Mark: Pretty much very close after that. Page 44 I have for though hereditary wealth and rank and the rank which goes with it are too much idolized by creeping sycophants and the blind abject admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the petulant assuming short sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent regulated preeminence, some preference not exclusive approbation given to birth is neither unusual nor unjust, nor impolitic. So with a few caveats. It's okay that there are some people that are lords. There's an aristocracy.

58:12 Wes: And the idea here is not that God has ordained it thus, it's just that it's for the benefit of the whole. In the way there's a heart and a liver and the pancreas. Some of us have to be the pancreas. It serves the functioning of the whole state. I think that's the general idea of the way you would justify something like this.

58:30 Dylan: Don't you mean somebody has to be the rectum?

58:33 Wes: Yes. Sorry.

58:35 Dylan: I just wanted you to come up with the. Somebody has to be the toenail. Right? Somebody has to be the toe fungus.

58:42 Seth: Now you guys are going back to Hobbes?

58:43 Wes: I thought I was a little farther north of the rectum, but okay, I'm somewhere.

58:49 Mark: Yeah, right after that it says. It is said that 24 millions ought to prevail over 200,000 true. If the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp post for its second to men who may reason calmly it is ridiculous. I'm not sure what the Having the lamppost is my second.

59:08 Wes: The lamppost for its second is the. The threat of hanging is what that means.

59:13 Dylan: Yeah.

59:14 Mark: Ah, okay.

59:15 Dylan: Thank you.

59:16 Mark: The will of the many and their interest must very often differ. And great will be the difference when they make an evil Choice. Government of 500 country attorneys and obscure curates is not good for 24 millions of men, though were chosen by 8 and 40 millions. So, in other words, you're always going to have, just as a practical matter, some representative body actually getting things done. And so wouldn't it be good if those people have some sort of qualifications, have some sort of even upbringing to do this kind of thing? So that, in other words, training, more or less since birth, the education to do this, you know, of course, we have to keep in mind the common people of his time were way, way less educated.

And I think that's kind of the key thing that unravels all of this, is that we have made the choice, we are going with democracy here. And so we have to deal with the electorate that we have, and we have to just commit to educating them, to all of us being educated and improving the communications. So it really isn't that a small representative body is just making the decisions with no possibility of any influence by us. Like, you know, now we have all this communication and stuff.

1:00:26 Wes: I think it's not just education, though. What I. When I was reading through this, I was thinking, well, how do I capture what he's trying to get at here? And I think it's like leadership ability, leadership qualities which he associates with being part of the nobility. I think.

1:00:40 Mark: You think just to vote in the assembly you need leadership qualities.

1:00:43 Dylan: No, I think that he means the idea that the nobility have as part of their ethic that they are supposed to be leaders. And so there's a cultivation within that class of habits and mores and dispositions to be leaders. That's the conceit.

1:01:01 Wes: Yeah. So, for instance, on page 42 of my edition, he says, the lawyers who are in the assembly are not the glory of the bar, but they, the greater part, the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession. Instrumental as in people who follow orders. And later on, he's going to basically suggest that you need people who are actually in a position to be not the instrumental members of a society, not the people who are given the orders, but who are giving the orders. And not only that, but who are conscious of their position.

There's something about here what Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance. Just the feeling of being superior to other people is actually a qualification for being superior to other people. So he says, you know, he talks of the body being placed in the hands of men not taught habitually to respect themselves, who had no previous fortunes in character at stake, who could not be expected to bear with moderation or to conduct with discretion, a power. So there's something about being qualified to use power.

1:02:06 Dylan: The criticism he's making there is of the National Assembly. So he's talking about the post revolution French national assembly as being full of non leaders, essentially the people who would be mere mechanics of government, the lowest of the curates and that that's a problem.

1:02:24 Wes: Men formed to be instruments, not controls, not habituated to sentiments of dignity. A lot of this again goes back to people who are not part of the landed interest.

1:02:35 Seth: I'm trying to find a way to engage with this in kind of a rational manner, but it's just so much of this stuff is I get a violent reaction to it. What he doesn't give a sufficient account for is two things. One is that the tradition which structures the society has to have a mechanism for change that's tied to this notion of rights that are supposed to be insured by the landed class or whatever. And there's this idea that, well, you have to trust in the mechanism of the nobility or the monarchy or the parliament to address these concerns. And if not, if they aren't addressed, then you have to just be patient.

Right? And it reminded me of the letter from a Birmingham jail. Do you guys remember having that conversation about ML Kings? He says, you know, one of the basic points in your statement is that the action and I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. And he says, hey, we've waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. And he's basically saying we do not want and we cannot permit violent overthrow because of the terror and the violations that will occur. But he's saying it's okay to continue to perpetuate oppression and the terror and the violence that's inherent in the system because that's somehow less objectionable or there's less of a degree to it than what happens when there's chaos.

And again, I keep coming back to the idea that this is an argument that could only be made by somebody who benefits from that inherent structure. And at the same time I'm sympathetic to it, just feels like he's reacting to one thing, but he's lining up all of these unsurprisingly portable arguments against it when he could have taken a very different approach. He's justifying institutions that don't deserve justification simply in response to what he sees as a threat or fear of something that might happen in England.

