Liberalism (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Again, in case we've forgotten what the word means.

Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others; but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.

*   *   *

The problem is compounded when one asks whether this is all that government can or should do on behalf of individual freedom. Some liberals—the so-called neoclassical liberals, or libertarians—answer that it is. Since the late 19th century, however, most liberals have insisted that the powers of government can promote as well as protect the freedom of the individual. According to modern liberalism, the chief task of government is to remove obstacles that prevent individuals from living freely or from fully realizing their potential. Such obstacles include poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance. 

See Liberalism (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Conservatism (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

What with Donald Trump's rampages, I thought it prudent to remind myself what it might mean to claim to be a conservative. 

Conservatism, political doctrine that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices.

Conservatism is a preference for the historically inherited rather than the abstract and ideal. This preference has traditionally rested on an organic conception of society—that is, on the belief that society is not merely a loose collection of individuals but a living organism comprising closely connected, interdependent members. Conservatives thus favour institutions and practices that have evolved gradually and are manifestations of continuity and stability.

See Conservatism (Encyclopaedia Britannica) 

Dog Whistles No Longer - They Speak En Clair

I think I've figured out the core of my disgust at Trump's message and the rot he has revealed at the heart of today's Republican Party.

He is offensive to the memory of my parents, my brother, and a large number of role models growing up in suburban, Republican, Nassau County Long Island in the '60s and '70's.

They were conservatives regarding government spending and morality and anti-Communist to a fault (the fault being Vietnam). 

But they were NOT hateful, they respected science and facts, and they were NOT wing-nuts in pursuit of conspiracy theories.

OUTLINE: Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.

The Great Debate

Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left Part One

All citations from…

Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books, 2014

Edmund Burke

•     Lived 1729 – 1797

•     Born in Dublin, Ireland – the result of a Catholic / Protestant marriage (Burke was raised Anglican)

•     House of Parliament (Whig) from 1765 – 1794

•     Supported the American Revolution, vehemently opposed the French Revolution

Thomas Paine

•     Lived 1737 – 1809

•     Flunked out of school, tried and failed at several jobs then migrated to America after meeting and being helped by  Benjamin Franklin in 1774.

•     Became a journalist in Philadelphia

•     Spent much of the revolutionary years of his life in France, strongly supporting their revolution.

•     Died impoverished and almost friendless due, in part, to his radically deist views and his attack on Christianity in “The Age of Reason.”

Nature and History
(Paine: Rights founded in nature)

    [In Common Sense] “…Paine takes his time getting to the American crisis (which does not really appear until the pamphlet’s third section) and instead launches into a thought experiment he insists is essential to grounding any theory of politics: “In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought.” (p44)

(Quotes from Yuval Levin are in Arial font.)

Nature and History (Paine)

      “Every history of the creation… however they may vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward; and consequently every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.” (pp.45 – 46)

(Block quotes from Paine and Burke in Bookman Old Style.)

Nature and History (Paine)

      “A nation is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals, [and] … public good is not a term opposed to the good of individuals; on the contrary, it is the good of every individual collected.” (p46)

Nature and History (Paine)

      “A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.” (pp. 47 - 48)

Nature and History
(Burke: Rights an inheritance from history)

    “The beginnings of any society, Burke writes, are almost certain to involve some sort of barbarism (not to say crime). But over time, by slowly responding to circumstantial exigencies, societies develop more mature forms – a process that, as Burke puts it in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, “mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement.” A return to beginnings would thus not offer an opportunity to start anew on proper principles, but would rather risk a reversion to barbarism. “There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments,” Burke argues, because there is little to be learned by exposing them, and there is a very real risk of harm in the exposure itself – especially the risk of weakening the allegiance of the people to their regime by exposing its imperfect origins.” (p.53)

Nature and History (Burke)

     “The pretended rights of man, which have made this havoc [the French Revolution] cannot be the rights of the people. For to be a people, and to have these rights, are things incompatible. The one supposes the presence, the other the absence of a state of civil society.”

     *   *   *

     The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made like all other legal fictions by common agreement… When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a people; they have no longer a corporate existence; they have no longer a legal coactive force to bind within, not a claim to be recognized abroad. They are a number of vague loose individuals, and nothing more.” (p.55)

Nature and History (Burke)

     “I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.” (p.56)

Nature and History (Burke)

     “By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete.” (p.65)

Justice and Order
(Burke: Justice an iterative, orderly and organic process embedded in history)

     “Burke turns out, therefore, to be neither a utilitarian proceduralist nor a natural-law philosopher. He does not believe that man-made law is the final authority and that only consequences matter. Nor does he believe that political life is an expression of unchanging Christian truths. The regime, he suggests, does not owe its legitimacy directly to God, and neither is every whim of the sovereign legitimate. He proposes, rather, a novel notion of political change that emerges from precisely his model of nature and his (again, rather novel) idea of prescription. And yet over time, this idea points us toward a standard of justice and judgment beyond pure utility.” (p.76)

Justice and Order (Burke)

On Wise vs. Unwise Governance

     “These are matters incapable of exact definition. But, through no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable. Nor will it be impossible for a Prince to find out such a mode of government, and such persons to administer it, as will give a great degree of content to his people, without any curious and anxious research for that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which, while he is seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquility which are in his power without any research at all.” (p. 80)

Justice and Order (Burke)

On Different Forms of Government

     “Liberty inheres in some sensible object, and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.”

