154. Ben Fleming - Edmund Burke: The Father of Everything Wrong with Conservatism

0:00You are listening to Seeking the Hidden Thing with Cryptos. Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Seeking the Hidden Thing podcast. It is my distinct pleasure to have on again, friend of the show Ben Flaming Welcome Ben. Thank you so much for having me. This conversation was initiated by none other than Aaron O'Toole, who is now a subscriber of my podcast and sub-stalk, which is just hilarious.

1:08He follows me as well. He follows me as well. That's right. But it was funny, because as many may know, who listen to the show and who listen to Black Horse to show the red ends in former leader of the conservative party of Canada during the COVID period, Aaron O'Toole, he recently started engaging with the online dissident right, and I think the vector for that was through a group called the Dominion Society, and we've had David Perry on the show here as well too. And I think part of it was to head off some of the successes that the Dominion Society were having, but he started engaging with them. And he kind of comes and goes, but he hasn't been able to stop himself. And at one point, he threw out the phrase, you know, we believe in, in order, you know, conservatives believe in ordered liberty.

2:10And you took some exception to that as kind of like, that's such a dumb thing to say. Well, no, no, I didn't say it was such a dumb thing to say. I said, why didn't you believe in order liberty when the truckers showed up on your front doorstep in Ottawa? Even worse, you called him on his own BS. Yeah, there we go. And as in response, Aaron O'Toole said, you know, what you guys really need to do is just start reading more Edmund Burke because Edmund Burke, if you read more Edmund Burke as the father of conservatism, you would understand it all and it would all make sense to you. And I had to admit that while I was, you know, kind of aware of Burke and aware that he was the father of modern conservatism actually hadn't read him. So you and I behind the scene said, well, let's do this thing where we actually go and let's read some Edmund Burke and then come back and talk about it.

3:11Yeah, to clarify one thing I actually even invited Aaron O'Toole to come on my podcast because he kept name dropping Edmund Burke and I said, look, give me one Burke text. We will both read it and we'll discuss the text on my podcast and then he just, this is three or four times now, I've extended that offer to him and I've gotten radio silence back. He engages me until I say, come on and we'll talk about this. This guy who you keep name dropping who you've probably heard about in a political science class in the early 90s, in the age of Fukuyama. Well, and the thing is or two, I mean, I had a number of classes where back in the day when I was in school in the 90s, you would have assigned books that you would have to go and buy at the bookstore. But we would also get these packs of assigned readings that the professor would want us to read so they would be like photo copies of articles or, you know, rather than make you buy the whole book, it would be a selection in a book so you'd read a chapter in this book and they would be photocopied and they'd be in a, you know, they'd be bound at the, you know, the printing shop from the university.

4:21And then they would sit on the shelf and you'd pay $5 for this collection of copies. And I'm sure that at some point in my university experience, I probably read a chapter of, you know, and quote unquote, important chapter from Burke at some point or another, you know, this was how I got introduced to a lul and to a few other thinkers that, who after, after university, I then went back and you know read the whole works from which the chapter was taken. But, you know, I mean, largely, I, yeah, Burke was out there, but I hadn't read him. So now I've read a good, I haven't completed his, what's it called, his one on the French Revolution. Yeah, and done the revolution in France, that's right. So reflections, which is generally considered one of his, the high waters of his writings. As, you know, it's, it's a bit of a flawed work in terms of the accuracy with which he described some of the historical events.

5:26Mary Marie Antoinette was said to have been very emotional in her reading of, of, of Burke and translation apparently. So, you know, it made impressions on all the right people, but it sold fairly well at the time and became very influential both in British politics. And in the future of what we would now know as modern day conservatism. So, just to clarify one thing here, when you say it was the high watermark, I'm not sure that's the right way to think about it. Excuse me, Burke was a wig. He was not a Tory. He supported the American Revolution. Now, in those days, the age, sorry, in those days, the, the accusation of treason could get you sent to the scaffold. So, you couldn't come out and forthroatedly support the American Revolution, but, you know, you could write a bunch of essays that made it quite clear that you believed in the idea of self governance, at least on some level.

6:39I mean, that's a big rabbit hole to go down. And to be fair, Burke in this regard, he made. I think Burke made some overtures to Parliament, to, at the time, strongly urging that England not go to war with the Americas and instead to basically kind of renegotiate their relationship with the, you know, the, basically the British and the Americas. And he really saw the Americans as an extension of England, but yet sort of its own independent thing. And there is some, you know, theory sell stuff, like what if they'd actually taken Burke up on, you know, his proposals, you know, could it have headed off the American Revolution, because he basically argued that going to war on foreign soil, basically like across the ocean.

7:40In a kind of existential struggle with the Americans that the British would probably lose, and he was correct in that assessment. I'm not sure I completely agree. You read, for example, Sydney Fisher's Karen, what is called like the true story of the American Revolution or the real story of the American Revolution, he puts forth the theory that the United States, what's now the United States, the American colonies may well have gotten there. Independence, anyways, the next time that there happened to be a wig parliament, because Burke was far from the only wig who was sympathetic towards the Americans cause. It's just that Burke was an eloquent essayist in his day. He was even quite well respected among Tories, he was part of the social group that included people, like Samuel Johnson, Tories, part excellence from the day. Johnson wrote a lot about what a brilliant writer wig was, I mean, sorry, what a brilliant writer Burke was as a wig.

8:47He was a back bench MP who never accomplished anything, but he wanted to talk about being a theory cell, he wrote a lot of essays and he was recognized for being brilliant, but he wasn't a mover and shaker in parliament by any means. But Burke being sympathetic towards the American Revolution was largely the wigs at large, at least a large chunk of the wigs were sympathetic, I think Burke just ended up personifying them now going. I was going to say, so maybe for the audience who are not aware, when you have the two groups, the wigs and the Tories, which interest groups are these two groups largely representing at the time, because they shifted somewhat over the course of Burke's life. But when Burke was alive and writing, who were the wigs and what interest did they represent and who were the Tories and what interest did they represent?