1:04:32 Dylan: Does it matter that he saw this threat of chaos that seems like it got borne out right in the terror which happened after he wrote this. So on the face of it, he saw elements that led to a weak government that had tendencies of tyranny and terror and that just ended up being borne out wholly.

1:04:55 Wes: And he does talk frequently about the possibility of both revolution, but then non revolutionary reform. You go back to that whole wounds of the father quote. You should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of the father instead of simply ripping the father apart. Which is kind of seems consistent with King's approach. Right, the nonviolent peaceful protest, persuading the law rather than trying to step outside of it.

1:05:19 Seth: We did read that section from early on in the essay where he says terrible outcomes in the short term may have positive outcomes in the long term, and positive outcomes in the short term may have terrible outcomes in the long term. He makes a claim about not being able to judge the efficacy or the outcome of actions. We don't have that ability to do that. Do you guys remember anything like that?

1:05:43 Wes: Yep, that's right before the section I just read, actually.

1:05:46 Seth: Okay.

1:05:46 Wes: The Science of Jurisprudence.

1:05:49 Seth: So yes, he predicted that there would be the terrors and this disruption of the French Revolution. And in fact his prediction was borne out. But if we look at it from the perspective of where we sit now, if the four of us said, okay, let's take a look at the state of France now versus if we did a hypothetical about what France would be like now if there had not been the French Revolution, or for that matter, if America had not had an American Revolution, do we look at that and say unequivocally that the outcome of the French Revolution was bad? Was there terror? Was there disruption? Yes.

1:06:27 Wes: Not to mention Napoleon romping around Europe and yeah, yeah, we're a bunch of

1:06:33 Mark: atheists that, you know, according to his take, that was the big long term thing, is that atheism ended up more or less winning or at least gaining a much.

1:06:41 Wes: And the metric system, Seth, the metric system,

1:06:46 Dylan: bon Dieu.

1:06:47 Seth: Well, if you say that without the French Revolution there would never have been Napoleon, then maybe my argument goes out the window. But this entire thing is in many respects his attempt to caution people against being infatuated with what happened in France and taking the same action in England. To the extent that he doesn't want to appeal to absolute claims or theories or reason or grounding principles, there's a sense in which this truly is just a piece of rhetoric to say, I am going to try and convince you Englishmen, not Americans, not Frenchmen, not Spaniards, not any. I'm trying to convince English people not to. To use the French as a model. Because yes, he's making predictions about what will happen to the French during the Revolution. But ultimately all he's really trying to do is say the same sort of thing that would happen in England would be a disaster.

1:07:43 Wes: France had much, much different problems at that time than England, and financial insolvency was really one of the big ones which led to the French Revolution. But it also didn't have the history that England had of this robust parliamentary counterweight to kingly authority. So I'm not sure that he's worried about revolution in England. The revolution, in a sense, has already happened. I think he's worried about, and we get this towards the end of our reading, he's worried about the corrosive effect of these ideas, the way in which they could undermine the good things that England already has.

You know, at one point he says just the very idea of rights is actually corrosive to liberty, ironically enough. And liberty, by the way, is sort of his overall prevailing standard. This isn't something we've mentioned yet because I vaguely said, well, you know, sort of the overarching standard here for his argument is good consequences and bad consequences. But the way the reading starts, he talks about being a lover of liberty, and liberty ends up being something inherited and society ends up being for the sake of liberty. And so that's the ultimate thing that must be safeguarded.

The main point here is I think he's worried about ideas, the effect of certain ideas on the fabric of English society. Not that England is going to imitate the French Revolution. Maybe I'm wrong about that. That's just the sense I get from the reading itself. These sermons, you know, in the old Jewry, these Marxist professors corrupting the youth.

1:09:15 Mark: So the whole take on the social contract here that we got a while ago of being necessity. I read this as strict, straight up, that he took Aristotle seriously, that we are social animals. And so by our very nature it is our good, it is our telos to be in these associations. And just like Aristotle thoughts that some people are naturally slaves, some people, the best thing for them, according to Burke, is to be in the low rung of this association. And it's still much better for them to be in the low rung of this association than to be a rebel against the association itself.

And then taking from that, there's a quote here on 52, you know why he doesn't like the idea of metaphysic rites? Is because those don't accurately describe what our telos would be about. What? Excellent. So he says these metaphysic rites entering into common life like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium are by the laws of nature refracted from their straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human, Human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.

And later he says the simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. So I think he's just trying to get at the complexity of what the human telos and then what it is for the compact to be optimal is just defies this like, no, everyone has the right to food, Everyone has the right to any sort of spelling out like, no, the rights are always going to be dependent on the exact circumstances of the society. What else did you guys make of this whole straight line thing?

1:10:56 Wes: So right after that, there's another great line in the next paragraph. The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes. And in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages. And these are often in balances between differences of good, in compromises, sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing morally and not metaphysically or mathematically true moral denominations.

