The Great Melody
O'Brien, Conor Cruise
/ n a vulgar, journalistic sense, modern conservatism may be dated from May 6, 1791. Like most things political, it began with an act of violence: the deliberate rupture by Edmund Burke of his...
...Burke, that it was some minutes before he could proceed...
...Not p. 534, as the preface has it...
...Yet in 1791 their friendship collapsed, and a quite new political tendency found its voice...
...Burke understood, as the new Whigs did not, that order is the achievement of centuries...
...journalists] shame them out of everything grand and elevated...
...a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred...
...He demands to be let out, and I shall end, as O'Brien ends, with some remarks from the Reflections that are obviously Burke's comments on political correctness: Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names...
...But Burke is Burke, and it's the right thing to do...
...One woman fainted away when Burke described the horrors inflicted on Indians who failed to pay up...
...Like most things political, it began with an act of violence: the deliberate rupture by Edmund Burke of his longstanding friendship with Charles James Fox...
...Together they had fought George III's policy of taxing the Americans, not to mention opposing the kings' backstage influence on British politics...
...And at the end there is a jolly epistolary conversation with Isaiah Berlin, who was foolish enough to think that Burke was a "reactionary" political thinker...
...O'Brien has found in Burke an Irishman who speaks to him across the centuries...
...What, for example, could be more dazzlingly up-to-the-moment than a remark about politicians made in his late, pessimistic response to the French revolution: In truth, the tribe of vulgar politicians are the lowest of our species...
...The French revolutionaries destroyed the ancien regime in the name of a theory about the rights of man...
...As Burke declared in, the House: "He had done his duty at the price of his friend, their friendship was at an end...
...The real secret of this political earthquake, Burke believed, was the harnessing of religion to the destruction of religion...
...Burke's opposition thus follows by the strictest logic...
...It was, for example, brilliantly employed by Hans Morgenthau to explore the response of the West to Communism...
...Now we have Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, which follows in fascinating historical detail Burke's response to those great events...
...It may seem odd to call conservatism a "new" political tendency, because the history of mankind largely exhibits little else...
...Nor does he mince words about the philosopher whose response to fatherhood was, again and again, to deposit the baby on the steps of a foundlings' home: He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings . . . [the revolutionaries] erect statues to a wild, ferocious, low-minded, hard-hearted father, of fine general feelings...
...He even created it as a Whig, not a Tory, and his conception of government had to wait more than a generation before it finally got its name...
...Its depth of both thought and feeling puts to shame the superficial knowingness of politicians in our own time...
...But the unreflective conservatism of earlier days has little in common with the sophisticated intellectual construction Burke created in response to the revolutionary project of managing society by theory...
...Fox proceeded eventually to review his disagreements with Burke, record their long years of friendship, and hope--vainly in fact—that "his right honorable friend would think on past times" and recognize that their association might survive their differences...
...This is no mere metaphor, as the careful reader of O'Brien's dedication ("For Deirdre Levinson Bergson who brought the Message from the Master") will find if he perseveres as far as the second footnote on page 536...
...And when Burke went to town on the ill-bred way the mob treated Marie Antoinette, their first impulse was to scoff at such superficiality...
...O'Brien actually has Burke speaking to him...
...The reason is that Burke's conservatism is solidly locked into a religious faith, whereas most modern conservatism springs directly from skepticism about the possibilities of politics...
...Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice...
...Wickedness is a little more inventive...
...O'Brien grasps this nettle by describing his book as an anthology with comments...
...The contrast again is between doctrine and conduct, between fancy words and low action...
...B urke has a moral vision that allows him to see through the surfaces at which the eyes of lesser men glaze over...
...Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by...
...What he accurately predicted, in considerable detail and step by step, was derived from a sophisticated moral and religious analysis of the human condition...
...Their attitude was summed up in a famous phrase from Tom Paine in his reply to Burke: "He pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird...
...The very same vice assumes a new body . . 0...
...A Shakespeare in prose, he ruthlessly appropriates everything written about him by forcing writers to use his own incomparable words...
...Writing about Burke has always been hell...
...Both were ardent for freedom and constitutionality...
...They are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and glory...
...The occasion of Burke's quarrel with Fox was, of course, the French Revolution, which Fox had hailed as "one of the most glorious events in the history of mankind...
...Burke ennobles all he touches, and even in reviewing O'Brien I cannot resist his charm and intelligence...
...birth tells us about the real character of conservatism...
...Burke has here a timelessness amazing in one who generally wrote in direct response to the events of the day...
...His success is explicable at many levels of thought...
