Archive for April 2012
On the Origins and Causes of the French Revolution
Although the financial crisis of the ancien regime was the immediate spark that set off the French Revolution, which broader factors within France contributed to the Revolution?
Prior to the evolution of the Estates-General into the National Assembly on the 17th of June, 1789 and the taking of the Tennis Court Oath three days later, the state of France had been lumbering along in its burdensome way for generations. With French involvement in the American War of Independence pushing the intolerable and unsustainable financial administration of the country beyond breaking point, and the privileged orders anxious to maintain their status quo, it created the catalyst for the wealthy, professional and ambitious representatives of the 3rd Estate to take up and claim political change and reform as their sacred and inviolable right.
This essay seeks to explore how other factors, in addition to the immediate bankruptcy of the monarchy, were to contribute to the causes of the French Revolution. It shall examine how factors such as the Enlightenment, although played down by many historians, provided the spirit and language of a newly politicised class, and how the manifest of this spirit in 1789 provided the recognition, justification and impetus for those feeling the more material pinch of the ancien regime to act, in the taking of the Bastille on the 14th of July, 1789. It shall explore how the consistently blocked attempts at financial and administrative reform which could perhaps have satisfied most of the fairly moderate aims that found themselves presented in the cahiers de doleances. How these ‘cahiers’ in their turn allowed political thought to become a popular interest, but as McPhee points out, it is necessary to remember that “people were being consulted about reform proposals, not about whether they wanted a revolution.” [1]
With this in mind, it is important to look at how the ideas of the Enlightenment are both the product of their age – following industrialisation especially, but also advancements in science, and the relaxation of the influence of the church amongst thought and expression – and the expression of hope for a new age.
In his book Will and Circumstance, Norman Hampson looks at the writings of men like Marat, Robespierre and Brissot in the years preceding the Revolution and how they were influenced by the writers of the Enlightenment. He asserts that Montesquieu and Rousseau “were quoted, paraphrased and misunderstood by everyone who wrote about politics.”[2] These two men were to form the language and ideas that the men of the Revolution would take up and champion during the years of political change, reform and terror that followed the forming of the National Assembly in 1789. Ideas of the separation of judicial, legislative and executive powers and governments respecting the much confused concept of the ‘general will’ of the population became intermingled with the notion of the government playing an active role in the moral regeneration of its people.
Although these two positions seem at odds with one another, they were both drawn upon regularly to form a common and fairly moderate political ideology aimed at “the preservation of the natural and inalienable rights of man; …liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.”[3] These ideas had been written and debated upon for decades preceding the French Revolution, and while their direct role in the events of June and July 1789 is demonstrably limited, their contribution to the emerging ideologies of the following years is almost total. As Duncan Townson argues, the philosophes were not revolutionary nor even opposed to the ancien regime itself, but that it was “only when the ancien regime had collapsed and new institutions had to be constructed did the ideas of the Enlightenment produce a revolutionary ideology.”[4]
Considering this view, the question to be asked is what constituted the collapse of the ancien regime. It could be argued that it was with the fall of the Bastille on the 14th of July 1789 that the monarchy failed, however its role beyond this date is prominent but ineffectual, with the power of veto still legally available to Louis in late 1791, and also a remaining willingness to retain him as head of state.
Whatever the clear sign that power had changed hands, it remains that it was the calling for the meeting of the Estates-General in 1788 that began the events leading to revolution. What led to the calls for this group to meet again for the first time in over 150 years were the constant power struggles that were occurring between the King’s financial ministers like Necker, Calonne and Brienne, and the Paris Parlement and later the Assembly of Notables. These men saw that extensive changes needed to be made in order for the French economy to survive, whereas the Notables and Parlement saw the proposals as a danger to their own privileges and to the social order itself. Townson identifies the fact that Montesquieu saw the parlements, dominated by the nobility, as playing an intermediary role between King and subjects, preventing despotism of Louis and his ministers,[5] but it is precisely this role that was to block the reforms that may have prevented, or at least delayed the Revolution. As Albert Soboul saw it: “the aristocracy had undertaken the struggle against absolutism in order to recover its political dominance and preserve its outworn social privileges.”[6]
Following the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who had been Controller-General of finance and responsible for initiating many reforms such as a central treasury and the issuing of the statement of royal finances, the Compte Rendu in the late 1770s and early 1780s, one of the more prominent reforming ministers of the 1780’s was Calonne. When no longer able to secure loans to keep the French economy from collapsing after the American War of Independence, Calonne also found fiscal reform to be inevitable. In seeking to reform the tax system he came into conflict with members of the clergy and nobility. While these orders could see that reform was indeed necessary, and were willing to make concessions, they were unwilling to tolerate any changes that would affect their social position.