*   *   *

“If the people are happy, united, wealthy and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived. In old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed they are the results of various necessities and expediencies. They are not often constructed after any theory; theories are rather drawn from them.” (p. 80)

Justice and Order (Burke)

      “Those levelers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things. The load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which, by the worst usurpations, an usurpation of the prerogatives of nature, you attempt to force them.” (p. 83)
*   *   *
“All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.” (p.87)

Justice and Order
(Paine: Justice results from an order founded in human equality)

      “Thomas Paine, of course, could hardly disagree more with Burke than he did on this point. Paine’s work was the very embodiment of the radical egalitarianism that Burke feared. Paine believed that every man stands in an equal relation to his origin with every other, and therefore that none is entitles to reign supreme.” (p.88)

Justice and Order (Paine)

On Hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy

     “Male and female are distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven, but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or misery to mankind.”
*   *   *
What is government more than the management of the affairs of a Nation? It is not, and from its nature cannot be, the property of any particular man or family, but of the whole community, at whose expense it is supported; and though by force and contrivance it has been usurped into an inheritance, the usurpation cannot alter the right of things.” (p. 88)

Justice and Order (Paine)

On Hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy

     “In all cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from the understanding of the nation the only thing that was beneficial to know, namely, that government is nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society.” (p. 88)

Choice and Obligation
(Paine: Choice and obligation are contractual with one’s contemporaries)

     “For Paine, the natural equality of all human beings translates to complete political equality and therefore to a right to self-determination. The formation of society was itself a choice made by free individuals, so the natural rights that people bring with them into society are rights to act as one chooses, free of coercion. Each person should have the right to do as he chooses unless his choices interfere with the equal rights and freedoms of others. And when that happens – when society as a whole must act through its government to restrict the freedom of some of its members – government can only act in accordance with the wishes of the majority, aggregated through a political process. Politics, in this view, is fundamentally an arena for the exercise of choice, and our only real political obligations are to respect the freedom and choices of others.” (p.91)

Choice and Obligation (Paine)

      “Suppose twenty persons, strangers to each other, to meet in a country not before inhabited. Each would be a Sovereign in his own natural right. His will would be his law, but his power, in many cases, inadequate to his right; and the consequence would be that each might be exposed, not only to each other, but to the other nineteen. It would then occur to them that their condition would be much improved if a way could be devised to exchange that quantity of danger into so much protection; so that each individual should possess the strength of the whole number.” (p. 93)

Choice and Obligation (Paine)

      “As all their rights in the first case are natural rights, and the exercise of those rights supported only by their own natural individual power, they would begin by distinguishing between those rights they could individually exercise, fully and perfectly, and those they could not. Of the first kind are of thinking, speaking forming and giving opinions, and perhaps are those which can be fully exercised by the individual without the aid of exterior assistance; or in other words, rights of personal competency. Of the second kind are those of personal protection, of acquiring and possessing property, in the exercise of which the individual power is less than the natural right… These I consider to be civil rights, or rights of compact, and are distinguishable from natural rights because in the one we act wholly in our own person, in the other we agree not to do so, but act under the guarantee of society.” (p. 93)

Choice and Obligation (Paine)

      “First, That every civil right grows out of a natural right; or, in other words, is a natural right exchanged. Secondly, That civil power properly considered as such is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not his purpose, but where collected to a focus becomes competent to the Purpose of every one. Thirdly, That the power produced by the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in the power in the individual, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the individual, and in which the power to exercise is as perfect as the right itself. We have now, in a few words, traced man from a natural individual to a member of society, and shown, or endeavored to show, the quality of the natural rights retained, and of those which are exchanged for civil rights.” (p. 94)

Choice and Obligation
(Burke: Choice and obligation are largely inherited from the accidents of birth and idiosyncratic circumstances)

     “For Burke, human nature can only be understood within society and therefore within the complex web of relations in which every person is embedded. None of us chooses the nation, community, or family into which we are born, and while we can choose to change our circumstances to some degree as we get older, we are always defined by some crucial obligations and relationships not of our own choosing. A just and healthy politics must recognize these obligations and relationships and respond to society as it exists, before politics can enable us to make changes for the better. In this view, politics must reinforce the bonds that hold people together, enabling us to be free within society rather than defining freedom to the exclusion of society and allowing us to meet our obligations to past and future generations, too. Meeting obligations is as essential to our happiness and our nature as making choices.” (p.92)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

