Ping Pong 27: To Vindicate Us All
How should the French revolution be understood? This deep question is one has perplexed the world since 1789. The opening salvos of the debate were more or less sketched out immediately. At stake were two great theories of both human nature and the role of time within that nature. On the one hand there was the knee-jerk conservative reaction to change exemplified by Burke. On the other, the very subtle and complex answer to that argument advocated by Wollstonecraft in her ‘Vindication of the Rights of Man’. Lying then at the heart of this debate are two complex and highly distinctive takes upon on the present nature of humanity and the debt that that nature owes to a developing series of temporalities. Each dimension will need to be considered in turn in the course of this Rant.
Burke’s attack on the very notion of the French Revolution was initially at least, caught up in the claim that the system of government of France but also Britain was the best possible one given the nature of the humans within that system. Human nature was far from perfect, and therefore the system of government which best controlled human destiny was likewise flawed. But this fact alone did not mean, he suggested, that one should sweep aside a long established system in fire and blood, in the misguided hope that one might produce a better system. The contrary is in fact rather likely to happen, as the flaws in human nature come to the fore, and the system they conspire to create is worse than the one that they sweep aside. This latter consideration was all the more likely as human’s natures tended to grow into their differing roles and responsibilities. The ruling classes therefore, developed the emotions necessary to the highly complex roles of government, while the labouring classes felt quite otherwise. This claim is less vapid than it might sound. Burke’s point is that if one is bought up to govern an estate and govern it well, then that is in the interests of one’s workers as well as oneself, and so the way that one felt about one’s duties to those employees was complex and the product of careful nurturing. One could not expect that anyone (without this upbringing) placed in the same situation of responsibility would have the same set of feelings, and without those feelings, the trials and tribulations of governing responsibly would be far too much for any one individual to handle. Or to put the same argument slightly differently; For Burke the very task of taking on the genuine responsibility of other’s lives as well as one’s own was highly problematic in its nature. One could not expect then that anyone simply and without training (or even breeding) to perform such a role. Their mind might be willing enough to lead, and the purpose good, but if their feelings were incapable of the necessary ‘collective’ pitch then their ability to govern well was doomed.
Writing in her ‘Vindication of the Rights of Man’, Mary Wollstonecraft replies that this argument is simply too damn easy. And is so for two main reasons. On the one hand, rulers by definition will be able to claim that their passions (and affects) are the one appropriate for government, as they are the only one’s currently being occupied in governing. One does not know what the passions of the poor (or the affects they might breed) would be like in governing. They might be different or at least come to be different, and with that difference they might well create a rather different take on exactly what it was to be within a state. Hence Burke’s claim that as only certain systems of passions were appropriate for government and therefore that one should ensure that those capable of these feelings remained in government, was in fact highly tautological. The system of government we had was in fact created by the feelings of the powerful. If one wanted a different system (and Mary Wollstonecraft did) then one must look to other ways of governing and therefore to a different economy of passions (and affects) to support that governance. That is, the old Tory claim to be the ‘natural party of government’, simple asserts as a God given truth just what the radical wants to question – that is the nature of government, and its connection to the ‘natural’.
On the other hand, Wollstonecraft insists that even if one accepts that there is something natural in who governs or at least an inevitability about what that government looks like, it does not follow that there need to be a caste which is peculiarly responsible or even born to perform the task of governance. On the contrary, one could imagine a situation where education plays the same role as breeding. That is, it selects out of the multitude and then trains up, the set of people who best seem able to manage the current system of government. Burke’s argument properly understood, ought not be an argument for caste determinism so much as an appeal to selective and careful education, an education whereby everyone has the chance to govern (if they are fit to do so).
This very basic debate is of course still very much with us. The entire ‘New Labour project’ is based on the platitude that one could use education to ensure an even playing field, where the best (that is the most fit to govern) emerge; an emergence, the theory went, that could be tied to education and not to social background. However this entire endeavour, which was perhaps noble in its aim, was flawed for two reasons. On the one hand it is clear that New Labour was not as committed to the Wollstonecraft project as all that, but rather wanted also to create an unlovely hybrid between her project and Burke’s. Right at the heart of Wollstonecraft, there lay the assumption that people had to be allowed to try and to fail. Failure was not then itself so very bad, and no one should be saved from it, if the cost was to sacrifice success. There was therefore no point in an exam system which awarded an A grade to 25% of the people taking the exam… New Labour therefore wanted to dilute their avowed Wollstonecraftianism with a popularised Burkanity: That is, they diluted an apparent meritocracy with a dimension that ensured that nearly everyone (and not just the most able) succeeded, in the same way that the Burke system ensured that the rulers (and their heirs) always succeeded (at the expense of everyone else). They created therefore a system that ensured everyone, not just the able or even the wealthy, triumphed in something, or at least if they did not, it became a political problem, and not merely a necessary product of a selective system.
The second flaw is far more critical to the entire project, and returns the argument once more to the heart of the Burke / Wollstonecraft debate. Wollstonecraft's criticism of Burke rested in part on the idea that the system which he eulogized, was defined by the governing class and operated for their own good and according to their own feelings. It was not therefore a system that anyone was in fact free to join. And not because others might not make a better system, but rather because the current system conspired, however good others were, to exclude them. Rulers had created a system that favoured the ruling classes, a fact that is felt now and much as then. However unlike the vapid phoney ‘caste-war’ of New Labour (a war which every one of their actions actively undermines in any case) Burke and Wollstonecraft take this debate very seriously. For both of them, the issue was how society became a system in which a group of people run the entire show, and what one might then do about that fact.
