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Burke is famous for his belief in gradual change....I’m
sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow.
Society has structural problems, but they have to be reformed by working
with existing materials, not sweeping them away in a vain hope for instant
transformation.
Edmund Burke on the East India Company,
a "map of misgovernment" ruling "a territory larger than any
European dominion, Russia and Turkey excepted," a territory in which
"there is not a man who eats a mouthful of rice but by permission of
the East India Company":
It is fixed beyond all power of reformation...this body,
being totally perverted from the purposes of its institution, is utterly
incorrigible; and because they are incorrigible, both in conduct and
constitution, power ought to be taken out of their hands; just on the same
principles on which have been made all the just changes and revolutions of
government that have taken place since the beginning of the world...If the
undone people of India see their old oppressors in confirmed power, even by
the reformation, they will expect nothing but what they will certainly feel,
a continuance, or rather an aggravation, of all their former
sufferings...If the Company's government is not only full of abuse, but is
one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies, that probably ever
existed in the world (as I am sure it is) what a cruel mockery would it be
in me, and in those who think like me, to propose this kind of remedy for
this kind of evil!
The other reason I have dwelled so long on Burke is that
though he’s often held up as the source of conservatism, I get the feeling
he’s not often read....Sure, someone will quote a passage here or a phrase
there, but the quotations inevitably have a whiff of cliché about
them—little platoons and so on—emitting that stale blast of familiarity you
sense when you listen to someone go on about a text he may or may not have
read during one week in college.
Gail, as you know I have a policy of teaching at colleges I
couldn’t have gotten into, and as a result I find myself teaching at
Yale....I just got out of a class in which we discussed Edmund Burke’s
“Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
God help us all.
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