      “Of this I am certain, that in a democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single scepter. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other.” (p. 99 - 100)
*   *   *
Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound (cont.)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

     indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome duties towards which those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties, or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things. Men come in that matter into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation. If the social ties and ligaments, spun out of these physical relations which are the elements of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will, so without any stipulation, on our part, we are bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) “all the charities of all.” Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us, as it is awful and coercive. (p. 102)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

     “This is a choice not of one day; or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time. It is a vestment which accommodates itself to the body. Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices – for man is a most unwise and a most wise being. The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.” (p. 104)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

    “I cannot too often recommend it to the serious consideration of all men who think civil society to be within the province of moral jurisdiction that if we owe to it any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms. Now though civil society might be at first a voluntary act (which in many cases it undoubtedly was) its continuance is under a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own…Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. Look through the whole of life and the whole system of duties. Much of the strongest moral obligations are such as were never the results of our option. (p. 106 - 107)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

    “ Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts, for the objects of mere occasional interest, may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee… or some other such low concern… to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born… The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty… to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles.; It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessary that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. (p. 107 - 108)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

       “If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favor. (109)

Choice and Obligation (Burke)

       “Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want every thing. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these rights should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions . (p.110)

Reason and Prescription

Reason and Prescription (Levin)

   “If natural equality is the crucial premise of Enlightenment-liberal politics, and government by consent its essential form, then human reason is its great moving force.” (p.127)

Reason and Prescription (Burke)

    “Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.” (p.129)

    *   *   *

    “A statesman differs from a professor in [a] university… the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with these general ideas, and to take into his consideration.” (p.131)

Reason and Prescription (Burke)

   “The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate, and the mathematics and arithmetic of an exciseman. They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life.” (continued)

Reason and Prescription (Burke)

     “They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself, all of which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals… For the legislator would have been ashamed, that the coarse husbandman should well know how to assort and to use his sheep, horses and oxen, and should have enough common sense not to abstract and equalize them all into animals, without providing for each kind an appropriate food, care and employment; whilst he, the oeconomist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, subliming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to know nothing of his flocks, but as men in general.” (pp. 131 - 132)

Reason and Prescription (Levin)

     “[Burke] is concerned that an overreliance on theory may unleash extremism and immoderation by unmooring politics from the polity. “Their principles always go to the extreme,” Burke writes of the radicals of his day. Because they pursue the vindication of a principle, they cannot stop short of total success. Even when their aims are well conceived, the radicals will not accept it a good thing if it “does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea,” and instead they will “push for the more perfect, which cannot be attained without tearing to pieces the whole contexture of the commonwealth.” Burke believed that when the perfect is thus made the enemy of the good, political life can never be satisfactory, since there is no perfection in politics.” (p.133)

Reason and Prescription (Burke)

      “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect the the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” (p.135)

    *   *   *

    “If you apprehend that on a concession you shall be pushed by metaphysical process to the extreme lines, and argued out of your whole authority, my advice is this; when you have recovered your old, your strong, your tenable position, then face about - stop short - do nothing more - reason not at all - oppose the ancient policy and practice of the empire as a rampart against the speculations of innovators on both sides of the question; and you will stand on great, manly, and sure ground. On this solid basis fix your machines, and they will draw worlds toward you.” (p.143)

Reason and Prescription (Levin)

     “Thomas Paine viewed reason as a profoundly liberating force that can help man learn his rights and establish governments equipped to guard and champion those rights. “There is a morning of reason rising upon man on the subject of government, that has not appeared before,” Paine writes. “As the barbarism of the present old governments expires, the moral conditions of nations with respect to each other will be changed.” Paine’s self-declared purpose is to advance the cause of this rational politics. “It is time that nations should be rational, and not be governed like animals, for the pleasure of their riders.” Making nations rational was in one way or another his goal in every political exertion.” (p.150)

Reason and Prescription (Paine)

    “Mr. Burke appears to have no idea of principles, when he is contemplating government. “Ten years ago,” says he, “I could have felicitated France on her having a government without enquiring what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered.” Is this the language of a rational man? Is it the language of a heart feeling as it ought to feel for the rights and happiness of the human race? On this ground, Mr. Burke must compliment every government in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten. It is power, and not principles, that Mr. Burke venerates; and under this abominable depravity, he is disqualified to judge between them.” (p.152)

Reason and Prescription (Paine)