9:56Sure. So after the English Civil War, the easiest way to think of it is just high church versus low church and by low church, that includes the various non conformist Protestant denominations. The Tories were the party of the throne and the altar of the nobility, whereas if you read a lot of, if you read a lot of the political writings from the day, it almost uses the terms Lockian and Presbyterian interchangeably. That's how much of a religious undertone and a religious connotation this had. What we now call liberalism or what it became liberalism was more along the lines of the churches who believed that the Church of England was, I don't want to say apostate, that's too strong of a word, but they believed that the Church of England was telling them to do things that were against their conscience.

11:01So they said, you know, we're still Protestant, we still believe in God, but we don't want anything to do with the Church of England, especially the liturgical aspect of that. Now I can go back even to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, if you want me to explain that, would you think that would be helpful? So, Henry VIII, we all know that he broke from the Catholic Church because he wanted to divorce his wife who wouldn't give him a male heir. And the Church within England, they didn't expect Henry to be a serious Protestant, but they expected his heir Edward VI to be a really austere devout Calvinist, and that was what the Church of England was supposed to be. That's what it was envisioned to become the same way as it is in Scotland with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, that's very austere, non liturgical, you know, no nonsense, but Edward died, excuse me, Edward died very young, I think he was only 15 years old when he died.

12:19So, that put a wrinkle in the works because his half-sister Mary was Catholic and she came back in and started burning a lot of these Protestants at the stake. A lot of these Protestants ended up fleeing the country, one of whom was John Knox, a famous Scottish, he wasn't a Calvinist at the time, but he fled to the continent as a result of fleeing bloody Mary. That's how he ended up, you know, in Geneva and eventually bringing back the much more austere form of Calvinism to Scotland, but then Mary died young as well, and Elizabeth became the Queen, she inherited the throne. Now, Elizabeth, she was educated to be some noble, you know, smart wife that as, you know, the third child of Monarch often was, but, you know, the crown fell into her lap, but the thing is, even though she was intelligent, she really did not want to get involved in any theological debates, she just wanted to go to church on Sunday, and that's it.

13:32But she couldn't go back and be a Catholic because the Catholic Church viewed it as a bastard, they viewed her as the child of an illegitimate marriage, so she had to be a Protestant if she wanted to range, she didn't have any choice in the matter, and that's kind of what made the Anglican tradition what it is now, very liturgical. The statues within an Anglican church are of secular things, but they have the feel of Catholic iconography, a lot of it is about praising the, I don't, praising is probably too strong of a word, but, you know, all the iconography is about the British royal family and praising England, it's sometimes being called English shinto. But the reason for that is just Elizabeth, she had to be a Protestant, but she really didn't want to get involved in these theological debates, which her older brother was being trained for.

14:35There was a problem, though, which is that her two closest advisors, Francis Walsingham and William Cecil, they were both Calvinists, they were both very austere Puritans, you know, and even back then, Puritans at their worst, they were people who were trying to nitpick everything that was wrong with your way of worship, but at best, and it certainly wasn't. As certainly was the case with these two men, they just want to be Puritans because they wanted to communicate with God directly, they didn't see any need to go through liturgy or confession or anything like that, it's, I'm a sinner, I'm going to pray to God directly and get on with my life. So this is really the genesis of what English Protestantism became, you had the dominant establishment church, that's really as a result of Queen Elizabeth not wanting to get involved in theological debates, and you had tolerance of all of these different low churches and these nonconformist churches,

15:53who were still Protestant, they, they were not going to make, you know, nonconformance to Anglican liturgy illegal because that would incriminate the Queens to top advisors, but from that point onwards, you had the Anglican church and you had the various nonconformist denominations and going forward a century or maybe a century and a half. The Wigs versus the Tories was largely this separation, when you read political theory, when they talk about freedom, it talks about freedom of conscience, IE, you know, I believe this is the right just thing to do, I believe this is what God wants me to do, but it's not in accordance with what the church of England tells me to do, but that's okay, I have the freedom to go join a non liturgical denomination.

16:53All this stuff about, you know, the freedom to do this or the freedom to do that, that comes much later on, at first it's really just freedom of conscience, which had the strong connotation of nonconformist Protestantism. So the Wigs then were largely made up of these, they're not really like, they're like, my understanding of it is they're like members of the gentry who are, as you say, probably Presbyterian, not Methodist so much, but more just like Presbyterian. Yeah, the Methodists are the early 1800s, they don't, I guess technically they're mid 1700s, but the Methodists become a serious force, the early 1800s, that's a little later on. And they were also defined by their anti-catholicism, like they were really, in my understandings that they were rapidly anti-Catholic, and whereas the Wigs were more Anglican and aristocratic.

18:00And the Torres, sorry, sorry, thank you for that, that the Torres were more aristocratic and Anglican and the Wigs were more the party of the factory owners and the gentry and sort of serious Protestants and sort of the particular Protestant character of the faith at the time. And so this is in some sense the kind of the piece that it took the continent to why, you know, the continent went through, you know, quite a, you know, the religious wars went through the period of the religious wars before the piece of Westphalia brought about the settlement, but in many ways it seems that like English politics became an expression of their own version of, you know, the settlement. The settlement between Catholics and Protestants, but also between high church and low church.

19:02Well, that that's largely what the glorious revolution was that that's kind of between Queen Elizabeth and Edmund Burke. This is 1688, the English have a civil war in the 1640s. That that's along exactly the same religious line, the parliamentarians are associated with the low church and the nonconformists and the Puritans, the royalists are associated with the Church of England and the Anglican church. Cromwell takes over for a few years, but that falls apart after he dies, you have the restoration of the monarchy. And that works for the reign of Charles II, but then his brother James takes the throne and James wants to be Catholic again. And this causes all sorts of, this causes all sorts of more political intrigue, but James is eventually convinced to abdicate the throne.

