The Doubter's Companion (7 page)

BURKE, EDMUND
   An unfortunate prisoner of the twentieth-century ideological prism, forcibly confined for the last sixty years to the Right, although for the preceding one hundred years he was considered one of the great voices of reform, which constantly sought justice and social balance.

Burke appears to be the victim of a peculiar long-standing cooperation between the intellectuals of Right and Left, in which all thinkers are reduced to a caricature in order to be fitted into a closed dialectic of extremes. For a long time the idealogues were unable to do this to him. His practical ideas of justice bore no relationship to the building-block abstractions of modern ideology.

Burke was not an isolated observer of real events, but an elected member of parliament, the leading strategist of the Whig opposition as well as its most eloquent spokesman. When he spoke, he didn't have the privilege that most modern philosophers take for granted—that they can constantly lay out ideal scenarios as if these are practical options. The complexity of Burke's message comes not from his philosophical line but from the effects of sitting on the parliamentary bench in a senior position dealing with reality on a daily basis. In that sense, Burke's trail resembles Thomas Jefferson's.

By picking out particular political events, almost any political group is able to deform the constant line of his career and claim him as their spiritual ancestor. As for Burke's enemies, they have concentrated on the practicalities of his daily political life in order to suggest that he was a hypocrite on the important philosophical questions.

By the early twentieth century, the reduction of Western political ideas to two reflecting opposites was almost complete. It suddenly seemed easy to ignore his long and passionate struggles for justice in America, India and Ireland so as to concentrate on what interested the ideologues—his “anti-revolutionary” stand during the French crisis that began in 1789.

The French Revolution was and remains the deflowering orgasmic event of the modern Left and Right. To have opposed it was to oppose the idea that a single overwhelming act—revolution—could solve the problems from which society suffered. From the 1790s on, the ideologues had found that Burke's opposition constantly interfered with their matrix. His had been the loudest voice raised in disinterested opposition at the time, and perhaps the only one which carried serious intellectual weight. Over the succeeding decades, as philosophers attempted to set down their opposing interpretations of the event and therefore its long-term implications, the memory of Burke's non-conforming voice seemed to become louder and ever more annoying. At the height of the Western ideological split in the 1930s they simply locked him up as an anti-revolutionary voice on the Right.

That this meant discounting most of what he had said and written was a curious thing to do to a man whose life and considerable public power were based entirely on his words. “The only way in which you can find Edmund Burke guilty of authoritarianism,” Conor Cruise O'Brien has written, “is by choosing to ignore everything he ever said, as a result of arbitrarily deciding that he didn't mean any of it.”
⁶

While Burke saw Americans as victims of the power held and abused by London, and while he continued to lead the movement in England which supported their cause, he also resisted the colonial opposition to the Quebec Act. Americans hated it because it gave citizens' rights to the French-Canadian Catholics. They hated the idea that any power would be given to a rival religion and language.

Subsequent mythology has presented the colonial revolt as a simple affirmation of citizens' rights, but the short list of American demands always included the removal of the rights of another group of citizens to the north. Burke also opposed a move to give the Americans representation in Westminster because it would have meant seating elected slave-owners.

Two decades later, when he was—according to twentieth-century ideologues—acting like a man of the Right by opposing the French Revolution, Burke was also working and voting with a small minority in parliament to abolish the slave trade. Through much of this period he was pursuing an exhausting campaign to see Warren Hastings punished for his violence, autocracy, racism and corruption in India. His efforts won him formal admiration, but also profound enmity in most circles of power for having stood in the way of England's
raison d'état
. London wanted control of India by whatever means. Burke disturbed a façade of respectable action by forcing parliament to deal with India and the Indians as a real place and real people.

The theme that ran through each of these Burkian interventions was his opposition to the abuse of power, particularly dressed up as an intellectual abstraction, and his belief that some sort of public equilibrium was possible. He did not propose as an alternative either unlimited individual right or the religion of the market-place.

The
NEO-CONSERVATIVEs'
claim that Burke is their inspiration can be dealt with by reading a few of his words while thinking of their market and social Darwinism:

Freedom is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of the Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint… This kind of Liberty is indeed but another name for Justice…but whenever a separation is made between Liberty and Justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe.
⁷

Most of those who today claim to be his spiritual descendants are precisely the sort of people he spent his whole life fighting. If he could be brought back to life to meet with his current disciples, the probability is that he would refuse to sit down in the same room with them.

Burke's arguments—his definitions of ethics and values—remain central to the events that have shaped our struggles over communism, capitalism, justice, nationalism, colonialism and religious freedom. If, as many believe, the standard arguments used in our society have come to an impasse, then the explanation probably lies not in recent events but in an intellectual wrong turn taken some time ago. The campaign to misrepresent a non-ideological thinker like Burke is among the best evidence we have of that wrong turn. See:
DIRECT DEMOCRACY
and
ELECTORS OF BRISTOL.

BUSINESS CONFERENCES
Aside from being a waste of the shareholders' money, these gatherings of executives can pose serious economic threats.

Conferences have a theme, official or unofficial. There will be a topic or a new method or a new market which will dominate all talk. The conference-goers can then return home enthusiastic about the latest Asian opportunity or production cost-saving process or diet book. This shared enthusiasm justifies the conference. It rarely has much to do with economic reality, common sense or particular interests. Conferences create business fashions and carry whole industries off in odd and often counter-productive directions.