So it's just the sense in which the abstract notion of rights doesn't do justice to all the sorts of compromises we have to make practically when we're making decisions. And if we are hardliners about those rights, this could almost again come down to what de Beauvoir calls the serious right. We might be willing to sacrifice everything to the concept of right. Right we might be, no matter how terrible things get, no matter how much terror there is, no matter how much. Well, this is a matter of rights, and we must enforce that. And there's no compromise.

That's a drawback. Is treating rights as sort of extreme metaphysical principles that are inviolable.

1:12:10 Mark: Gun laws, anyone? I have the right to my firearm. It doesn't matter how bad things get, how many people are murdered, how much gun violence there is, like that's the right. This is exactly the kind of example I think that he's talking about. Once you buy into abstract rights, they take over. They prevent you from actually doing good governance. You need a more pragmatic approach to overall well being.

1:12:31 Wes: Just one note here. The Bill of Rights that came with the glorious revolution that Burke supports includes the right to bear arms. It's sort of one of the origins of the American Bill of Rights.

1:12:40 Dylan: So. Yeah, but part of the Second Amendment and the troubles with that have to do with the interpretation.

1:12:47 Seth: Right.

1:12:47 Dylan: All the rights that are outlined in the Bill of Rights, at least in the American Constitution, have limits on them.

1:12:53 Wes: It's interesting you bring up this because historically it really is about giving you the capacity for revolution. That's really what that right is about in English common law and in American law. So it's about making sure that at any given time we can overthrow the government.

1:13:09 Dylan: That might be a matter for another discussion.

1:13:11 Seth: Right.

1:13:11 Dylan: I know that people interpret it that way. It doesn't seem so clear to me by reading like the three sentences there that that's what it really means.

1:13:18 Wes: There's a huge scholarly dispute. I did my own research on this. It seemed pretty clear to me. And especially in English common law, it's clear because they state it expressly.

1:13:27 Mark: Or just imagine if somebody's arguing for an absolute right of privacy and so like, no, I can't let you into the terrorist phone, that kind of thing. That Burke would be a pragmatist about individual things like that. Yes, we would want privacy to be an expectation as an overall part of our well being. However, when it comes down to it, none of these things are absolute.

1:13:49 Wes: There are limits on free speech which are already well embedded in American law. There are many, many limits on free speech. The most famous one, of course, is the yelling fire in a crowded theater, incitements, you know, things like that, fighting words.

1:14:02 Dylan: But there's also going to be another line, right, where the rule of law, in the sense of following those rules are part of the administration of justice. So something like a Miranda rule or whatever, so that the case where you know, the person is guilty, but because the evidence against them was obtained illegally, then they're not found guilty by the law because the evidence is inadmissible because the rules were broken. There are good reasons for having rules go in both those directions.

1:14:32 Wes: If we come at it from the other direction, it could be, yes, we're going to torture this person.

1:14:38 Dylan: Yes.

1:14:38 Wes: And not give them due process. We can sacrifice rights for the sake of security. It's a tough question and Burke even acknowledges this at some point.

1:14:48 Mark: Right. It's something that is worked out by experience, I think, over time. Like that's the value of tradition is because something has been honed over time that we've worked out what Are the limits on free speech through a series of conflicts and end up tweaking the exact rules to something that seems to work best. And maybe as circumstances change, what seems best? You know, if terrorism gets much, much more frequent, then maybe we change our expectations about privacy. We kind of have the feeling like, well, if you allow torture in this one case, then we're lawless.

Like we're lawless in the way that Burke would object to. It's because, okay, now they'll just torture all the time. But if the where you allow torture were not that I think you should allow torture ever anyway, but if this were the kind of thing that had the no torture rule was like the free speech rule, that well, okay, there are exceptions in certain circumstances. You could figure out as you go forward what those circumstances should be. And as long as people are actually paying attention to the rules and perhaps there has to be transparency, you can't have groups shielded from public eye making these decisions because then what is going to connect them to the tradition?

Certainly not their code of ethics, not their religion.

1:16:01 Dylan: The circumstances you're describing, Mark, those exceptions seem to to be impossible to codify into law. They're the kinds of things that you would have to leave up. They would be part of the prudential activities of the appropriately experienced and smart people that Burke wants to have running government. So there'd be this whole category of judgments that are made that are pseudo judicial or extrajudicial, right, where you would never codify them and probably never have the kind of transparency you're talking about. But they are the politic judgments based upon circumstance of the appropriately experienced people.

1:16:43 Wes: Like a star chamber. Sorry,

1:16:47 Seth: there's a reference.

1:16:48 Wes: I'm sorry, you guys are beginning to scare me with this line of talk.

1:16:51 Dylan: I think what I'm saying would be a very Burkian kind of thing to say, okay, that you would have all these pragmatic decisions that would be one offs, right, but you could never codify such a thing into law.

1:17:02 Mark: It's interesting exploring Burke's whole thinking here because we had in our Federalist papers and our discussion, if you learn anything about the Constitution, just the fundamental assumption is that there is going to be abuse and we just have to construct the system so that abuse will be checked. I'm trying to figure out the extent to which Burke buys that. Like it seems that no, he thinks that yes, of course there is going to be abuse in individual circumstances, but you don't construct the whole picture with the chief purpose of preventing abuse.