20:05There's in the glorious revolution called such because there's no bloodshed, though his enemies were raising an army against him. That's not to say that it was peaceful. It's that he abdicated the throne before the fighting started. And that's what brought in William of Orange. So if you're talking about believing that it's, you're talking about these people are staunchly anti-Catholic or whatever, well, the Bill of Rights, which comes out of the glorious revolution. It has a couple of clauses in there that says, you know, an Englishman has the right to do ABC or D comma, as long as he's not Catholic. Yes, this concept of freedom and liberty. This is not you get to do whatever you want. It's freedom from Catholicism, freedom and, sorry, liberty and Presbyterian, sorry, liberty and Protestantism are at this point in history at least synonymous with each other, especially when you look at the American conception of liberty.

21:07You can almost use that as a synonym for Calvinism, like liberty means we can be a member of any of these, you know, I'm liturgical churches, but we all agree that we don't like the Catholics. Yes, and that's sort of the basic foundational thing sort of, you know, you can be any kind of Protestant that you want as long as you're more or less a Protestant. There are some restrictions though, like, as a general rule, if you're at least willing to partake in some parts of Anglican liturgy, you can do anything that an Anglican can do. If you really want to be a complete Puritan and you believe it's heretical to do anything other than sit still in church, you know, you might not be allowed to sit in Parliament. But I believe like you had to take almost like a form of subscription in order to be an MP where you had to the notable one is you had to reject transubstantiation. It's more you had to participate in Anglican liturgy that didn't mean you had to be an Anglican, it meant you had to participate in certain aspects of Anglican liturgy.

22:17Now that means that the Communion is obviously the most important part of liturgy that's, but it's more of a liturgical thing in general than that in specific. And so this is kind of the landscape in which Burke enters now what's interesting is Burke is actually he's not even an Englishman, he's an Irishman from Dumblin. And he's born in a mixed marriage, I'm probably going to get this wrong. Because mother is a Protestant and his father was a Catholic or his mother was a Catholic and his brother either way one of one one one parent was Catholic and one parent was was Anglican Protestant. And so Burke himself was Anglican. And so this, so you know, so he's got this kind and he spent much of his life though as well also advocating for better treatment for Catholics to allow them to re-enter public life, which I think eventually creates his advocacy for Catholicism actually creates a split in the Wigs later on in his life.

23:24So if I'm not, if I'm remembering it correctly. So that's another rabbit hole to go down. The main thing about that is that the act of union when the United Kingdom brought Ireland completely in that was not just them trying to flex their muscles. And then being Catholic was actually trying to use Ireland as a vector to invade England. And the way they headed that off at the past is they said we're going to bring Ireland into the United Kingdom and offer you guys spots in the House of Lords and in Parliament and in the House of Commons. The the hiccup there is that George III was still kind of a hands-on king at least by the standards of the day. And he has this title defender of the faith.

24:25So he was not going to, you know, just let the Catholics come in without without some stipulations on that. So that the Catholic question was largely a result of Ireland being brought in in the early 1800s, but that was a result of Napoleon. So, you know, you're kind of right, but there's there's a few steps between it. There's layers to this all. And yeah, it's it's I mean, we could literally spend hours going through all of this period of history. But I think this gives people enough of the idea of of where you're coming. So you have these two dominant political groups, the Tories and the Wigs and the Wigs are largely. Siding with the Gentry and the, you know, the more Calvinist Protestants and they are those in generally in favor of the new industry. And also in their gen, actually most of the Wigs are generally in favor of the kinds of things that are happening in America and that are happening in France.

25:30But they want them to be more measured and respectful of the past. And so, you know, one of these big bugaboos that you get in Burke is that his big contrast is between, you know, universal rights and the rights of an Englishman. And what Burke wants to argue is that rather than basing things on reason, we need to ground them in history and tradition. And one of the things in reading Burke that you, and maybe it's a function of just reading him, you know, rather think, but there is this sense that these things are easier to assert than they are today. Then they are to demonstrate actually how it is that it's grounded in the like in the history of Englishman. Because oftentimes one should begin talking about rights that the distinction between universal rights and the rights of an Englishman is one of these things, you know, philosophically where it's a, you end up saying, you know, it's a distinction without a difference when push comes to shove.

26:43And I think that's part of the thing is that in many ways when, as I'm reading Burke, that conservatism is more about we want all of the things that go along with at that time, modernity, we want, we want the industry, we want the trade, we want the wealth, we as the gentry want to participate in politics and parliament. We want to understand that we don't want everyone to participate, we want men of quality and men of quality meant being people from the upper gentry and up, you know, but Burke on the one hand say, you know, we want to restrict it to those who have known, you know, rule forever. We want kings, we want the landed nobility that this anchors our society, but we also need to include men of quality and ability in the thing. So you're at some point, okay, so which, which is it Edmund, you know, is it that you want the country to be won by the nobility or do you want it to be run by men of quality.

27:46And so he says, well, we want men of quality, but not everyone, we don't want, you know, I mean heaven forbid that we don't want commoners because, you know, they, they, but he doesn't in a sense seem to grasp that once you do things like open up the franchise, that there's no real limiting principle on it. So my sense of it is as you read through Burke that conservatism is really more of we want modern industry and commerce, but we want it to have the right vibes. So my sense of it is that we want it to be respectful of the past and restrain, we want it to be, you know, erudite and upper class, we don't want it to be crass and, you know, one of the funniest things in in Burke as you read it is his rampant anti-semitism, you know, we, we, we wanted to be cultured, sophisticated, grounded in the history of England.

28:47For goodness sake, we don't want to act like a bunch of Jews, you're just like, you're like, oh my word. He's just like, you just like to be several times right and you're going like, okay now. Yeah, and while when he talks about that, I think there is a connotation of everything being about the almighty dollar, I guess the almighty pound, if it's Britain, he says that everything just becomes transactional. But you know, that's kind of what the modern world has become. Well, that's the thing. So you get a sense where you can see like everybody can see the things that Burke is concerned about. He's concerned about everything being transactional, everything being financialized about the masses being allowed to participate fully in democratic institutions. He's worried about the philosophical dangers of universal rights that once you end up, you know, arguing from from from abstract principles, well, you can extend a right to just about anything, you know what I mean.

