Ellis Washington continues his supplemental reading of Benjamin Wiker’s new book and encounters the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, Edmund Burke, atheism, and the problem of sin.
Burke’s views on the French Revolution are still in print; Washington notes that
Burke’s prescient worldview came from years of cloistered study, scrupulous and often unpopular observations (i.e., his support of the Irish Catholics over British hegemony, freedom for the American colonists, favoring limited monarchy checked by a strong Parliament) and a profound reverence for the lessons of history against the savage beauty of human nature – all this emanates from Burke’s conservatism.
Burke’s comment on history is worth repeating:
History consists for the great part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites.
… in other words, sin. The French Revolution, says Washington
remains a point of historical revisionism and idealism and is still widely viewed by liberals as an anomaly of the lofty principles of revolution – as opposed to Burke’s contemporary narrative based in realism as the predictable catastrophe of the French Revolution. …. Burke, a student of history and traditions, understood that humanity’s love of chaos was viral throughout history, regardless of gender, time period, race, social class or circumstance.
Burke wrote in Reflections:
IN FRANCE, you are now in the crisis of a revolution and in the transit from one form of government to another — you cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country. With us it is militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be supposed to confine those observations to any description of men or to comprehend all men of any description within them — No! far from it. I am as incapable of that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremities and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little when no political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.
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Ellis Washington’s WND article.
Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read on Amazon.com.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) on Amazon.com.