No Burke, Please

"I'm a writer," Wade said.  "I'm supposed to understand what makes people tick.  I don't understand one damn thing about anybody."

-- from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

A while ago I decided to read some of the classics I hadn't gotten around to, and that project has been aided by a rich harvest from local library sales.  In fact, last week I bought a sealed grocery bag labelled "classics" for one dollar.  Everything in it turned out to be good, so I'm set for the rest of the year (most are very long).

I had already started with several volumes from home and previous sales, but it's been disappointing.  For example, I began with one of Sir Walter Ralegh's histories of voyaging and exploration.  Yikes! the first paragraph was a distressing page and half long.  In his time, and continuing through the Victorians, more was definitely always more:  the vastness of your vocabulary and prolixity of your words demonstrated inarguably that you were an educated gentleman to be taken seriously by others.  Fine, but you're unreadable.

Next up was George Eliot's Middlemarch, picked due to my interest in the setting and time (Great Britain and the Reform Act era).  But I will never know what it had to offer since I could not get past the first overblown and pretentious page. 

I was beginning to think classics are like 1950s cars:  icons surely, but unsafe, uneconomical, unreliable and a pain to park.  Today professional restorers can retain the look (body and interior) while greatly improving the original badly executed parts and mechanical design.  A sorely needed corps of editors could do the same with those creaky literary classics.

Edmund Burke wrote what is considered the founding classic of conservatism, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which should definitely be on anyone's starting list of classics along with Adam Smith and many others from the Enlightenment.  It turned out, however, that Mr. Burke seems to have not noticed the Enlightenment at all.  His arguments seem to come from the medieval era instead.  The tone of the tract is emotional and outraged:  he is incensed that the Church was separated from the State by the revolutionaries, that the King was removed (government is divinely ordained and not to be touched by the unworthy governed!), and that titles and tradition were, to put it mildly, questioned.  He believed that power in government derived only from ownership of land.  He particularly loathed paper money (feeling it was illegitimate wealth not tied to land). In other words, change is not a challenge that societies should meet positively: though the Industrial Revolution had made the feudal order obsolete and dangerous, there were no solutions outside of established religious and aristocratic authority.  The wild emotions of the mob and the folly of the new self-made political philosophers in France were not good bases for the needed change in government, true, but Mr. Burke's devotion to the selfish, shortsighted and reactionary establishment at home was equally misplaced.  Extremism -- too much revolution or too much tradition -- is always bad, whether you're holding tight to the royal standard or the red banner.

(Why the illustration above?  I was going to write about gratitude and got off the rails.  Will try again.)