29:49So, you know, his argument that well, if they're grounded in history and the long history of tradition, this puts a limiting factor on the rights that we have, because we can point to the past of these are the rights that have developed down through history. And then, you know, and in some sense, all of the things that Burke predicted was going to happen happened. At the same time, all of the things that he pointed to as limiting principles really provide no limiting principles at all. And that's in a sense, I think sort of the slight of hand in a sense of that. And that's why I think for me, like sort of from this perspective, I mean, in many ways, maybe you have to give Burke the benefit of the doubt that he really honestly believed that these to be limiting principles. It was an optimistic time. And culturally at the time, they probably were limiting principles. But, you know, you fast forward another 200, 250 years. And you, we know how the transactional nature of the commercial economy just wipes away all of that stuff. Everything can be bought or sold. Everything has a price to it.

30:50And reason can dance and make anything, you know, it can say anything it wants to say because you can find reasons for just about anything and any right under the sun. I mean, nowadays we have a right for people to pretend that, you know, if you're born a woman that you're actually a man. And so these are the kinds of things that Burke was concerned about. But at the same time, I don't think that, you know, the limiting principles that he saw were actually real limiting principles. And in that sense, that unfortunately, his limiting principles were more, I guess, we want the future, but we want it to be restrained by the vibes of the past. Yeah, so we keep using this word conservative. As I said, he was a wig and the wigs were the ones who became the liberals, the wigs were the ones who were, you know, against the king and against the nobility. They were in favor of what somewhat anachronistically called progress. I think that word is more of a 19th century word, at least in the political connotation.

31:58But I think that on some level, though, the reflections on the revolution were him realizing that his limiting principles were not exactly working in friends and him just hoping and praying that they were going to hold an England. He says talking about things being grounded in history. So a lot of people, including the Prince Regent, who became George the Fourth, and I think even including Louis the 16th themselves, thought there was something providential about the fact that the French Revolution was happening in the year 1789. Why? Because that's exactly 100 years after 1689, which is when the English Bill of Rights was written after the glorious revolution. 1689 is a huge date in English history for this exact stuff that we're talking about. And people think, well, clearly God must want France to go through the same thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't be happening in the year 1789.

33:00But the thing that Burke is a little bit mortified by is the fact that the stuff in France, it's using an incorrect interpretation of English history, saying that the English cut off their king's head and managed to fight for the rights. Well, this was the English Civil War in the 1640s. All of these rights about limited government and the ability to belong to whatever church you want to and the rights of the Englishman. This comes with the glorious revolution in 1689, four decades after that. And this is what Burke is saying that guys, you're conflating to completely different historical events here. They have nothing to do with each other. I mean, maybe on a superficial level, they have something to do with each other. But we're talking about Burke being a theory cell, you know, sure. These people in France, the Jacobins, they have a bad grasp on English history. Does it really matter when they're sending people to the guillotine?

34:03Well, no, and this, I think the thing that tips Burke off is there was a, well, it's called a sermon. I don't know if it's really a sermon, but like a speech was given at a, what was the club that it was a, but there was a club and there was a fairly well regarded speech. And Burke, and they were celebrating the revolution in France in many ways as realizing the, you know, basically realizing the full flowering of the glorious revolution. And so they were in a sense interpreting the glorious revolution through the light of the revolution in France and Burke, as you say, reacts to this and said, wait a minute, that's not the correct way to understand the glorious revolution. So we have to understand the glorious revolution as something reaching back and affirming the long tradition of English political life that goes back all the way to the Magna Carta and also the experience of the English prior to the Magna Carta that gave birth to the Magna Carta.

35:11So it says ours, you know, the glorious revolutions itself an expression of our own history and what's happening in France is something completely different. It's them throwing off the tradition of the crown and the church and rebelling against it using abstract principles as their way of grounding it. He says the two things are completely different. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, as the famous line in there, you know, we, the age of chivalry is dead, the age of, uh, softesters, economists and calculators is upon us, you know, we've gotten rid of our, or the French, they're getting rid of their proud tradition and they're just trying to reduce everything to transactions and things that are our hyper rational. I think at one point in there, he even talks about how he imagines going to France in the future and seeing all the buildings looking completely geometrical because that's the rational way of doing things. Well, what does modern architecture like a couple of hundred years after that word?

36:18Yeah, you know, like like Corbusier, you know, I mean, I mean, isn't that that's basically it, right? Well, and he also jokes in there about, you know, you might as well make my hair stylist, you know, like he actually like the woman who styles my hair or whatever, you might as well put her in parliament, right? And you're just sitting. Oh, my word. So there's all of these things that he mocks as like he's just making fun of the French and like, here's what's going to happen and it all happens. But the question and this is really, I think from the modern perspective, when we look back at it, all of the things that Burke was relying upon to provide restraint don't. And I think this is really the way that we in someone sort of mock the modern conservative movement, which sort of grew out of the wigs, is that they talk about restraint.

37:21And really, they're still the party of, you know, the, the, well, you know, the, the, the mercantile classes, the, you know, the, the, the, the open economy and, you know, transaction. And so it's one of these things where as much as they want to preserve tradition, they failed to see or to project at least Burke, you know, they fail to see how industry that, you know, in many ways, the real true acid that dissolves society is not even so much politics, but, you know, in the industrial economy. Yeah, so a couple of things, two points, one, one, one, I agree with and one, I have to correct you on. But first is where he talked about having man of quality, he did kind of foresee he has a line saying that if you don't do this properly, it's going to be gone in one generation.

38:25Yeah, where, you know, sure, you get the best people in who are going to make this new rational utopian system, whatever work, and that's all fine and dandy, but what happens when they have to find successors who are driven by ideology, but don't have the skills or the rooting in the past. Again, I think he was absolutely right about that his funny one was was like laughing at the idea that that practicing lawyers would make good politicians, he says it's like inviting the tradesmen into to, you know, a practicing lawyer is no different from a tradesman, he says it's like having the, you know, it's like inviting the local carpenter to become a member of parliament, you know, it's just it was hilarious. Well, he he wasn't even talking about this theoretically, he said he was looking at the national or the state's general in France, looking at the new parliament that they'd put in place after the revolution, he says, okay, these people are lawyers, but wait a second, these aren't, you know, legal scholars, people who are serious, half of them are what we now call ambulance chasers.