1:17:33 Dylan: Checks and balances aren't.

1:17:34 Mark: You assume that most people are going to be doing what they're supposed to be doing. Again, because we have these non governmental customs, we have religion built into the government, we have all these moral aspects of a moral compass that are sort of built into. So you don't need the degree of paranoia in the construction of checks and balances.

1:17:54 Wes: When he's defending the Glorious Revolution, one of the things he valorizes about that is that basically they set up some checks and balances, like the Parliament is a check on the king, but not

1:18:04 Mark: such that the king can be impeached. It's not that kind of.

1:18:07 Wes: He explicitly. Let me just read you the. The rule laid down for the government and the Declaration is right. The constant inspection of Parliament, the practical claim of impeachment, they thought infinitely better security, not only for their constitutional liberty, blah, blah, blah. So there is a impeachment clause in there. I don't know enough about it to know how that works exactly. And whether that's specifically towards the king,

1:18:29 Dylan: but it seems like it can't possibly be towards the king, given the other stuff that he says. How could you impeach a king and even the way he defends it.

1:18:36 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure how impeachment works exactly. But the Parliament is a counterbalance to the monarch. There's no.

1:18:43 Mark: I'm probably even overstating. Yes, it's in the text of the Constitution and worrying about checks and balances and things, in other words, trying to put everything into law that you have to obey so that you don't rely on the judgment of individuals, you don't rely on them being wise or virtuous in order to prevent things from going wrong. But we've seen even recently in the operation of the government, like all these kind of Senate rules, these traditions, such that then we have we're going to pursue the nuclear option. There's a lot of things that are not strictly rules, but that are just procedures of.

This is the way we've always done it. And so then when a president or some party in the Senate violates this thing, then it's like, oh, my God, when somebody says, I'm going to trash the system. You know, when Trump says he's going to ignore sort of all the gentlemen's agreements that are built in. I'm going to play hardball with these people in a way that even though we've had antagonistic parties before, they've never played hardball like this against each other. I'm going to really play hardball.

1:19:43 Wes: I Want to correct this. So the impeachment thing, it's a clause about. It's a freedom of speech clause. It's actually members of Parliament can't be prosecuted in court for anything they say in the debates in Parliament. It's preventing Parliament from being impeached, essentially, or the parliamentary debates.

1:20:00 Mark: The last part that we quoted was from like 52, 53, about how government is computing principle. This is all in the context of him railing against people that want to use revolution instead of reform. Page 54. These professors, finding their extreme principles not applicable to cases which call only for a qualified or as I may say, civil and legal resistance in such cases employ no resistance at all. Is with them a war or a revolution, or it is nothing. Finding their schemes of politics not adapted to the state of the world in which they live, they often come to think of lightly of all public principle.

This I wrote Bernie next to it because I feel like people who are idealists. In fact, he even says later on the page they have some change in the church or state, are both constantly in their view. When that is the case, they are always bad citizens and perfectly unsure connections for considering their speculative designs as of infinite value and the actual arrangement of the state as of no estimation, they are at best indifferent about it. They see no merit in the good and no fault in the vicious management of public affairs. They rather rejoice in the latter as more propitious to revolution.

1:21:05 Wes: So they have their mind set on this ideal and anything but that becomes of no interest. So gradual reform and being pragmatic and compromising, that all becomes tedious. Even if someone horrible comes along or threatens to come into power, even that can become a matter of indifference because it might lead to the sort of societal breakdown which will lead to. To the revolution they really want and establishing the ideal state on top of that, or something like that. And he goes on to say that this focus on the ideal ultimately perverts people's capacity for empathy. Sure, just after what you read, Mark.

1:21:41 Mark: Yeah, specifically if they're all girded for violent revolution. But as these occasions may never arise where they need to use violence, the mind receives a gratuitous taint and the moral sentiments suffer not a little when no political purpose is served by the depravation. Which seems a little less relevant to our politics now, but I guess that does if you are, for instance, a hard right militia person or really just anybody that feels like maybe there are leftists that are like this. Like if the. The person I don't like gets elected, there's going to be a revolution. I might participate in that. I just heard an interview on NPR with a Trump supporter that actually said that, yes, if Hillary wins, there's going to be something's going to go down. Not that he was necessarily going to initiate it.

1:22:22 Wes: People on both sides have been saying that kind of thing forever.

1:22:25 Mark: Yes, exactly.

1:22:26 Dylan: It's not a simple equality. It's far too facile.

1:22:30 Wes: I think it's more equal than our side is willing to admit.

1:22:34 Mark: We just threatened to move to Canada. We don't.

1:22:36 Wes: That's a political debate to have another time. But this whole general idea of perverting one's capacity for empathy or the way he puts it, they have perverted in themselves and in those who attend to them all the well placed sympathies of the human breast, in part because they get so taken up with rights. This again is the specter of the serious where most violence. You know, this is one of the interesting things lately I've seen in some books that have come out by sociologists. But violence is generally moralized. Right. People are most prone to doing brutal things when they think they know the ultimate good.

1:23:09 Dylan: It's a righteous action.

