The hopeless messes in Egypt and Syria recall a lesson drawn by Adam Gopnik in trying to make sense of Edmund Burke

What in tarnation does Edmund Burke have to do with the price of eggs in Egypt and Syria? More than you might think, I think.


"We are no better, or worse, at understanding Iraq from instant video than the Brits were at understanding America from salty, soggy mail. Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it."

-- Adam Gopnik, in "The Right Man: Who Owns
Edmund Burke?," in the July 29 New Yorker
(only an abstract is available to nonsubscribers)

by Ken

The news keeps coming from Egypt and Syria (not to mention a host of other places we pay even less attention to), and it keeps getting horribler. And the horribler the news gets, the stupider the commentary. From the Village insiders and the right-wing commentariat in particular (yes, there's a lot of overlap between the two groups, but they're not the same) we get pusilanimous cretinousness couched in oracular thunderbolts of dead certainty which are a dead giveaway that the blowhard knows squat about the subject.

I don't know what to do in any of these places, but I do know that you could hardly do anything worse than to listen to these pestilential dickwads. And it's only recently that I've had a conceptual framework for saying back to them: "Shut the frig up, you bleeping dickwads!"

I'm going to invoke a name that's sacred to most conservatives, especially of the American variety, and I hope that won't put you off. If it's any help, there's a strong likelihood that none of the right-wing doodyheads who genuflect to Edmund Burke have ever read any thing he wrote, except for a handful of quotations the regurgitate ritually, and really have no idea what the man thought about, well, anything.

I invoke Burke because it was in the course of an exploration into what Burke actually thought that The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik unleashed an analogy that landed on me as a "Eureka!" moment. And the truth, according to Gopnik, is that hardly anyone knows what Burke really believed because what he believed is all over the philosophical and ideological map.

Gopnik mulls the contradictions and proceed to discuss Burke's political philosophy according to the three overwhelming issues he addressed over the course of his public career: America (and our revolution), France (and its revolution), and India (and the problems of empire). His contention is that the American Burke, the French Burke, and the Indian Burke seem to have hardly anything in common, though he does venture that "seen as a human being, rather than as a time-transcendent oracle,"

Burke is less that familiar species the Disappointed Radical, who swings wildly from one ideology to another, fighting for Indian dignity one moment and for French monarchy at another, than the Shocked Liberal -- the man of reform who, when reform turns to revolution, is driven around the bend by its excesses.

Of the "three Burkes," Gopnik writes: "The American Burke is a model of rational prudence; the Indian Burke one of imperial responsibility and sympathy. The French Burke is not only the most influential but also the most tangled."

It's in writing about the American Burke, that "model of rational prudence," that Gopnik makes the point I'm trying to get to. He notes that American conservatives are particularly drawn to the American Burke, because, "unlike other anti-Enlightenment thinkers, he supported the American Revolution." But in fact, he notes, Burke was at first "rather cool to the American position," partly because of its tolerance for slavery and partly because of the Constitutional Congress's conspicuous anti-Catholicism. But in time he came around, for highly practical reasons.

He came to doubt the wisdom of trying to rule a big country from a great distance, and of taxing people who didn't get to vote for the people who taxed them He thought the idea that you could run an empire on a balance sheet was crazy. Life took place in a theatre of values and traditions, and it was fatal to translate them into a merchant's language of profit and loss. The real imperial glue had to be a commonality of interests and values.

Bear in mind that the American situation was evolving through the whole time the king and Parliament were grappling with it. (I should note that what follows is all a single paragraph in Gopnik's text. I have taken the shocking liberty of breaking it down.)

In those days it took about eight weeks for a letter or a newspaper to travel between Old World and New, as mail was carried on leaky and wind-tossed boats. There was no way to know that what you were saying today hadn't been rendered immaterial by what happened last week. Burke was well aware of the difficulty: "Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat an whole system."

And yet each side's ability to grasp the other's position (or fail to), and to adjust its policy (or fail to) in the light of changing events, seems exactly as agile, or as clumsy, as it is today. In particular, the positions taken in Parliament sound the same as those we might have now regarding an imperial issue of our own. Some argue that to compromise with the insurgents would be to lose all credibility with other insurgents; others that just one more surge of troops will do it. We are no better, or worse, at understanding Iraq from instant video than the Brits were at understanding America from salty, soggy mail.

Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it. Knowing the day-to-day movements of a foreign adventure confers no more advantage than knowing the minute-by-minute movements of a stock. The range of responses is always the same: there are bulls and bears, loss-cutters and this-will-show-them-ers. When it came to America, Burke was a loss-cutter.

It seems obvious once the point has been made, but the bloviations about Egypt and Syria aren't really about Egypt and Syria, by and large; they're the bloviators' standard mindsets applied to the superficial framework of these situations that they've plucked out of the headlines.


A BURKE BONUS: THE FATHER OF CONSERVATIVE GLOOM?

In attempting to parse the French Burke, and in particular his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Gopnik notes a tendency on his subject's part to get carried away in his denunciation of revolutionary excesses, to become "oddly overwrought." (He cite an indeed-pretty-loopy passage defending the honor of Marie Antoinette in apocalyptic terms.) Noting Bertrand Russell's attribution of "a lot of the gloom of the early Church" to "the personal gloom of St. Augustine" (Gopnik's words, not Russell's), he suggests that --

certain apocalyptic tendencies of modern conservatism may be due to the later Burke. It isn't enough for him to say that something revolutionary is bad or cruel; the bad thing must be also ruthless, irredeemable, and very nearly irresistible. (And so begins that strange note, found to this day in American conservative magazines, whereby the most privileged caste in the most powerful country in the most prosperous epoch in the whole history of humankind is always sure that everything is going straight to hell and has mostly already gotten there.)

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