39:34This isn't exactly a high quality body of, you know, men of laws. So he wasn't even talking about that in the abstract, he was talking about the new parliament in France. So you were going to offer a disagreement to it like yeah, so you said that you said that the modern conservative movement grew to the wigs that that's not true it grew to the Tories. What happened was in the 1830s, as industrialization grew, it became very clear that society just wasn't running the way that it did before, there were a lot of what, what I think the word was dead writings, like old constituencies in England that were not. And with where all the industrial strength was so the a they redrew a bunch of the constituencies, but be they extended the extended the franchise to urban professionals like people like lawyers and well again this is what is the genesis of the people you'd now you'd now think of as the yuppie or the modern liberal who votes in a certain way because.

40:57They it makes them feel smart to vote for the person with the academic theories the this new cohort of voters they largely voted wig. But what did they do if you read chart ism by Carlisle he that this was that was written in 1939 the great reform act was 19 sorry 1839 the great reform act was 1832 so it was in recent memory it was only 70 years before he said what was the you know outcome of this they. Past the a new poor law making it illegal to be a vagrant in in England so you essentially got the poor houses from all over twist and he said they went right back to doing absolutely nothing the some total of this one big parliamentary reform and extending the franchise to a bunch of people is they open some poor houses and now you know you have a bunch of people who.

42:04Have decided oh this is great I don't have to work anymore you know give me give me give me so he says this is going to be a disaster that was the 1830s then in the 1860s there was a second reform act which extended the franchise to people like tradesmen in the cities people paid taxes. This was in 1867 and though he was not the leader of the Tories at the time high ranking Tory was Benjamin disraeli and he said okay there the wigs one big last time when there was the when the franchise was extended to this new group of people this new working class people are going to have the rights to vote we need to make sure we don't lose out on them as well. And he had the political instinct to say these people don't want people to pander to them they want us to be really proudly English. They want us to be really proudly saluting the king and proud of our noble tradition and proud of the Anglican church and all of this stuff and it was a gamble he took and in his day people thought he was maybe a little bit crazy doing this thing these are working class people they don't have any money are you sure you want.

43:22To you know be the party of the rich well he won them big for most of his life he there were even to this day in England you have pubs working class pubs from the day called the Benjamin disraeli or the Lord beaconsfield that he got that title towards the end of his life he was so respected by the working class of England. That that you know the working class they started voting conservative so I think you even see that that split in the angle sphere today in the cities you see the the yuppies the people who think their university degrees make them enlightened they vote left for left leaning causes. Whereas the working class is the tradesmen they're more conservative and you know people sometimes say sneeringly all these people vote against their economic interest they were making that argument against them in the 1860s when the second reform act happened.

44:28But a result of the second reform act a result of the Tories going after the working class was they rebranded themselves as the conservatives and that is where this full history of Edmund Burke comes out of Edmund Burke he wrote the reflections in 1790 this was the 1860s so Burke was long since dead at this point was about 70 years after the fact that that this. I don't know what what do you want to call it this this myth of Edmund Burke is being a champion of all the sense that this what happens to the wins then what happens to the wigs then going forward the the merged with some of the more radical political parties and when I say radical that means pushing for things like universal suffrage. Actually I mean you want to talk you you mentioned the Methodists earlier the Methodists in the early 1800s they said you know we hate democracy as much as we hate sin but that you know as as industrialization went forward that I think they changed their mind on that one.

45:38But no the the the the wigs they became the liberal party of England which in the 20th century lost out big to the labor movement especially after World War One so the wigs kind of died out with the liberal party of England. It's it's an interesting phenomenon I think that like a lot of people don't necessarily grasp in you know. Because you see a similar thing happening in the early 20th century in places like Italy and Germany where the intelligentsia all embrace Marxism and think that the working class is going to you know they're going to then educate the working class and they're going to join in kind of the you know instant revolution but in many ways the. The the working class and the average guy felt much more comfortable with what we now got like with fascism in that regard and so there is this sense and you you ask yourself why and in many ways the working class their stability their well being in life in a sense relies on a high degree of.

46:58What do you make a solid like social structures that are imposed on them from the outside so in a sense these aren't like as a group they generally like the idea that we have a social structure that dictates to us how we act how we behave and so forth this idea of the enlightened free thinker who lives and acts and makes his own choices and so forth and lives the way he wants to live that's not how the working class want to live. The working class want sort of a regular ordered everything proper in their place and in some sense this is that that marriage between that the the upper gentry and the land and the ability with the working class in that regard makes sense in a sense where we're going to maintain the stability and the tradition you think yourself like this is how this really ended up selling it to the working classes in that regard and this is this is also in the sense you know why.

47:58In the 20th century the working classes were willing to embrace sort of you know the myths of the past and the traditions of the people and and the vulcan and the glory of the nation and all this because they provide structure and they provide order and and all of it and so this is I think you know where that and that's right because I had. It's funny now that you as you think I did a paper on this really in in undergrad you know it was also as soon as you started talking it's like it all started coming back to me. But and so then as you say there's this gap then the between Burke in in time and then Burke gets picked up and and celebrated as sort of the essence of of conservatism when in fact as we've noted he was a wig. That was trying to hold on to a certain he was just trying to prevent the chaos of the French revolution but by by grounding you know sort of the by grounding the the emerging industrial classes and all the rest of that in the long history of the English people rather than in abstract universal rights.

49:14Well I'll give Burke the benefit of the doubt earliest I'll give disraeli the benefit of the doubt maybe this you know folk myth about Edmund Burke was appropriate for this new political system after the second reform act but before world war one when suffrage was made universal when not everybody was franchised when you know people couldn't vote themselves well. Fair you had to still be a net giver a net taxpayer to be able to vote you could make the argument that this version of conservatism was well suited to this period between 1867 and 1918 or whenever the next reform act was but yeah that that's more than a century ago and trying when somebody like our friend Aaron O'Toole tries to try it.