1:23:10 Wes: Yeah. So when you're this righteous, when you know what the rights are and there's no compromising and blah, blah, blah, then I think he's right. There is inevitably that effect on empathy because actual individual human beings become less important than those abstract ideals and are to be crushed underneath their boot. They can be sacrificed for the sake of those ideals.

1:23:32 Dylan: I think you're right. That's the danger. But in a funny way, sacrificing oneself to those ideals is also the glory.

1:23:40 Seth: Right.

1:23:40 Dylan: That's where the sacrificing oneself or one's life for be it the idea of freedom or the your country or the rule of law or any of these other ideas, I mean especially something like democracy is founded on an idea. And the interesting thing being pointed out is that you can be associated with a terrible idea or a really good idea.

1:24:04 Wes: Ultimately all ideas are really terrible when they become more important than flesh and blood human beings.

1:24:11 Dylan: Oh, that's not true at all.

1:24:12 Wes: What do you mean it's not true at all?

1:24:13 Dylan: What is the quote from Martin Luther King? What are you willing to die for? Right. I think the difference is the choice that one makes to sacrifice one's life for an idea versus sacrificing other people's lives for that idea. That is to me a kind of clarification of where that line is right.

1:24:30 Mark: I mean, we'd have to ask Burke. Well, what about conscription? What about like different things that were going on? It seems like he thinks that the power of ideas is an essential part. Like I was saying, you can't have just written laws. You have to have a culture of ethical norms and things that supports that. And part of that culture is that the goodness of the society has to be embodied in the person of the king. That's part of what he thinks is awesome, that it makes us revere, worship society itself. So in that case, yeah, that's an idea, tradition, God, country.

Those are ideas that he thinks you could legitimately not only die for, but send other people in a battle off to die for or potentially. I mean, he doesn't want to go in and kill unjustly, but it seems like there are lots of. Depending on how bad things get, there might be lots of sacrifices that are not just of yourself that get justified by these ideas.

1:25:30 Wes: Yeah, each side in this debate can always accuse the other of sacrificing people to ideas. But ultimately he thinks though that his sort of ultimate standard is again, consequences, it's the good of society or something like that. Whereas the idea of abstract rights is inherently non consequentialist. So the example we gave in the Singer episode is, you know, this whole classic utilitarian dilemma between flipping a train switch to have it go kill one person lying on the tracks versus five people on the tracks. And then one level you could make that from a consequentialist point of view, it's obvious that you send it to kill the one person.

But from a rights based point of view, each life is sort of an infinite value and the calculation breaks down. So it is two different modes of rights based reasoning versus consequentialism is two very different ways of thinking about these things. So then the task is to explore can each one be rigid in a way, can each one lead to atrocities and sacrifices when taken to an extreme? And probably the answer is yes.

1:26:32 Mark: However, that's also an example of a prejudice we have that, you know, you shouldn't intentionally do wrong. That was at least one of the things that when we were talking with Singer, that what is rational according to him? The law of utility? Everybody's interest is equal is not the thing we are prejudiced to do is not the thing that is a natural sentiment for us. And he very much argues so here's on page 72, he's talking about prejudices. The context of this whole section is he's saying why he doesn't think that these ideas that caught on in France will catch on in England because of the English character that earlier he says, we think that we are not the converts of Rousseau.

We are not the disciples of Voltaire. Atheists are not our preacher. Madmen are not our lawgivers. As we know, we have made no discoveries and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality, nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty which were understood long before we were born.

1:27:31 Seth: Oh yes, good tempered Englishman.

1:27:33 Mark: In England we have.

1:27:35 Seth: Does this validate my concern that that was the thrust of this was to caution the English against.

1:27:41 Wes: In England we have not yet been completely emboweled of our natural entrails. We still feel within. This is one of my favorite lines. We still feel within us. And we cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments, not to mention inbred royalty, which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. It's not the only time he uses the word manly.

1:28:05 Mark: Lots of manly.

1:28:06 Wes: We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled like stuffed birds in a museum with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men.

1:28:16 Seth: We're English, not French.

1:28:18 Wes: The gist of this argument towards the end of our reading is it's about the sense in which the passions. And later on they'll talk about the passions instructing reason. It's about the feasibility of reason or the frailty of reason and the necessity for sentiment and attachment and passion and these sorts of things, particularly attachment to tradition, of course, to play a role in our political decision making.

1:28:42 Mark: Yes, the quote that I was actually edging toward there was about prejudice in particular. Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we, the English, cherish them to a very considerable degree. And to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices. And the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade, each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the bank and capital, of nations and of ages.

1:29:14 Wes: This made me think of Gadamer, this passage, the importance of Explain name dropper. Well, I only vaguely. This is like what's so terrible about these podcasts is how quickly I forget within like the week after we've recorded it. I completely forget. And I didn't look this up. But the sense in which our interpretive project begins with prejudices. And we can't simply pretend that we can cast them away and sort of look at things from a bird's eye point of view. So in other words, it's analogous to the whole idea of being reformers instead of revolutionaries. Our hermeneutic predicament is that we can't really be revolutionaries. That's the same hermeneutic version of our political predicament.