As Georges Lefebvre saw it, “by threatening the tax privileges, it [the reforms] aimed a blow at the social structure of the Old Regime.”[7] In an effort to bypass the opposition he expected from the Paris Parlement, and unwilling to trust in support from the King, Calonne arranged for an Assembly of Notables to consider his proposals. They met in the first half of 1787, and like the Paris Parlement who adopted a similar position, claimed that only an assembly with representatives from all three estates could decide upon questions of tax reform. Thus with the calling of the Estates-General and the cahiers de doleances was the way set out for the rising middle classes to be able to dominate the political debate that had previously been monopolised by the king’s ministers and the parlements, or in effect, the nobility.
The Estates-General convened on the 3rd of May 1789, with changes having been made to allow for double representation for the Third Estate, so that they more or less equaled the number of deputies of the first two orders. It was assumed by the Third Estate deputies that voting would now be by head, and not as had previously been the case, by order, where each estate decided upon an issue and then cast one vote. It was thought that this would effectively negate the gesture of doubling the 3rd Estate. What this effectively did was to put the first two orders at odds with the third, as observed by Mallet du Pan, “Public debate has assumed a different character. King, despotism and constitution have become only secondary questions. Now it is war between the Third Estate and the other two orders.”[8]
The men of the Third Estate elected to the Estates-General were the rising professional and mercantile classes. Doctors and lawyers as well as bankers and merchants. They were literate in legal matters and had experience in financial administration. They were well versed in the writings of Rousseau and Montesquieu and interested in furthering their own aims and positions, which previously they had to do under the ancien regime by aspiring to noble office. Now they were presented with the opportunity to achieve the bourgeois aims that had arisen out of years of the slow move towards the industrialisation of the French economy, whilst also improving the lot of their fellow countrymen. It was this class of men who had learned the ideas for revolution, had been given the opportunity by the feuding ministers and nobles, and who possessed the financial means and independence to take part.
It could be said that the Revolution took almost everyone by surprise, although many had called for it, they had not necessarily envisaged it as it was to play out over the next five years. While many motives at work were purely for financial reform, the revolutionaries had been won over by the hyperbole of the Enlightenment writers. In this way the moral aspirations and political ideologies of writers like Rousseau and Montesquieu were to find themselves expressed in the reforms of the new governments, securing their contribution to the Revolution.
In terms of setting off the events of 1789, the financial reforms and counter-reforms over much of the 1780’s created an almost stalemate situation where stalling tactics led to the involvement of the new political breed, the representatives of the Third Estate who were to become the driving force behind the Revolution. In this way it was not just the bankruptcy of 1788 that sparked revolution, but financial mismanagement from the mid 1770s and earlier.
If it were the bourgeoisie who made the Revolution, the perspective that then follows is that the industrial revolution which made them, combined with the Enlightenment which shaped their ideas and thoughts, became the sufficient wedge to drive them between the administration of the Monarchy and the nobility at a time when both were weakened by their division from the other.
Bibliography:
Declaration of the Rights of Man
Hampson, Norman., Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.
Lefebvre, Georges., The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962.
McPhee, Peter., The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Soboul, Albert ., A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977.
Townson, Duncan., France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.
[1] Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789-1799, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 45.
[2] Norman Hampson, Will & Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the French Revolution, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, p. viii.
[3] Declaration of the Rights of Man.
[4] Duncan Townson, France in Revolution, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1990, p. 12
[5] Ibid., p. 11.
[6] Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977, p. 14.
[7] Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1962, p. 22.