This is then the point that the issue of time come in. For Burke the key was history. Humanity he claimed, naturally finds it rather hard to cooperate. Feelings tend to get in the way of the best endeavours, and the deep problem of society was always one of how to manage the complex world of feelings that humanity enjoys. These feelings are then for him sacrosanct, unchanging and utterly unchallengeable. Indeed feelings, and their indulgence, are the important ingredients within a human life, and therefore they must be not just encouraged but also indulged at every opportunity. The problem is then to develop a system which can both indulge but also manage this welter of human feelings, feelings that are perhaps the true ‘citizens’ of any estate.
The only mechanism capable for performing this complex task of balancing up whilst indulging, Burke suggests, is human history. The past here has a double role. On the one hand, the current system of government was one that emerged from the past. It was therefore that system which gradually emerged as humans learnt to balance their feelings one against the other, and in the context of differing circumstances and cultures. Each country will then have developed across time its own system for managing its true citizen (that is human feelings). This system is not then to be lightly thrown aside or rejected, as any other system would necessarily lack the long history of that perfected (or at least developed) current system of government. Thence the French might simply be condemned to their system of absolute monarchy by their long history, and be so in spite of the fact that for Burke, a preferable system existed across the channel in Britain. History could never be simply thrown aside, as if it was, worse things might always follow, and so if it fated certain peoples to success and others to failure, then so be it. One’s task as a human was simply to manage the world which one found oneself in, and not attempt to cloud compel another to appear.
On the other hand, the past mattered because it allowed a focus for communal feelings and to an expression of collective (and unchanging) identity. Adulation of the monarchy allowed certain human feelings to be expressed, feelings that linked any and everyone to their political system through their feelings about the past, and the sentiments that those feelings established. The fact that these feelings were based on a romanticism of the nature of that past mattered not at all, when set against the advantages of expression and collectivity which those feelings created in the minds that enjoyed them. Thence the problem of how one bred a race to feel together, and so work as a society, was for Burke a problem which could only be answered through an appeal to history, an appeal which any amount of reason or enlightenment just could not synthesize.
Wollstonecraft answers this line of argument by the very nature of human feelings. Feelings are not valuable because they are irreducible truths in themselves (and so are the only true citizens of a state) but rather because they inspire humanity to act in ways that initially cannot be reconciled with reason or established practice, and yet might, when followed, produce a system which is superior to the one that proceeded it, and which accords to a higher or better reason. Wollstonecraft thereby creates a reply not just to Burke but also to Kant. For Kant, morality has always been tied to universalizabilty and therefore to eternal verities established in reason. Wollstonecraft’s retort is that that might be very well, if nothing ever changed. But the very essence of change is that an anomaly that cannot be reconciled with what simply is, emerges. One has then at such times to act not just in the face of accepted human practice but also in a way that could not (yet) be universalized. One needs to experiment. As it is only through experimentation (which is never as yet universalizable) that something new emerges. The importance then of feelings is that they encourage and inspire humanity towards just such mechanisms for experimentation.
The Modern equivalent is no doubt found in the problem of how one understands what is in fact at issue in the debate about how humanity should respond to climate change. And there are two clear approaches which are at times suggested. The one approach is motivated by the Burke-Kant concern for universalizabilty. It will therefore endeavour to establish a common currency (carbon trading) by which humanity can coordinate their actions and off set harming the world with a notional helping of it. The problem with such a method is of course the very requirement that the system be universalizable itself, precludes the kinds of systems that could be explored. One sacrifices genuine experimentation to the possibility that other systems might emerge, in dealing exclusively with the politics of the Now. The other approach is then to encourage anomalies, and non-universalizable experiments, in the hope that it is these experiments that might blast their way into a new and rather distinct reality. The problem is of course, that one invariably confuses these two very different approaches. One attempts then to judge the experiment by a universal criterion, or to claim that the universal mechanisms will lead to free experiment; rather simply accepting that the two are different, and that each has their role to play.
Wollstonecraft wants then to allow for experiment in the face of tradition, and sees all revolutions in terms of a great experiment. They might fail, they might succeed, but either way the experiment must be made, as without it humanity could never develop at all. Feelings, that is hunches, matter because of their very problematic status. This status as such, must not be simply indulged or turned into the perfect citizens of a world rooted in romanticism, but rather must be seen for what they are, the driving force for eventual change. By carefully (and Wollstonecraft does mean carefully) following one’s feelings one might feel oneself into a new world. This other world is one that reason alone could never create or even forecast, and yet will be one that once feelings have lead the mind to, that reason will understand and welcome with an open heart. The corollary of Wollstonecraft’s plea for the right of experimentation is that humanity finds a way to allow, but also understand failure. Failure by itself need not be bad, (as humans are born to frequent failure). One might suspect that this belief in the power and even the virtue of failure was the natural preserve of an eighteenth century woman, who lived within a system that more or less assured that any and everything she did was (or at least was treated as) a failure. Women were then used to failure and used to finding value in it, and through it. That is they were more used (than men were) to experimentation with feelings and their effects. Be that as it may, it was certainly the case that possibly the greatest handbooks about how to understand and move beyond failure were written by an eighteenth (or early nineteenth) century woman. That woman being Jane Austen, and it is to her that the next of these Rants will turn.