...And the strength of that syllogism becomes clear when we remember that it was fully worked out long before the killing of the king and the onset of the Terror...
...The central point is perhaps most concisely made in a sentence from Burke on the East India Bill of 1783—a sentence that ought by law to be inscribed over the portals of every university in the United States as a warning to theory-crazed youth: I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government, upon a theory, however plausible it may be...
...There is no trade so vile and mechanical as government in their hands...
...But the important thing is what this moment of The fact that Burke was right about the French Revolution, and the liberal Fox was wrong, is one of the founding strengths of conservatism...
...It is precisely for this reason that Burke is an embarrassment to modern conservatives...
...The jesters and buffoons [i.e...
...Indeed, what makes Burke a figure of extraordinary fascination is that he lived at just the moment when utopianism was escaping the timid prose of philosophers and invading the streets...
...Together they framed the East India Bill and impeached Warren Hastings for corruption...
...Burke the crusader against an "armed doctrine," Fox the liberal enthusiast for the rights of man, and Pitt the pragmatic believer in the politics of business as usual are archetypal political actors caught in the bright lights of a crisis that illuminated the realities of the modern world...
...In supporting the revolution, Fox was threatKenneth Minogue teaches political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science...
...Sometimes the logic comes in the form of a fast dialectical karate chop, as when in the Reflections, Burke remarks that he is far from denying the real rights of man, among which he includes a right to be restrained...
...Burke took a whole book to explain why Fox was wrong...
...It would be hard to imagine an understanding of the world more at odds with the value-indifferent social instrumentalism of today...
...Fox rose to reply: but his mind was so much agitated, and his heart so much affected by what had fallen from Mr...
...The calculators compute them out of their sense...
...Reflections on the Revolution in France argued that the revolutionaries aimed to destroy everything valuable in the European tradition...
...Much of what he says appeals to experience, but more than most people realize, his penetration results from pure philosophical sophistication...
...These men had for two decades led the Whig party in the House of Commons...
...Burke had, in fact, been a kind of ideological seismologist all his life...
...Fox and the other Whigs got it wrong because they took more notice of aspirations than of actions...
...America after 1945 confronted an international ideology on the march, an ideology not only similar to French Jacobinism but actually descended from it...
...T he debate on the French Revolution is a model of political understanding...
...In youth he had detected the subversive tremors of Voltaire, and the rumblings of Rousseau showed up unmistakably on his Richter scale...
...Virtue is not their habit...
...Burke's birth is delayed for seventy pages while O'Brien tears into Burke's modern detractors, especially the followers of the historian Lewis Namier, who relentlessly denigrated Burke in order to exhibit eighteenth-century politics as nothing but jobbery...
...Burke was Fox's mentor, the thinker of the party...
...The Revolution was the direct outcome of the ideas of frivolous and libertine men...
...It is easy, for example, to confuse reform, which Burke approved, with innovation, which he detested...
...How do we explain Burke's deeper insight...
...Progressive hopes for the future made them insensitive to present nastiness...
...It is a variant of Burke's focus on what the revolutionaries actually did by contrast with the Foxite susceptibility to verbal declarations...
...ening the very constitution of Britain itself...
...He has written a big book in every sense...
...The Whigs made this mistake, and it took Burke to point to the simple but revealing fact that the revolutionaries wanted to change everything...
...To allow avarice, love of power, sectarian enthusiasm, lust for domination, and their like to escape the bonds of law is what Burke means by corruption, and some of his descriptions of it are positively bloodcurdling...
...Cobbett's Parliamentary History records the sequel: "Mr...
...Wherever they begin to approach profundity, Burke is already way ahead of them, yet all that lofty eighteenth-century prose cannot but look a little pompous, even precious, when set down beside the sound bites and one-liners of contemporary rhetoric...
...Human action reveals virtues and vices that the social order must channel...
...Berlin hardly lasts one round in the ring with O'Brien...
...to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear...
...These sonorous words reveal a political culture a world away from our own...
...Burke responded no doubt to a culture deeply divided between religious faiths, but it was morally homogeneous in a way we can barely dream of...
...He is the irresistible talker in a Dublin pub conducting a knockabout seminar full of excellent talkers...
...When restraint fails, the result is civil war—or the condition of the inner cities...
...The rhetoric of the rights of man bewitched them...
...Seldom have two ages the same fashion in their pretexts and the same modes of mischief...
...No one had yet told them that in politics you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, but they already had the idea...
...Tears trickled down his cheeks, and he strove in vain to give utterance to feeling that dignified and exalted his nature...
...Rousseau he detested...
...At one point Burke is given seven pages at a stretch before O'Brien interrupts...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