[8] Mallet du Pan in Townson, p. 26.
Article Review: Martin Wolf – ‘The Market Crosses Borders’
‘The Market Crosses Borders’ – Martin Wolf, from Why Globalization Works.
The excerpt titled ‘The Market Crosses Borders’ from Martin Wolf’s 2004 book Why Globalization Works focuses primarily upon the conflict between the ability and desire of markets to cross territorial borders; and the role states and governments play in regulating the movement of goods, services, labour and capital across these borders. Wolf discusses this conflict with reference to the following key factors of global economic integration; trade, capital and labour, before considering the further implications of geography and policy.
Wolf is a strong proponent of globalisation and economic liberalization. His intellectual origins – and the economic principle of comparative advantage which permeates this work – are heralded with an opening quote taken from Adam Smith’s …the Wealth of Nations. In this extract, Wolf expounds the thesis that ‘conflict between the natural tendency of markets to cross borders and the need for the states that define those borders to support markets is at the heart of all the challenges created by a global economy.’[1]
Revealingly, the recognition of this fundamental challenge comes in the introduction to this passage, wherein Wolf subtly assembles a disparaging view of the role of states in a global economy.
Wolf does this by explaining his own role in the global division of labour, and his own experience of markets crossing borders, largely in the form of consumer items available to him that are made elsewhere. The positive view espoused is no doubt informed by his favourable geographical situation, a determinant that Wolf returns to in more detail. He then creates a reasonable sounding implication that the operation of markets is fundamentally good, because those who engage in transactions ‘expect to be made better off’ by them.[2]
It should, however, require no debate that the reality frequently falls short of the expectation, and that these transactions are not engaged upon by equal parties. But at this point, Wolf’s preference is to discuss the inequalities of states, rather than that of other economic actors. Indeed, his emphasis on the statistics put under the heading of a country’s external transactions having little to do with the state itself serves to further sideline for the reader the role of the state in the operation of markets.
Wolf’s subsequent claim that ‘political institutions behave as if the welfare of foreigners counted for far less than those of nationals and residents’[3], when read with his analysis of inequalities in the capacities and efficacy of states domestically and internationally – which, he says, ‘makes for black holes in the world economy’[4] – completes this somewhat biased view. That is, that the opportunities and benefits of cosmopolitan markets are inhibited by states seeking to distort the operation of markets in the favour of its citizens, often at the expense of foreigners.
But although Wolf is certainly in favour of liberalization of markets and of controls imposed at borders, Wolf does not see liberalization as an all-or-nothing pursuit, nor even as an end in itself.[5] Rather, he is in favour of that which facilitates the freeing of movement of the elements of production between different jurisdictions. Herein, using examples of South Korea, Taiwan, Chile and China, Wolf perceives a causal link between economic liberalization, economic growth and democratization, a contention which he cannot resist following with an unsupported reference to western leftists’ admiration for totalitarian China.[6]
This coincides with one of the more contradictory ideas explored in this article. Like Sachs et al.,[7] Wolf sees geography as being the main determinant of poverty, and muses that perhaps the ‘simplest thing we can do to alleviate mass human poverty is to allow people to move freely or their labour services to be traded freely.’[8]
Yet, in light of Wolf’s discussion of the increasing returns compounded by ‘agglomerations of skills,’[9] he does not seem to be seriously advocating an acceleration of the drain of skills from the poorer countries to the rich (which already occurs, as he rightly points out). In any case, this would not be the market crossing borders, but rather people crossing from one labour market to another; a subsumption of the poor into the wealthy societies of the rich.
It is in this area of people and labour that Wolf seems to struggle to find a standpoint as neatly anti-regulation and anti-government as he managed with his sections on trade and capital.[10] But despite his lack of surety, this freeing of labour seems to be the strongest recommendation in Wolf’s conclusion. Thus, while his convictions are well argued, it is the paramount role of people in a world economy on which Wolf finds himself confounded by the fundamental challenge he earlier identified between markets and states.
References:
Sachs, J., Mellinger, A., and Gallup, J., ‘The Geography of Poverty and Wealth’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, pp. 9-13.