    “Those two distinct and opposite forms erect themselves on the two distinct and opposite bases of Reason and Ignorance. As the exercise of Government requires talents and abilities, and as talents and abilities cannot have hereditary descent, it is evident that hereditary succession requires a belief from man to which his reason cannot subscribe, and which can only be established upon his ignorance; and the more ignorant any country is, the better it is fitted for this species of Government. On the contrary, Government, in a well-constituted republic, requires no belief from man beyond what his reason can give. He sees the rationale of the wholes system, its origin and its operation; and as it is best supported when best understood, the human faculties act with boldness, and acquire, under this form of government, a gigantic manliness.” (p.156)

Reason and Prescription (Paine)

    “Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up. By associating those precedents with a superstitious reverence for ancient things, as monks show relics and call them holy, the generality of mankind are received into the design. Governments now act as if they were afraid to awaken a single reflection in man. They are softly leading him to the sepulcher of precedents, to deaden his faculties and call attention from the scene of revolutions. They feel that he is arriving at knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the barometer of their fears.” (p.158)

Reason and Prescription (Levin)

       “This dispute between universal principles and historical precedents - between a politics of explicit knowledge and a politics of implicit knowledge - cuts to the core of the debate that still defines our politics. To this day, progressive voices argue that our political system must empower expertise to directly address social and political problems with technical prowess. And today’s conservatives argue that we must empower institutions (like families, churches, and markets) that channel the implicit knowledge of many individuals and generations that that have passed some test of time and contain in their very forms more wisdom than any person could possess.  This dispute, which Burke and Paine made so explicit, is another version of the disagreement about whether political thought must consider abstract, solitary, rational individuals or must take up particular human societies in their social and historical settings.” (p.175)

Revolution and Reform (Bekkenhuis)

     Skipping this chapter as it makes a simple point.

    If one believes that inherited institutions contain the implicit wisdom of a people throughout history with all the particularity of circumstances, then one seeks - as did Edmund Burke - to presume the good and reform the defects and seek to improve upon it for future generations, with the burden of proof being on innovation.

    If one believes – as did Thomas Paine - that inherited institutions, in fact, disguise their irrationality and injustice to keep despots in power then the only rational choice is to sweep it all away through revolution and begin anew as did the first humans when they formed societies.

Generations and the Living (Paine)

     “A nation, though continually existing, is continually in a state of renewal and succession. It is never stationary. Every day produces new births, carries minors forward to maturity, and old persons from the stage. In this ever running flood of generations there is no part superior in authority to another. Could we conceive an idea of superiority in any, at what point in time, or in what century of the world, are we to fix it? To what cause are we to ascribe it? By what evidence are we to prove it? By what criterion are we to know it?” (p.208)

Generations and the Living (Burke)

     “One of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation, and teaching these successors as little respect to their contrivances as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. (pp. 215 - 216)

Generations and the Living (Levin)

      “Here we find the true bottom of the Burke-Paine debate, and from here we can begin to appreciate how their differences have helped to shape our own. They disagreed about whether some basic aspects of the human condition, especially the facts that we are all born and that we all die, should decisively shape human societies. Paine’s assertive, confident, rationalist, technocratic, and progressive outlook held that through the right kinds of political arrangements, man could overcome the limits that that these facts might impose and he could therefore reshape his world to his preferences and even end the long-standing scourges of injustice, war and suffering. Burke’s grateful, protective, cautious, pious, gradualist, and reformist outlook held that man could only hope to improve his circumstances if he understood his own limits, built on the achievements of those who came before him to repair their errors, and realized that some profound human miseries and vices are permanent functions of our nature - and that pretending otherwise would only make them worse.

      “Both are modern attitudes, and both are liberal too, but they disagree about just what modernity and liberalism mean. Indeed, that very disagreement has ultimately come to define modern liberalism.” (p. 222)

Conclusion

   I’ll pass on Levin’s conclusions regarding the trajectory from Paine & Burke to our current politics as, following the legacy of Thomas Paine, we’ll figure that out for ourselves. (And, by the way, Paine would hate to be cited as an authority! ☺ )

 

Where to find God, for those who are looking.

The gospel is that God is to be found with bad people in worse neighborhoods. Especially when we discover that we are the bad people and our lives are the worse neighborhoods.

So there is hope for us all.

 

The worse the situation, the less ambiguous the encounter.

DUMPING TRUMP

Donald Trump is just one more demagogue and ISIL is just one more terrorist group.

Their significance is that large - and apparently ever replenished - number of disaffected people who are attracted to them.

Bernie Sanders made a damn fine point on Rachael Maddow last night.

A demagogue is someone who finds very angry people... RIGHTFULLY very angry people... and directs their wrath against a scapegoat.

The challenge is not to beat Trump in an election of beat ISIL on the ground - both of which will eventually occur.

The challenge is to ROB THEM OF THE ANGRY PEOPLE EMPOWERING THEM by enlisting them in battle against the ACTUAL source of their anger.