Life has settled down a bit for me recently. Today I have time for reflections on wisdom, pragmatism and ideals. Sometime ago I began to read through Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I’m reading an edition I procured from Apple Books, so page numbers shift with portrait or landscape orientation. This short blog post rather reflects the thoughts in the most recently read part of the text. Here Burke sets out some of his basic themes on the nature of government and civil society. This comes after an extensive first part of this work describing the ideas of a group called ‘The Revolution Society’ as presented by a Dr. Price.
I have much more to read. Page counts being irrelevant on an iPhone, I calculated the percentage read which stands at just under 24%. At this point, however, Burke notes that rights are not some ideal, immutable foundation to which all human affairs must pay heed. Rather rights are a matter of balancing competing realities. Balances ‘between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes, between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.” This describes the essence and practice of politics in western democracies, but suggests there is some foundational principle he labelled morality .
The French, the Americans and now we Canadians have attempted to graft onto Burke’s description, documents called ‘charters of rights and freedoms’. The Brits have so far avoided this path. Yet, the pragmatic principles I quote from Burke above still swirl about these documents as they do around all the degrees of representative government established in democracies.
Ok, this is a start but as I noted, I have a good 75% of the text to wade through. I hope to discover what he means by morality.
Happy Sunday!
An Historian looks at the West 