BURKE = PAINE? Sort of. I just finished reading The Rights of Man, and this fairly uninformed thought struck me: Both Paine and Edmund Burke (in Reflections on the Revolution in France–I’ve read very little of his other writing, because I’m lame) are both so a) caught up in contemporary political disputes and b) modern, that they come off as much too sunshiney. Both are optimistic in their starkly different ways. They don’t quite see how bad either of their positions could be if certain aspects of their worldviews were taken to the extreme.

Burke doesn’t really offer any way to deal with either a country with little tradition of liberty to draw on, or with few traditions of any kind–China, say, and America. He also provides support for the traditionalism-as-relativism stance, with his inveighing against the “philosophers” (by which, as far as I can tell, he means rationalists).

Paine has a few problems. He’s clever, for one thing, and enamored of his own cleverness–his point-scoring analogies and turns of phrase are more often word-juggling, rarely cutting philosophical points. Then there are the easy, obvious, quick contradictions between, for example, liberty as freedom from constraint and liberty as freedom to bind oneself (cf. for example the property rights vs. seizure of church property stuff). Paine thinks in terms of the individual and the state; Burke is of course famous for his praise of the “little platoons” that stand between these two poles. Paine comes off the worse in hindsight, because of his sweet certainty that the French Revolution will be fun for the whole family. After the Terror, Burke gets a lot of credit, since hindsight is 20/20 but foresight is rare. Paine also looks pretty bad these days due to his charming belief that “all religions are in their nature kind and benign, and united with principles of morality.” (They only become bad when they get the law on their side. Hmmm.) Both Paine and Burke, destructively, agree that religion and philosophy are clean, different things. Imagine this passage in TROM rewritten so that “philosophy,” “political system,” or “worldview” replaced “religion”:

With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if everyone is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other’s religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore, all the world is right, or all the world is wrong. But with respect to religion itself, without regard to names, and as directing itself from the universal family of mankind to the Divine object of all adoration, it is man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart; and though those fruits may differ from each other like the fruits of the earth, the grateful tribute of everyone is accepted. (itals in original)

I think you can only say this if you think religion is completely opaque to reason and completely different from philosophy. I wouldn’t identify religion and philosophy, certainly, but I think they are a lot closer than the Paine passage would imply; and so the choice of one religion over the other is a lot more than the choice between equally valid, equally truthful, and equally good ways of honoring the same basic God. But Burke’s identification of “philosophy” with rationalism ends up in the same misleading place. He just prefers the other horn of the false dilemma.

More on Paine later if I can think of interesting ways to flesh out some of my problems with him and with Burke. Reading TROM gave me more respect for him, although it was not nearly the startling experience that reading ROTRIF was–most likely because Paine’s ideas are the American mainstream, while Burke’s mistakes tend to come off as irrelevant and his insights as truly “rich and strange.” (The main thing I took away from Burke was the belief that all loyalties are ultimately personal. This is presumably not the main thing readers of his own time would have noticed!)

Shrug–it all ends in Nietzsche anyway, one is tempted to say….