"To Edmund Burke we raise our glasses up! Damn the French, call the wench, bring another cup!"

Thursday, cigarette #3

I should have known better than to think I could get away with calling Edmund Burke an aesthete, especially after I was shot down for saying so in class on Monday (I assumed I had a sympathetic audience...), so let me try to clarify.

The question is "When does Burke think revolution is justified?" We have as data points that he was sympathetic (sort of) to the American revolutionaries, not at all to the Jacobins, and very much to the Indians under British rule, "whether the white people like it or not." If his rule of thumb isn't "all revolution is bad," which it obviously isn't, what's the difference between a revolution Burke would like and one he wouldn't? I said that the criterion was whether or not the revolutionaries had style equal to their task (I mean, if you're gonna kill the king, let's at least have a little theatre to it); commenters on- and off-line are skeptical.

He almost gives us a moral rule for when revolution is okay in the second day of the Hastings impeachment:

He have arbitrary power! My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons, nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give.

No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, preexistent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir . . .

If [despotism] has no written law, it neither does nor can cancel the primeval, indefeasible, unalterable law of Nature and of nations; and if no magistracies control its exertions, those exertions must derive their limitation and direction either from the equity and moderation of the ruler, or from downright revolt on the part of the subject by rebellion, divested of all its criminal qualities.

There is a difference between bad government (which has unfortunate or unjust laws) and despotism (which has no law and is governed "arbitrarily"), and revolution is only justified against the latter. Sounds like a rule of thumb to me!

But this fails to explain why Burke would be so sympathetic to the Americans. To the "Speech on Conciliation with America!" This passage comes during a discussion of American whaling:

No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things; when I know that the Colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

Burke certainly has enough bad things to say about America's stubborn attachment to liberty (it has "at least as much pride as virtue in it," and don't get him started about the lawyers), but something about the nobility of its effects softens his criticism. I quoted the Cromwell passage ("these disturbers were not so much like men usurping power as asserting their natural place in society") last time, so l'll end with the last line of his rhapsody over chivalry:

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness!

What could "vice losing half its evil by losing all its grossness" refer to except some aesthetic criterion?

If a low-rent revolution causes short-term violence on the one hand and long-term ignobility and meanness on the other, Burke may have been right in saying that the latter is the more dangerous effect.