Wolf, M., ‘The Market Crosses Borders’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, pp. 401-9.
[1] Martin Wolf, ‘The Market Crosses Borders’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, p. 402.
[2] Ibid., p. 402.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., p. 403.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., p. 404.
[7] J. Sachs, A. Mellinger, and J. Gallup, ‘The Geography of Poverty and Wealth’, in Sharad Chari and Stuart Corbridge (eds.), The Development Reader, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2008, pp. 9-13.
[8] Wade, p. 406.
[9] Ibid., p. 407.
[10] Ibid., pp. 404-6.
The Human-Nature Relationship and the Social and Physical World
How do we reconcile the human-nature relationship to take into account both the social and physical world?
The relationship between nature and humans is such that it lets us arrive at no easy answers when attempting to analyse it. Instead it poses questions, and provides us with opposing viewpoints that attempt to define just exactly what that relationship is. Sociology generally has not given this relationship too much thought, until the 1970s when ‘environmental sociology’ began to emerge as a discipline in its own right.
Sociology, almost by definition is anthropocentric, in that it is the study of human society and solely interested in human relations. Nature and wilderness on the other hand have been seen as something outside of the human experience or realm. We see our world in terms of culture, the distinctive learned aspects of our society, involving both built culture, the material objects we create, and the more intangible examples like language and ceremony and law. Culture is the lens with which we use to interpret our world.
The role of sociology here then is to define perspectives of viewing and perceiving the environment which transcend cultural limitations of understanding. This is necessary because the extent of our culture and society is such that it leaves many individuals feeling dissociated from the natural world.
Following on from this comes interpretations of the nature of ‘wilderness’. Like all constructions, this too is subject to the cultural lens, and so conflict arises when different values and uses are ascribed to the environment. This has been influentially described by Peter Hay as “the ambivalence of the wilderness.”
This ambivalence is represented in sociological perspectives that seek to understand the human interpretation of the natural world. To be highlighted are the ‘mild social-constructionism’ and ‘critical realist’ approaches, as these are both useful, moderate perspectives that acknowledge their own fallibility.
Whatever the definitions or value placed upon wilderness and the environment, the reality that humans are a part of the natural world and require its resources for survival is undeniable. Perhaps the role which environmental sociology needs to play is that which will resolve the complacent construction that resources are endless so that it achieves some practical meaning in terms of changing human patterns of consumption. Here is the need to distinguish between natural capital and natural income, recognizing that the use of one is exploitive, and the other sustainable; in resolving this, perhaps it will finally reconcile the human-nature relationship and divide.
It is not hard to imagine or understand why many people feel dissociated from nature. But it is also a feeling which is hard to define. This dissociation can be attributed to our culture, both materially and immaterially, and its effect of insulating us from the natural world. Our clothing, housing, transport and all other conveniences and comforts all serve to limit the awareness we each have of being a physical organic body existing within an environment that is human independent and indifferent.
Pointed out by Simmons (1993: 66) is an emergent anthropological perspective of the 1960s that “humans were not behaviourally homogenous in the way of many animal species, and that an understanding of the ecological required a knowledge of the social.” What this means is humans can exhibit quite varied cultural practices as a result of their environment, and that a greater knowledge of our social needs is required to understand our ecological relationship; especially when this relationship becomes exploitative.
As societies made the early transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian means of subsistence and economy there arose the basic principles that would underpin the fundamental conflict that now exists between industrial and post-industrial society, where the nature dissociation is greatest, and the environment. The hunter-gatherer society functioned with the aim of meeting the primary needs of its members of food and shelter. Any trading that occurred involved the exchange of goods directly related to the tools needed for clothing, hunting and food preparation. In contrast, the agrarian society required the creation of surplus so that members could be involved in activities not essential to individual society.
Here we see the beginnings of the human-nature dissociation, whereby one individual is not directly involved in meeting their own needs for survival. Borgmann suggests that in the days of hunter-gathering “the nature of realities and the reality of nature were divine. The world was full of divinities” (1995: 31). This understanding is the cultural construct of the time, and is considerably more benign in outcome considering low population density. Simmons highlights the suggestion that the “perceptual selectivity” made possible by low population and life expectancy could “ignore any longer term trends in the environment” (1993: 158). There is a sense that as a society we have inherited this complacency and tendency to ignore environmental problems so long as immediate needs are being met, whereas the difference may now be that management of the natural environment requires an intensely practical approach.