1:29:55 Mark: Well, saying that we are doomed in some ways to start with the prejudices that we have and actively riding yourselves and trying to cling to them. Those seem different heuristic tools.

1:30:09 Wes: Except that there's so many other passages in this in which he's open to reform. So we really should not paint a picture of him where he's opposed to reform and he's completely opposed even to revolution, because it's just not accurate.

1:30:20 Mark: And he's probably not using the term prejudice in the way that we would use it. No matter how many smart minorities I see, my prejudice is that they're all lazy dumb bastards and I'm gonna cling

1:30:34 Wes: to no prejudgment assumption. The sort of things that Aristotle was talking about in our Nicomachean ethics, reading the principles that only nous can get at the things that can't be proven.

1:30:47 Dylan: It's not a pan to bigotry.

1:30:49 Mark: What if we just interpret that in terms of the earlier quote? We think that no discoveries are to be made in morality, nor many in the great principles of government.

1:30:57 Wes: Well, that's like Aristotle saying they cannot be the conclusions of demonstrative arguments.

1:31:02 Mark: Where does then Peter Singer's claim about universality, which again goes against our native prejudices, where does that lie? Because that's exactly the kind of thing that he says that nous would discover that Singer says that reason itself discovers. It's a discovery made in morality. It's one made perennial. It's not a recent discovery, but it's not one that controls societies. There's almost no society actually based on that principle that the in groups and the out groups get equal treatment. You can't have a society based on that.

1:31:36 Wes: Well, the law tends towards that, right? I mean, one might even think the whole point of the law is to prevent revenge based in group out group antagonism. An eye for an eye sort of thing, right? So instead of us all being mafiosos and forcing justice for our families the way we see fit, if someone kills someone I love, it goes to the courts that's the sense in which the law embodies the impartiality that Singer is talking about.

1:32:02 Dylan: Thank you Athena.

1:32:03 Wes: But your question still stands. Do we really think there are no discoveries in morality or I just had

1:32:08 Mark: the crude picture of purely property redistribution in terms of a government, if you distinguish between citizens and non citizens, then you can collect tax from everybody and you can spend it on all the citizens through various things. And maybe you could be very egalitarian about it. But if you said even though we the government were only elected by this part of the people, we're not going to distinguish between citizens and non citizens or people within our borders or without our borders, then we have to equally distribute all the stuff we collect over everyone in the world. And it would. You know, this is the thing that people afraid of the extreme liberal welfare state think might really happen. We're just going to give away everything, right?

1:32:48 Wes: We either have a country or we don't have a country.

1:32:51 Mark: Sorry, gotta be bastard.

1:32:54 Wes: That's a quote from Donald Trump.

1:32:57 Mark: Any other threads people want to pull out here? What about the end? This is page 203. What is Liberty without wisdom, without virtue? It is the greatest of possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness without tuition or restraint. To make a government requires no great prudence, settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done to give freedom still more easy. It is not necessary to guide it is only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government that is to temper these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful and combining mind. There you go.

1:33:30 Wes: I like Burke.

1:33:32 Mark: Elaborate.

1:33:33 Wes: Although I know Seth is horrified by him well, I remember it's interesting. I read him. The last time I read this was at the University of Texas in a It was sort of one of my electives at grad school there. So it was a sort of an upper level undergraduate course and the professor who was running it basically made Burke into this foil idiotic. Basically it was completely idiotic and stupid and he just shit all over it for the whole class. And I found myself raising my hand to defend Burke because I thought it was unfair until he got fed up with that and didn't want to hear from me anymore.

So despite my sort of sympathy for deontology, for the concept of rights, and my natural distaste for consequentialism, which has probably come across in a few podcasts, and the typical American disdain for monarchy and nobility and the rich and all the things it's interesting to see this kind of defense of that. So, I mean, who today would write something like this defending this, right? And of course, there are a lot of profound and interesting truths to be gleaned from it, whatever your politics. But the thing that continues to be most interesting to me is this question that was raised in the Crito and continued here about when disobedience to the law is legitimate, when revolution is legitimate, and the implications of that not just for politics, but it's a question we can even ask about ourselves because we could treat ourselves, our psyches, on the classic analogy as sort of mini political systems.

How do we change? So that's really the fundamental question. It's a question about becoming. It's a question about change and moral and political. And so I think it's fascinating in that sense to me. That's my closing.

1:35:12 Mark: Some of what he says in the abstract. I like the idea of favoring the concrete over the abstract, of being too willing to make substantial sacrifices of real people's blood, sweat and tears for an ideal, for an abstract thing that you just came up with. I completely get that. And even the pictures he outlines of how mean it was in France for them to just think, if you're a nobleman or a clergyman in that society, and like you, you've obeyed the rules your whole life and you've done what you think you're going to do, and then everything just changes on you and they just take your stuff and they kick you out and the whole thing you train for, for your life, you don't get to do.