50:14Talk about Edmund Burke as being relevant to modern conservatism it hasn't been relevant for a hundred years because just apples to oranges comparing a system where the urban tradesmen are the lowest cast in society allowed to vote with the system with universal suffrage it's just apples to oranges. Yeah where women aren't allowed to vote Catholics aren't allowed to vote and a few you know there's like a whole range of other thing and it's also in a sense where we no longer have like in Burke's day his sense of his own connection to the past and to the landed nobility and so forth was real that was still a thing of substance at that time but for us today to to look to you know the upper gentry in the world. Landed nobility and the history of those as a grounding force in society is just laughable so then you're really in a sense and then really it does come down to like as you read it today and I think that's in my sense the correct interpretation is that you're saying that the limits the limiting principles on you know the transactional the transactional market society and the corrosive

51:37effects of universal suffrage are basically going to be held in check by vibes and that's and that's really sort of this you know the feeling that our society has to be grounded in something and this is one of the things that that Burke does talk a lot about is institutions and I think today people pick up on that as in a sense and this was the other thing that I had with Burke is that institutions grounds society because the institutions ground society so in a sense that you have to support the institution because you have to support the institution because if you don't support the institution everything falls apart but the institutions aren't doing anything they've been completely hollowed out and they're being worn like a skin suit now like you know we who was that that that Miller fellow that that clip that we were just that's been making the sort of that's him talking about you know he's he's granting himself all of these powers in legislation that he's writing and that you know he's getting called on it

52:46and he's saying well yeah that does give me absolute power but you know you have to trust me that we're going to use it judiciously you know that just and it's sort of the sense of like the institute you know and it's the institution of cautious of cautious government is just going to you know compel me to only use my powers in a way that are judicious and you're like well yeah let me know how that works out for people and and I think that this really is in part the problem with Burke today and this is why people like myself and others you know we start going and reading people like you know shutters you know Carl Schmidt and others because people like Schmidt just basically go and they dissect all of the you know the fairy nonsense that you know vibes conservatism is trying to shovel forth because they basically call it listen it isn't grounded on anything and you know once you look at it you can see it's only grounded on power that

53:52in a sense you know when push comes to shove Nietzsche was right and the left is right and whether you like it or leave it that you know all of these traditions have been swept away and politics isn't grounded on anything and that's that's sort of the troubling thing that nobody really wants to face is that it isn't grounded at anything except for wow you can talk about reason and ideas but you can make reason do whatever you want it to do well okay so when you say grounded on reason that's what the French were doing uh when you say Burke believed it was based on vibes I will steal man him a little bit on that one because he wasn't hoping to be fair that I've been fair to work I hope well well yes go ahead steal man you didn't believe it was based on vibes he believed it was based on the common Protestant faith then that's he is quite explicit about that a couple of times but he does give the game away

54:53when you you mentioned him listening to that that lecture uh where they were you know debatching the history of the glorious revolution to to support the uh to support the revolution in France one thing he talked about at that meeting was that there was a very low church Congregationalist minister named uh bright dr. Price uh you you see I don't know a lot about this guy uh I just know that you read uh political writings on both sides of the Atlantic at this point and they all talk about this guy so I probably should read a little bit more about him uh but Burke said this guy is talking about how every church has the right to follow its own conscience and uh if they don't like what the Anglican Church is saying uh then go find some non-conformist church and if you don't like what they're saying either just create your own non-conformist church

55:55that uh is still Protestant but uh does things in its own way and uh I think it just doesn't compute in Burke's head because he says wait a second he's not he's saying uh you know create your own church to do whatever you want but he's not seeing a word about whether or not uh this is you know heretical or founded in strong theology he just says uh if you don't like what the church is doing just split off and form your own church and I think he honestly believed that the Protestant faith was going to be strong enough to as you say to be a check on that throughout time but I think he gave the way game away right at the start of uh of the reflections on the revolution by talking about this uh this guy's discernment uh because he what what Dr. Price was talking about was exactly what ended up happening especially after things got secularized well and it and this is you

56:57the benefit of hindsight when you're reading Burke is that you know when he's offering the critiques it's like well yeah that happened basically like Burke was saying it was going to happen and then you look at the unfortunate thing is all the things that Burke pointed to who is limiting principles um none of them really had any effect at all yeah and and so then you have to ask yourself you know when when somebody like Aaron O'Toole you know trots out a term like ordered liberty you know like you're looking at it going but that's actually internally incoherent like it's logically an incoherent phrase like ordered liberty and this is in a sense I think where you end up coming down to the problems with Burke in the end is that once you unleash these forces in society um and this is sort of you know for all of the gains that came of the through the Protestant church in you know overcoming the corruptions that and because the Catholic Church of the day really was corrupt I mean through and through in many ways

58:01I mean there was always good people and and you can still all throw at the period you can find it and there was the counter revolution and it had a positive effect but you know there were then certain positive and negative downstream effects of the Protestant revolution of reformation and one of these is that you know it it does remove some of the grounding that then you know you take away the limiting principles and one of the limiting principles was the you know this whole notion of apostolic you know apostolic secession and you know the the magisterum now and out that that has prevented the Catholic Church from becoming liberalized so it's it you know the the forces of liberty that once they're unleashed um really do become a kind of acid that just to slowly dissolve everything and these acids were released in the pursuit of money and technology and

59:03that technology was really the thing that gave them the ability to make money at scale so it's one of these things where I think that you know historically once you start down this road I'm not sure that you're going to be able to land anywhere other than where we are today in that regard um given where we started from I got you know it it it seems to be like when you look at things like indicators like um total fertility rates and so forth that um commerce this kind of industrial commerce seems to have this effect on all societies um this corrosive effect everywhere that it's supplanted and tried in that regard even in places like China and Russia and you know South America and anywhere where it's actually tried you know tried with any kind of earnest yeah I mean if you the the history of the 19th century especially in Britain is just industrialization

