On this day in 1790 Edmund Burke published an epistolary pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was prescient for the time and still seems so today. The magic of it, which gives so much prescience, is that it encapsulates large dollops of knowledge of human nature. In a thousand years, it shall be as relevant as it was in the Eighteenth Century and is now in the Twenty-First.
A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
When Burke speaks of the “spirit of innovation,” he is not speaking mainly of technical achievements and new devices. He is speaking more of innovations to the social contract. Technical innovations can certainly change the social contract if we allow them to do so, but there is always a choice of directions to go.
Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, an the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter? I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity in all the proceedings of the assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.
Savagery and brutality are parts of human nature. So is yearning for higher things: order, nobility, the coming together of religion, and the divine. We make our choices as to what we will pursue. We also choose in how we educate our children.
What have you chosen? And how have you shown those choices in your life?
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