Burke, Paine, and Modern Conservatives

Yuval Levin's new book on Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is getting a lot of attention, and Elizabeth Corey has an interesting review. We have a habit of tracing modern politics back to the era of the French Revolution, and in particular to the debates between eighteenth-century conservatives like Burke and revolutionaries like Paine. Corey lays out the contrast:

Paine followed the state-of-nature theorists, arguing that human beings are fundamentally individual, solitary, equal, and capable of remaking government whenever the need should arise. As he famously put it, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” What defines us, Paine thought, is a notion of pure rationality that yields the ability to make choices and engage in acts of self-determination. When all the artificial conventions of society and history have been stripped away, this is the permanent condition of mankind.

Burke, on the other hand, thought that Paine and other state-of-nature theorists made far too much of such mythical beginnings and not nearly enough of the benefits yielded to society over time by artifice and history. . . . Burke, therefore, focused on a different kind of beginning for human beings: that each person is born at a specific time, in a particular place, to a family of people with whom he or she did not choose to associate. All of this establishes the givenness of the human condition, the inherited character of so much in human life, and the limitations (sometimes welcome) of the choices open to us. Burke emphatically did not see these particularities as hindrances waiting to be eradicated in the name of universal equality. Instead, they were the constituents of a full, rich human life. What defines us, thought Burke, is not bare rationality but our sympathies, sentiments, habits, pieties, emotions, and the simple fact of human embodiedness.

Pondering this distinction, Corey wonders whether there are any conservatives left in Burke's sense of the word:

With few exceptions, modernity requires that everyone, and perhaps particularly conservatives, defend their modes of life in abstract, rationalistic terms. Nothing inherited and longstanding can go unexamined (witness the marriage debate) nor can natural differences (as between men and women) any longer provide a convincing basis for different customs, ways of life, and inclinations. Everything must be examined at the bar of rational argument.

Paine has won.

But he has won largely because conservatives have lost heart. With some notable exceptions, most people who call themselves conservative in the present day have little sense of what it might mean to adopt gratitude and appreciation as a mode of orientation toward our experience. Instead, like everyone else, we are concerned with efficiency, problem-solving, and changing the world. We may have qualms about technology, but we no longer resist it. 

The classification of technocrats like Mitt Romney or big-thinking loose canons like Newt Gingrich as conservatives indeed makes no sense in Burkean terms. But then a lot of contemporary liberalism does not sit well with Paine's thought -- think of small-is-good environmentalism, neighborhood preservation, the defense of minority cultures and languages, and so on.

My first reaction to Corey's essay is to think that too much has changed since 1800 for the political debates of that era to coincide very well with ours; neither Burke's thought nor Paine's can really be placed on the contemporary political spectrum. I suppose there is some sense in which different political traditions, especially the tradition of conservatism, have endured. But this is true only in a very limited sense, and the connections become more tenuous every year. In fact as I ponder this I grow dissatisfied with the whole business of dividing us into left and right and assuming that this says something important about who we are and how we see the world. If I were to define my own liberalism, I would say it is most profoundly rooted in a suspicion of wealth, and a desire for prosperity to be distributed more fairly; and yet I know that many of the people in America angriest about Wall Street shenanigans are Christian conservatives. Is there some deep emotional structure that unites all conservatives, and all liberals, separate from the political issues of our time? Do those studies about hand washing and pet names really show that our politics somehow reflects our core identities? Or is it all just convention and political accident?