1:00:10has gotten too big for us to handle but we're making it work somehow so let's just keep doing what we're doing but I I I don't think there was as much thought put into it as uh we would like to hope that our ancestors did well but the thing is it and here is here is the thing is that at the time there were critics right and what we mentioned Carlisle earlier right yeah there's Carlisle um the Luddites well what what's really interesting you know just and this is another aside is that um at one of these crucial moments where perhaps it might have been possible still yet to smash the machines and to return to the shire so to speak um there was a prominent thinker who stepped up to reassure people the working classes who were feeling the effects of of machine technology and that was Karl Marx and Karl Marx was able to convince many of the working classes that these

1:01:14machines were not in fact dangerous and it wasn't going to you know radically alter their lives and they should be embraced as the stepping stone of leading to kind of the glorious revolution um and so Marx was instrumental in swatching the fears of the working class against um the you know the rise of the machine I think you have to be a little careful when you make claims like that because uh the causality um might be backwards you mentioned the Luddites the Luddites were the 1810s yes it was already now the 1830s were a completely transformative generator sorry a completely transformative decade uh like the political theories uh and uh and uh philosophy after 1830 and before 1830 might as well have been two completely different things the 1830

1:02:14uh July revolution is what gave France its limited monarchy citizen king which they expected to finally be their last revolution 1848 proved that wrong I mentioned Britain having its great reform act uh expanding the franchise I mentioned uh in a previous episode I think I talked about Jacksonian democracy in America a lot of stuff happened in the 1830s and the 1830s is a completely uh transformative decade and you know talking about continuity between the Luddites and Marx uh you might be making some connections that aren't there because Marx was a completely a product of the post 1830 world where political solutions were possible because the political systems were different especially after 1848 and and uh reforms spread across the continent most of the revolutions failed in 1848 but there were some democratic concessions when you talk

1:03:20about the Luddites in 1810 there was not even an inkling that there was going to be a political solution it's uh these machines are going to put us out of work so we don't want these machines period and we're willing to smash the machines but this is completely about the labor side of it there is not a political aspect to the Luddites at all the sentiment remained in that sense um I know a Lewell talks about it that talks about this at length the the role that Marx had Marx had in I guess making the working class comfortable with um industrial like the industrial economy in that regard um and now whether he was the decisive point or not but you know the a Lewell of course began his his intellectual career as a Marxist before abandoning Marx and and I mean he ended up converting to um a continental version of of Calvinism in that regard but um one of the things he

1:04:25talks about in the technological society is the decisive role that Marx played in probably maybe in that regard as you say there was a transformative thing but in overcoming sort of the last hurdles of making the working classes comfortable with technology because he convinced them that rather than being a threat this is going to be just another step on the way to ending the domination of the bourgeois class over your lives in that regard so um that the machines will help along that way um and he cites a number of passages from Marx that um that were were instrumental in that regard so um you're probably right there in terms of the the the order that way but you know in terms that like Marx did play that role in in making the working class comfortable well again before the 1830s you did have the Sensimonians who were people now say that they are a precursor to socialism

1:05:26I think that might be you know with some certain you know hindsight biases sure but the Sensimonians did you know preach uh you know to they they work quite popular in France and they did have some popularity uh trying to convince the working classes that the machines weren't scary but it was not in the form of political reforms it wasn't getting a voice in the political arena it was in the idea of you know utopian communes were going to build these communes centered around a factory where the workers all get uh or the people who do productive work all get uh their you know share value of their labor not not even necessarily the value of the labor but just just a cut of the pie uh that you have some ownership in it you know when we talk about uh the the workers owning the means of production that was not the socialist that was not Karl Mark that was the Sensimonians so I mean I I get what you're saying but there is a little bit of an anachronism

1:06:32there and you have to realize just how you know much the 1830s divided history into the before times and the after times sure but it does like but again too like we're talking about then like Burke is on one side of that divide and Disraeli is on the other side of that divide absolutely right so then you know in a sense what you're talking about makes sense then you know when you have this early 1800s when when industrialization really sort of comes into its own in England um and that you know the political landscape that emerges after that these writings of Burke are picked up then and made the touchstone of you know what we now know as as sort of the modern conservative movement in that regard um and it it is interesting that that Burke keeps that people keep coming back to Burke again and again and that I mean I know Burke has his critics but it's just sort of this is the kind of thing like you know I had never read Burke but people you

1:07:36know sort of probably you know put Burke forward as um you know if we just listen to Edmund Burke and just modeled ourselves after after the teachings of Edmund Burke um all the problems of us that that we have as conservatives would just drift away and you know what you young men need to do is just read more Burke and you'll understand what we're trying to do and I just and this was I think that you know this is like to get back to the air no tool claim of like why we were doing this and you know what you know what gave birth to this whole episode is that I think that claim in today's context is just it's largely laughable once you read Burke now and you think yourself like no just telling the young men to go read Burke is not going to cause them to understand what you as a conservative parties are doing what you as conservative politicians or Republican politicians are doing that I think if they read Burke and they grasp Burke properly they're going to understand

1:08:41all the more deeply why it is that you have failed them so completely. Well Burke is considered the avatar of conservatism in you know wig framing of history that already concedes that progress is inevitable you know if you want to be a right wing thinker why wouldn't you read a Tory from the time and and Burke certainly did have some genius Tory contemporaries we mentioned Samuel Johnson earlier but one of the ones who I like whose lesser were known is Josiah Tucker who in 1780 so while the American revolutionary war was going on he wrote a rebuttal of John Locke and in fact if you really want to see how much the wig Tory divide is based on the high church low church divide or the Anglican Presbyterian divide whatever

1:09:44you want to call it I think that Tucker's rebuttal of Locke is a great work and it was written at the same time as Edmund Burke was writing in favor of the American revolution. Didn't he write it in response to Burke in some sense? I don't believe so I think he wrote it before that I might be I might be off. I could be Ron yeah but yeah and what's interesting in reading some of these authors historical and why they're good to read today is that even why Burke itself is good to read today because in some sense Burke was prescient he did see what was going to happen and some of these other authors did as well too and it's useful to look at them and to see like why did they see what was coming you know and because those are often things the things the reasons that they're pointing to as why they see this coming are often the the things that we need to be focusing on