That's not very nice. And you better have a damn good reason if you're going to actually do that to people. You better be sure, as much as you can be of that, that sacrifice will not be in vain. I'm glad that violent revolution is not on the table among our realistic political options among sane people anymore. And if that is the point here, then great. But so much of the rest of what he has to say, so much of the underlying. Unless you have religion strapped to the political, then things are going to be terrible. Then people aren't going to obey, and people are naturally unequal.

Not because only the people born of noble houses are worthy to govern. But that's still more true than not. You know, just this fundamental. We have put all our eggs in the egalitarianism basket, and I'm comfortable with that. I don't see how it's possibly defensible to go the other direction. You know, if I really was going to Judge him. I'd have to see. Even though he's talking about very specific things in his day, we don't know those things well enough to know whether we would agree with him about about these things. We would have to just read other authors from this time that also sound reasonable.

Maybe we'll read some Mary Wollstonecraft I know is one of the ones on our list. Apparently was very shocked by Burke's views here about natural rights. And I certainly take Seth's point that he keeps bringing up about those who are not benefited by the current system could not possibly have this view. And so I can certainly see people in the modern age trying to be Burkeans and and themselves advocating politically conservative things that would disgust me.

1:37:37 Wes: We should say here Burke is considered the father of political conservatism as we know it. I don't think we said that up to this point. So this is for intellectual conservatives. This is one of the classic figures to which they look for.

1:37:51 Seth: Which is why I would have expected that there would be an easier to read and more authoritative version out there.

1:37:56 Mark: Apparently he's more more quoted than read. And that was Even true like 50 years after he died, according to the intro of the book that I have that was from like 1940 or something.

1:38:06 Seth: If it was possible for us to do our podcast on quotes instead of readings, then I certainly would have in this case. And also for Husserl.

1:38:16 Wes: See, I like this kind of prose, the ornateness, this kind of purple prose.

1:38:21 Dylan: There's times where it was pretty awesome. I really like him as a pragmatic advocate for politics and for government. Especially if I kind of close my eyes during the sections of rabidly supporting monarchy because it seemed to be in large part about the notion of pragmatic government and there seemed to be a lot of virtue there. To me, where I found myself just chomping at the bit was just his sort of sanguine attitude towards the location of power and where it is and that that's just naturally the way it is and there aren't things that are going to change that.

And frankly his lack of thoughtfulness about what the sources of some of those discrepancies are. Like for instance, saying that there's all kinds of reasons why common everyday people can't possibly lead the country. Maybe if there was more education amongst people and that there was more equality of certain sorts that that would help alleviate this kind of thing. It's not even part of his vocabulary or part of the conversation at all. And it's not clear to me that it couldn't have been. So I just find that it tweaks a lot of my anti authoritarian, anti nobility American kind of sentiments.

I find myself more enamored of something like the Federalist Papers about the way to think about government and good government and the construction of it.

1:39:51 Wes: What you just said there, Dylan, reminded me that this is a good lead-in to our de Tocqueville reading because one way to read Burke's argument here is that our egalitarianism can actually be a threat to our liberty. You know, this is one of the things that Burke says repeatedly that society is it structured as it safeguards liberty even when there's inequality. And de Tocqueville is going to explore the same idea that there's a tension between freedom and equality.

1:40:17 Dylan: Yeah, that'll be a good discussion. We can elaborate more about the nature of that tension and maybe reflect on where Burke ended up on that.

1:40:25 Mark: So yes, folks should already be aware that our next reading is Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It was a partially examined life live show that will have already happened by the time you're hearing this. Seth, anything else to take us home? Do you have more closing?

1:40:39 Seth: I guess I'll just say listen to a comment and said that, you know, Burke was a conservative in the true sense of the word. His goal was to conserve as much as he could with the minimal amount of change that that's kind of the true nature that his whole project was stability and avoidance of this terror and tumult and the things that he saw that we're awful about. And the two things I would say about that are first that that is in many respects it's operating from a place of fear. So it's a reaction to the fear of a potential future outcome. And so this conservativism that he introduces is really about preserving the status quo because it's something that you know versus the thing that you fear, which is something that you don't know.

And that knowing of this current state which makes it familiar and comfortable versus the fear of the unknown is to be juxtaposed with the knowing of the current state of the people who again I'm beating the drum, but for whom the status quo is not worse than the alternative. And he shows remarkably little compassion or imagination for any motivation that might drive somebody to say whatever the unknown is, it's got to be better than the situation as it's stands. And it also not taking into account the long patience of people who perhaps have Tried to change or the mechanisms, understanding the mechanisms that are available for change.

And it's this notion of patient enlightenment, waiting for the people who have the power to make change in a society to become enlightened about the plight of others or whatever. And so the whole thing struck me. I mean, I wanted to be, you know, that I'm the generous reader, right. I'm the guy who tries to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. But in this case, I really struggled to do that. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah.

1:42:35 Mark: It was only really going back and taking notes on this that I wasn't just thinking the whole time, like, this is just bullshit.

1:42:45 Wes: It's amazing how, like, I completely do not have that reaction.

1:42:50 Seth: Yeah. And I didn't want to be the modern liberal guy, like, reacting to this.

1:42:55 Wes: I just step into a different frame of mind and enjoy. Maybe it's perversely, the word is perverse. Perversely enjoy the elitism of it without necessarily endorsing it. But I can enjoy it.

