Reflections on Reflections

My copy of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France comes with a splendid introductory essay by Conor Cruise O’Brien, onetime academic, politician, journalist and writer. I understand that he also wrote a biography of Burke which his Wikipedia page describes as ‘unorthodox’, though I think he may have used that term himself to describe his interpretation. I’ve not read it so I can’t say if it is or not. What I can say, and say with assurance, is that his essay brings out aspects of Burke’s life and work that I might otherwise have missed, particularly in relation to Catholicism and Ireland, and the bearing this had on his perception of the upheavals in France.

Burke belonged politically to the English Whigs and - at least by outward association - to the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland; he could never have advanced his political career as far as he did if he had not. But O’Brien identifies a tension between what he calls the ‘outer Whig’ and the ‘inner Jacobite’, between a Protestant gloss and a Catholic tradition. It was this friction that helped drive the irony in Burke’s critique. Here his first target was not the Parisian revolutionaries but the London rationalists, those who identified the Revolution as the triumph of Reason over Superstition and Tradition.

O’Brien’s point here is quite subtle, as subtle as Burke’s intellect. Protestant he may have been but the Irish Catholic tradition was there, part of his makeup and part of his background;

…if Burke as a Whig cherished, at least in theory, the Glorious Revolution, Burke as an Irishman, with close emotional bonds to the conquered, detested the Protestant ascendancy which that Revolution had riveted on the people of his country.

There are things here that could not be said openly, were not said openly, at least not until towards the end of his life. But there were things that could be said indirectly, if you like, things that could be said in the context of a critique of the French Revolution.

The crucial point of departure here is that events in France were welcomed by the likes of Dr Richard Price, a leading Protestant dissenter. In November 1789 he delivered a sermon entitled Discourse on the love of our country in which he compared the political transformations in France with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a common theme in the early days.

But if the Glorious Revolution, the Whig touchstone, meant one thing in England it meant quite another in Ireland: it meant hostility to Catholicism; it meant the oppressive Penal Laws. It was the identification of the first event with the second, the English with the French, O’Brien maintains, that wakened the “slumbering Jacobite” in the elderly Whig. The creative tension here goes that one step further; for while in relation to England and France the Jacobite perspective was clearly counter-revolutionary, the opposite was true in the context of Ireland.

The Reflections begins, then, as a rebuttal to Price, begins as a way of getting the English establishment to see that their interests were bound up with Catholicism in Europe; that there Catholicism was the bastion of order, of property and of tradition. It’s a wonderful exercise in intellectual gymnastics, for Burke is getting people to see that it is the militant anti-Catholic Protestantism of the dissenters that is the natural ally of Jacobinism.

So, while preparing the most effective counter-revolutionary polemic ever penned Burke was also planting the seeds of sympathy for Catholicism in the minds of the English, the very antithesis of the message on the Glorious Revolution. Growing hostility towards the Jacobins was, with wonderful irony, accompanied with increasing sympathy towards the Jacobites. That is to say, it was in part thanks to Burke that English policy towards Ireland began to change, evidenced by the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 followed two years later by the foundation of Maynooth Seminary with state support.

In a letter written five years after the publication of the Reflections Burke made plain that his whole politics centred on anti-Jacobinism. He was particularly incensed by the hostility towards religion on which that movement was based. For him the practice of Catholicism “forms as things stand, the most effective barrier, against Jacobinism”. He further argues that in Ireland in particular “the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration.”

It’s an impressive argument, one which deepens, if such a thing is possible, the profound respect I already have for Burke as a thinker. My politics, my conservatism, begin with Burke and end with Burke, begin and end with words he wrote in a letter of March 1790, the most devastating critique of bloodlessly bloody ideology ever written. The emphasis here is in the original;

“I have no great opinion of that sublime abstract, metaphysic revisionary, contingent humanity, which in cold blood can subject the present time and those whom we daily see and converse with to immediate calamities in favour of the future and uncertain benefit of persons who only exist in idea.”

Here is the key to the horror of much of modern history, from Robespierre to Pol Pot and beyond.

Burke and Orwell

This is the bicentenary of the death of Thomas Paine, a political writer I have no particular respect for, despite the modish enthusiasm, I thought I would add a piece on the two I admire most: Edmund Burke and George Orwell.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Reflections on the Revolution in France might be read as prophecies and warnings. Orwell's chief concern is with the globalisation of totalitarianism. Edmund Burke, writing in 1790, warned that the upheavals in France would only lead to further political destruction, terror and dictatorship.

Both men also expressed views that were not wholly welcome in their own political and intellectual milieus; in the case of Burke, the radical Whigs of Charles James Fox; and in the case of Orwell, the circle most associated with the left-wing demimonde. Their critiques were thus all the more trenchant because they were made from within the citadel, so to speak, not from the perspective of the establishment.

Orwell and Burks also shared a distrust of their fellow intellectuals. Orwell expressed his contempt of a certain kind of 'Bloomsbury highbrow' in The Lion and the Unicorn, his wartime essay on socialism and patriotism, just as Burke disliked Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'literary cabal', as he put it, of the French philosophes. On the fate of Marie Antoinette he wrote "But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded."

Both Burke and Orwell, two of the greatest political writers in the English language, were, in essence, defending human values threatened with destruction by waves of violence and intolerance. Both stand against the notion that cruel means justify abstract ends. I'm reminded, in particular, of Burke's warning in Letters to a Noble Lord to those aristocrats of his day who embraced radical chic-"...these philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump."

But it is in his riposte to Rousseau, the grandfather of Fascism and Communism, that he is at his greatest: "Society is indeed a contract...but becomes a partnership...between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." You will find an echo of this in Orwell’s defence of patriotism as "…the bridge between the future and the past."