1:10:46today in a sense because a lot of times like you know with you know but we live within a simulacrum right and and so there is often the surface layer of the discourse the narrative the way we think things work and the way we think things should work and this simulacrum overlays the way things actually work and sometimes reading these early authors is good because it allows you then to get past the surface discourses and to then understand why the surface discourse is all a bunch of BS and that you know the way things actually work is very much different and Burke is one of those things a sense of where he points out this is how it's good this is what's going to happen this is what's going to happen this is what's going to happen this is what's going to happen unfortunately the antidote that he had really was no antidote at all well that that's exactly why I like reading Tucker's Rebuttal of Locke because if you want to

1:11:52talk about breaking this simulacrum there's this phrase that a lot of people think Americans made up by checks and balances I don't know who the first person that made it made that I don't know who is the first person who made up that expression but Tucker certainly uses it in this essay which again is written during the American Revolution and he says the reason that you know England works as we have our checks and balances here we have the king we have the nobility we have industry we have the church we have all these different actual power centers as opposed to now when we hear that phrase we think all the Americans were founding fathers were geniuses for setting up a system where the senate balances the president and they're both balanced by the Supreme Court now these those are not real checks and balances and that's not something that made up that was made up by the Americans the phrase checks and balances was used by Josiah Tucker and he was talking about all

1:12:52these real power centers in society in a real tangible in real tangible terms the other reason that I kind of like reading it is I mentioned earlier that Burke was writing in favor of the American Revolution but he had to couch his language and say I'm not completely in favor of people starting a war I don't want I'm not committing treason here you God save the king etc etc. Tucker being a Tory said oh my god the Americans are just a bunch of ingrates who do nothing but complain but then expect protection from the British Navy can we just please let them go already just and just trade with them so while we're talking I managed to dig up a copy of a treatise concerning civil government and three parts by just that's exactly the one I'm talking about yeah and for which is good for me a free e-pub version is good for my e-reader so that's maybe I'll include

1:13:54the links in the show so that other miss from me for the next next conversation is this I think that's one of my favorite documents I also read I also recently downloaded just this whole thing with with Edmund Burke I actually downloaded a couple of John Locke's more influential writings because I think that Locke is also good to to have a have a boo at it's been since undergraduate that I've read I haven't read Locke since undergraduate it's probably time for some refreshers just because of some of I it was actually Peter Teal that got me thinking in this regard because Teal made a fair reference to to to Locke as this as putting forward this notion that you know we still keep Christianity around all its forms and language and morality and everything but we just don't take it all that seriously you

1:14:57know from a religious perspective and I think I I want to go through Locke and see whether or not Teal's interpretation of Locke is fair or if that's an over reading of Locke yeah the the the thing you got to again remember about Locke is that he's optimistic about the future because his life was when he was a young man when he was going through school at Oxford or Cambridge or wherever that was when the English Civil War was going on apparently when he was in one of his classes he could hear the crowd cheering when King Charles's head was cut off and so he he watched you know England fall apart and then he watched the restoration he watched things get better so he was whitepilled on the future because he had watched this whole cycle compare that to Thomas Hobbes who is much more blackpill on the future but that's because he wrote

1:15:57Leviathan when he was in his 60s right when the English Civil War started so Hobbes things had gone well for his whole life and then things fell apart right at the end so when you're reading Hobbes Locke you know yes obviously you want to take their philosophical arguments on their own merit but you have to remember that they're both very much colored by you know what they've witnessed in their lives well it's it's it's it's an interesting phenomenon too because um and I think like you've noted this too that that in many ways we're we're stuck um we've been stuck kind of philosophically intellectually at the end of the 1800s in that regard and like we look at it certain in my own tradition um you look at like Abraham Kuiper when you read his stone lectures there's an inherent optimism in there like he just takes it for granted that everybody is more or less a supporter of liberal democracy we're just anti-revolutionary right and so what we want again it's there is a kind

1:17:01of almost burky and sort of cast to to Abraham Kuiper's writing in a sense where it just seems kind of self evident to him that we would use democratic mechanisms and you know popular sovereignty the vote and so forth and yet somehow still are able to square that circle with the idea that the defining characteristic of Calvinist theology is the sovereignty of God and the two of these can like sit side by side without any need to explain them at all you know it's just and you think that's a function of the kind of optimism of the time um you know sort of pre-World War I and um you know that everything seems to be on the ups and everything is on the rise and you know this is in some ways it was almost thought that you know like that um you know sort of the radicalness of of you know French revolutionary liberalism had been

1:18:07you know combated with um this new casting of Calvinism so there is a sense like there that you know Burke is not unique in terms of like I mean and these various authors you say where they come at certain times and Locke is optimistic because of where he sits and Hobbes is not because of where he sits but then you can look at somebody like say Kuiper and he's optimistic because of where he sits in a time and today we're all pessimist because of where he sits in time and so we look back and we're picking over the ashes of our now dying culture and and you know it's civilization and wondering sort of you know what the heck went wrong yeah if I could give you an answer to that what went wrong I would well I think that's you know this is one of these you know the the Duma in us all has sort of like that's that's one of the questions I just I can't bring myself to be optimistic yet about the future I also come from a Scottish family we don't do optimism about

1:19:14anything there you go yeah I don't know if you've heard the joke uh that there there's Scottish pessimists says this is as bad as things could ever possibly get and the Scottish optimist says oh no things can totally get worse yeah I'm surprised that you know like that you have the chairbell the chairbell society the optimist club and I've often thought you know that why has there never been a pessimist like that would seem to be but then again maybe they don't see any point in in doing that but yeah anyways Ben it has been a delight it's unfortunately we've been going on now we're like an hour and 20 minutes and shoot we were we were hoping to have Aaron will tool on briefly to to chat with us about Burke but unfortunately we've run out of time so we'll have to do that another day um thank you Ben for coming on it has been a delight I always enjoy these

1:20:15conversations me as well you