1:43:05 Seth: We've read many other things that advocate politically a conservative position that I took that position to much more than this. But I think it might be interesting too. I think the discussions about Burke and his context and the reaction to this publication, amongst other things, are actually much more interesting than a discussion about this particular text itself. I mean, it seems like a lot of people talk about the Paine Burke debates, talking about Thomas Paine. Very few people seem to reference Wollstonecraft. But there was clearly a very strong and violent response to this, which in itself is an endorsement that we should respect it.

1:43:47 Mark: This also served to just dispel the appeal of Aristotle's politics because Aristotle is just so abstract. This is. Folks can look back at the politics episode on this, but since I was just interpreting this whole thing in terms of taking Aristotle seriously, then when you read Aristotle, like, oh, yeah, an aristocracy in the abstract. If you could figure out who the best people were and put them in charge, wouldn't you rather have the best people, the qualified people in charge? Like, well, okay, People actually did feel like they were taking that seriously through a good chunk of history. And I don't like it. I like our way better.

1:44:22 Wes: You haven't tried the other way, Mark, don't knock it until you try it.

1:44:26 Mark: I did. I. Traditionally, through my ancestors, I tried it. I think they probably liked it just fine.

1:44:32 Wes: Well, the point is, yes, we like our way better, but we have also lost something. And I think. I think we shouldn't forget that we shouldn't pretend that there are no trade offs, there are benefits to the old system. We've gained a lot of things, but we've also lost something.

1:44:44 Dylan: I'm happy to say goodbye in Adios farewell to the old system, but I think that we should remember that the system we have now, at least in the US and other similar countries, relies on a lot of contingent facts about the nature of our communities. In particular things like education and the availability and breadth of education that people have.

1:45:10 Mark: They didn't have the education and communication. At least we talked about those two.

1:45:13 Wes: Exactly. We should also remember stating, you know, Burke is a Whig, he's the liberal, he's the reformer in the anti monarch party. In a sense, it's not accurate simply to see him as a defender of the ancient regime or something like that,

1:45:27 Dylan: despite all the times he refers to the importance of the ancient regime.

1:45:32 Wes: Again, it's the whole reform versus Revolution question. And you know, we hit on that.

1:45:36 Mark: So yeah, and if Trump wins and makes himself king, then it will just have been a reform, we voted for it and it'll so all hail King Trump.

1:45:45 Wes: Yeah, that's the way it works. You become president, you just declare yourself king and then you're king.

1:45:53 Mark: All right, folks can continue the conversation with us via our Facebook group or on our blog, partiallyexaminedlife.com please become a partially Examined Life citizen. Maybe you could start a not school reading group about this topic. Maybe you could start reading groups about purely political stuff if you want, or stuff that has nothing to do with this about Malebranche hey, once again, for our closing song, I'm going to take the opportunity to pull from the catalog of one of my interviewees for our sister podcast, Nakedly Examined Music. On our most recent episode there, number 27, I talked to Peter Knight, the violinist and one of the singer songwriters for Steeleye Span, which is a British folk rock band.

It's been around since the early 70s. Both his playing and his songwriting, just beautiful, heartbreaking stuff. And our conversation really covers not only musical techniques, but producing art in the face of mortality, being authentic, which is a particularly interesting topic for that band, given that a lot of their output has been recreations of traditional folk songs. Right. How do you do something authentically that was written hundreds of years before you were born? One of the old tunes that Steeleye Span covered back in the day was called Hard Times of Old England, which was given a rather chipper interpretation at that time.

Well, what you're about to hear is Peter's current trio called Peter Knight's Gigspanner from his Layers of Ages Album 2015. This is a different version of Hard Times of Old England that actually expresses how hard the times were. I thought this was very appropriate for this episode when thinking about traditional. It wasn't really that great in Britain back in the day. And the same could go for making America great again. Of course. I hope you like it. And check out the interview@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com okay.

1:47:24 Seth: Good night. Good night.

1:47:26 Wes: Good night.

1:48:33 Unknown speaker: Come, O brother tradesmen that travel along oh, pray come and tell me where the trade is all gone Long time have I traveled and I cannot find none Sing all the hard times of old England in old England, very hard times. Provisions you buy at the shop it is true but if you've no money there's none there for you oh, what's a poor man and his family to do? Sing all the hard times of old England in old England very hard times and you must be Go to the shop and you'll ask for a job and they'll answer you there with a shake and a nod and that's enough to make a man turn out and row Sing all the hard times of old England in old England, very hard times Eyes.

You will see our portrait Walking the street from morning to night for employment to see and scarce have they got any shoes to their feet in all the hard times of old England in old England very hard times and our soldiers and sailors have just come from war They've been fighting for queen and country this year they've come home to be starved they should have stayed where they were Sing all the hard times of old England in old England very hard times. Sa. And now to conclude and to finish my song. I hope that these hard times will be not last long and I hope soon to have occasion to alter my song and sing all the good times of old England in old England, jolly good times.

Sing all the good times of old England in old England, jolly good times. Sing all the good times of old England in old England, jolly good times.