Burke, Veblen, and the New Feudalism: Part I -- Reflections on Edmund Burke

Introduction

Almost every great lesson and important truth I have ever learned was not by direct rational argument. I either learned it obliquely, for example by encountering it unexpectedly while in pursuit of something completely unrelated, or by some experience or anecdote that I happen to run across. Rarely have I found another's arguments persuasive enough to convince me of anything important which I did not already believe, though I suppose they do serve the purpose of 'planting seeds' that flower later. Serendipity, in other words, has been a least as great a part of my adult education as anything I have rationally undertaken, and its direction seems to have been due as much to random chance or acts of God as any kind of direction I have tried to give them.

Probably the first important truth I so discovered (at least, that I can recall clearly) was that one absolutely cannot trust modern accounts, even from highly respectable sources, of the writings of ages past. If you want to know what some famous historical figure really had to say you absolutely have to read his writings for yourself. When you do, you will invariably find that the modern 'pop-culture' versions are horrible distortions of the original. Sometimes they are so bad as to be unrecognizable.

In my case, it was Robert Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population, horribly mangled versions of which I had repeatedly encountered in college. Why this book? Because it struck me as silly that people would still be making fun of something a man said two centuries after his death. If he really was such an idiot, why were people still talking about him? Why would anybody remember him among so many others?

As it turns out, his book is primarily an economic argument against contemporary schemes for the collective ownership of property, not a biological thesis on the behavior of populations. He did not predict that the population would explode and then humanity would starve to death, and from what I can tell, he's largely been proven correct with respect to the main points of his argument. But you wouldn't know it if you listened to practically any modern recounting. Almost every mention you will encounter today will twist his arguments in knots and make him out to be either a devil or a clown.

This book is also where I got my first inkling that people of the past, and in particular the eighteenth century, were more 'developed' in many respects than we are today. I had never encountered a comparable modern work at the time, and that really made an impression on me, given how much I had read from present times as compared to the past. I still haven't seen anything by a modern author that compares, with the possible exception of C.S. Lewis, who hardly qualifies as modern.

Repeated encounters of superior work from earlier days had convinced me that somehow the nineteenth century was some sort of Western human pinnacle. However, two recent 'encounters' have convinced me that I need to rethink that idea, as well as quite a few others.