A diligent study of Burke’s letters and manuscripts brings home the extent to which Burke’s approach to politics was a religious one. What is often spoken of as his “empiricism” appears in this light to be better described as Christian pessimism. As a Christian, Burke believed that the world is imperfect, he regarded his “enlightened” contemporaries’ faith in the perfectibility of man as atheistical as well as erroneous. Thus, whereas the fashionable intellectuals of his time looked for the progressive betterment of the world through the beneficial influence of Reason and Nature, Burke maintained that the moral order of the universe is unchanging. The first duty of rulers and legislators, he argued, is to the present, not to the future; their energies should be devoted to the correction of real ills, not to the promotion of an ideal order that exists only in the imagination.
Burke put great faith in the inherited wisdom of tradition. He held that the moral order of the temporal world must necessarily include some evil, by reason of original sin. Men ought not to reject what is good in tradition merely because there is some admixture of evil in it. In man’s confused situation, advantages may often lie in balance and compromises between good and evil, even between one evil and another. It is an important part of wisdom to know how much evil should be tolerated. To search for too great a purity is only to produce fresh corruption. Burke was especially critical of revolutionary movements with noble humanitarian ends because he believed that people are simply not at liberty to destroy the state and its institutions in the hope of some contingent improvement. On the other hand, he insisted that people have a paramount duty to prevent the world from getting worse - a duty to guard and preserve their inherited liberties and privileges.
These considerations explain the so-called inconsistencies often attributed to Burke, who supported the movement for the independence of Ireland and the rebellion of the American colonists against the English government, but bitterly opposed the French Revolution. The reason for this seeming inconsistency was that Burke regarded the Irish movement and the American rebellion as actions on behalf of traditional rights and liberties which the English government had infringed on. The French Revolution was quite different, he argued, because it was designed to introduce a wholly new order based on a false rationalistic philosophy. Burke did not object to a resort to force as such; it was the aims of the French revolutionists to which he objected. Similarly, Burke approved of the English Revolution of 1688 because he saw it as designed to restore the rights of Edmund Burke, page 1 Englishmen and to secure the hereditary succession to the throne. The French Revolution, on the contrary, was intended to establish the so-called rights of man and the republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity at the expense of personal property, religion, and the traditional class structure of a Christian kingdom.
In one of his most celebrated works, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke attacked those of his contemporaries who made an abstraction of liberty, and who invited people to seek liberty without any real knowledge of what they meant by it. He claimed that he himself loved “a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman in France,” but he would not “stand forward and give praise” to an “object stripped of all concrete relations” and standing “in all the solitude of a metaphysical idea.” As for equality, Burke insisted that it was contrary to nature and therefore impossible to achieve; its advocates, moreover, did “great social harm,” for by pretending that real differences were unreal, they inspired “false hopes and vain expectations in those destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life.” Burke dismissed talk of fraternity as so much “cant and gibberish”; such splendid words were simply the pretexts of the French revolutionists; the causes of the French revolution, however, were “men’s vices - pride, ambition, avarice, lust, sedition.”
Burke was essentially a religious man living in a rationalistic age. Although he often spoke the language understood by that age - the language of calculation, expediency, utility, and political rights - he had a mind which his contemporaries, and many others, could not readily comprehend. Burke was conscious, above all things, of the reality and unavoidability of evil, and was thus led to claim that the only hope for mankind was to cling to safeguards which had stood the test of time. His hopes for bliss lay in heaven; on earth, his policy was to defend the tolerable, and sometimes the bad, against the immeasurably worse.
Although Burke’s contemporaries in the “age of reason, enlightenment, and ideas” were too naively optimistic to understand him, he used reason to show that their idealism had overlooked the fact that, although humans are capable of virtue, they remain imperfect and finite in this life, and the hoped-for utopia will not happen by means of political progressivism or revolution; sadly, later generations would see that Burke was right, after millions died under Stalin’s and Mao’s reigns, and in two world wars.
Edmund Burke, page 2