The higher the quality of these gatherings—those sponsored by business newspapers or business schools, for example—the more dangerous they are. National and international gatherings which do not have a concrete purpose are the most dangerous because they are desperately solution-oriented. Important people gather to discuss the state of the world and of their industry and the relationship between the two. The participants' status as powerful people—that is, their egos—requires that progress be demonstrated. A theme or an attitude, no matter how unfocused, must emerge in order to prevent doubt setting in while they are all locked together in meaningful meetings.

The annual gathering of business and political leaders at
DAVOS
in Switzerland has the highest profile and the least purpose. It is the most susceptible to a fashionable idea which can then reverberate around the world and give credence to the sense of importance felt by the participants about themselves. See also:
ASPEN INSTITUTE.

BUSINESS SCHOOLS
Acting schools which train experts in abstract management methods to pretend they are capitalists.

The graduates of these institutions have dominated Western business leadership for the last quarter-century. This corresponds exactly with a severe economic crisis in the West, which has included runaway inflation, endemic unemployment, almost no real growth, record levels of bankruptcy, and a collapse in industrial production. Manufacturing, the sector which they have been trained to manage, has suffered more than any other.

This raises two questions:

1.  Is there any indication—practical, statistical, philosophical or financial—that training future business leaders in specialized management schools has benefited business or the economy?

2.  Has this new élite—approximately a quarter of the university population
⁸
—been able to communicate to society any convincing program for ending the crisis?

Not surprisingly, an education which above all teaches the management of structures is impervious to failure. Those within the structure continue to define the economy's needs in their own terms and so seek out successive new generations of business school graduates.

In 1993 the Harvard Business School reacted to growing criticism of its methods by announcing a new curriculum. In the future students would “focus less on specific disciplines and more on combining skills to solve problems.”
⁹
But it is precisely their obsession with problem-solving that is the heart of the problem. To organize the training of business leaders from the point of view of the corporate executive is rather like training athletes to compete from the point of view of the team's office manager.

The outside observer might conclude dispassionately that these schools should be shut down or their methodology revolutionized. The graduate will argue, like the World War I staff officer, that failure could be turned into success if only there were more of his own kind in positions of power. Just one more wave of bodies heaved out of the trenches for a charge and the war will be won. See:
MANAGER.

C

CALM
   A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats. It is used principally to
CONTROL
people who are dissatisfied with the way those in authority are doing their jobs. When individuals show annoyance, the person in power or with privileged information or expertise will make them feel they are not calm enough to deal with the situation rationally. A lack of calm suggests a lack of courage, intelligence or professionalism.

Calm was the quality most admired by World War I generals in themselves and in their troops. Since then, calm incompetence has risen to become a quality of high professionalism. A loss of calm in a catastrophe is seen to be worse than cowardly; it indicates a lack of breeding as well as inappropriate amateurism. Outsiders are amateurs.

The cliché of calm as a virtue was captured in Rudyard Kipling's “If you can keep your head when all about you…” But Kipling was far too smart to mean that people should be victims of incompetence or mulishly stubborn or blindly loyal to either their professions or their class. He was talking about deft, razor-sharp coolness; a fast, flexible mind capable of admitting error and adjusting to circumstance; a talent for reaction to crisis with white-heat action or invisible subtlety.

The Captain of the
Titanic
was no doubt pleased that his male passengers in first class remained calm as they waited to drown. Had they been less controlled, they might have found some small satisfaction in passing their time by throwing him overboard. See:
PANIC.

CANADA

1. So complicated that nobody knows how it works, which causes Canadian social scientists to talk about it all the time, which causes foreigners to say it's boring because nothing ever happens.

2. The most decentralized country in existence, which causes Canadians to complain constantly about the power of the central government.

3. Administered under the third oldest constitution in the world, which causes Canadians to insist that it has never worked and must be changed.

4. The only major country in which the two leading western cultures have managed to live peacefully together for several centuries, causing Canadians to insist that they cannot live together.

5. Burdened by the laziest élite of any developed nation; people who have made their fortunes by selling off the country's resources and by working for more energetic foreigners. They are most comfortable on their knees, admiring those from larger countries who have purchased them.

6. A country where 95 per cent of the land is north of the major cities, which causes its urban inhabitants to treat their hinterland as an embarrassing and backward region, while pretending that they themselves are situated hundreds of miles to the south, somewhere between New York and
FLORIDA.

CANNIBALISM
   A few years ago over dinner in St. Tropez, a retired colonial doctor in his nineties began recounting his experiences with cannibals in the Cameroons. He had been twenty-one. We were up on a terrace looking across the great bay with the lights of other towns ringing the shore.

His account turned entirely on the administrative problems which the phenomenon produced. Was it a crime? By whose law? Who was to be punished? A whole village would have consumed the body. Were they therefore, in European terms, accomplices to the murder? This was his first colonial job and he had been left as the sole civil authority over hundreds of square miles. In this district the villages were isolated from one another.

I eventually interrupted to ask what seemed to me a key question. How did they cook their humans? The doctor stared at me as if he didn't understand.

“Grilled or boiled?” I asked again.

With an energetic enunciation of contempt—the sort of energy which was common in language before electronics cooled it—he replied, “Boiled of course! Boiled!”