Perhaps somewhere in our psyche we retain an innate feeling of subservience to nature, both through being dependent on a wild landscape for survival, and this same landscape being a source of danger. For the majority of the population, this individual human-nature relationship has passed, and we live in almost completely man-made environments. When Peter Hay wrote of “the ambivalence of the wilderness” he was referring to the mixed and dual nature of the feelings and interpretations that humans hold toward the ‘wilderness’. It is seen as both a place and source of danger, and as a provider.
This has been born out in different ways, with on one hand people’s interaction with the land taking on a spiritual nature, and the opposite, where there is perceived a need to tame and conquer nature, so that it provides what humans need without any nasty surprises. This has resulted in two simplified perspectives on ‘wilderness’. Firstly that it has intrinsic value due to its lack of human interference, and that there is a need to preserve human-free spaces. And secondly, that ‘wilderness’ has no real value, because it serves no primary human needs, and thus has no cultural value or need of protection.
It must be recognised, however, that ‘wilderness’ itself, as an idea, is a cultural construct. It is what a society perceives it to be, thus the ‘ambivalence’. David Graber writes;
wilderness has taken on connotations, and mythology, that specifically reflect latter-twentieth-century values of a distinctive Anglo-American bent. It now functions to provide solitude and counterpoint to technological society in a landscape that is managed to reveal as few traces of the passage of other humans as possible. (1995: 124)
There is a resurgence being experienced in the idea of wilderness and nature having spiritual value. This is perhaps a perhaps an offshoot of idealization of aboriginal societies that are seen to have lived completely harmoniously with their environment. But “unlike the hunters and gatherers who preceded then on the land, moderns who enter wilderness do so not to live on the land, nor to use it, but rather to experience it spiritually” (1995: 124). Graber continues by discussing the general lack of awareness that these visitors have of land use practices of these aboriginal societies that resulted in change to the landscapes through hunting, clearing and agriculture.
There are many academic ways of thinking which seek to explain why humans see nature the way we do and why we interact with the non-human world in certain ways. There are of course many difficulties for doing this, not that least that we each are raised in very different cultures with different values. Simmons explains this as being because humans also inhabit a psychological world. Of our species he writes:
As well as its biophysical surroundings, it has an environment which we understand culturally. Hence, how we act towards the non-human is a consequence of our beliefs both about ourselves and what it is we are acting upon (Simmons 1993: 1).
What this illustrates is the fundamental cultural limitations of completely objective interpretation. From this it is hard to find any sociological point of view that will truly stand the test of time in its definition or understanding of the human-nature relationship because of the continually changing cultural factors which influence our way of seeing the world. Those points of view that seek to unequivocally sum up this relationship will always find themselves at odds with more liberal points of view which are more upfront about their own shortcomings.
To take for example, the extreme social constructionist approach, which sees nature and all reality as a pure social construct, although it does accept cultural differences, is to deny the idea that nature exists in its own right regardless of human interference. In contrast, the mild social constructionist approach recognises the intrinsic value of nature, and also its indifference to human activity. That we exist within it, but that it is by no means dependent upon humans.
The scientific method, careful collection of data and objective analysis of results that are themselves replicable through repeating the progression of the experiment can be seen as the way to achieve the greatest, and purest understanding of things we observe in both the human and non-human world. But there is an approach that sees even this most objective tools of arriving at human understanding as itself subject to the ‘cultural lens’. The critical realist would argue that the very hypotheses set out at the beginning of experiments is subject to our cultural and social values, and also the individual aims and aspirations of the scientist conducting them.
The position that this leaves us with is that the academic interpretation of nature will always be multi-faceted and continuously changing. There is no doubt that human activity has a deep, and more often than not, detrimental effect on the natural world. Even now there is no clear favour towards either the scientific and technical approaches, or the perspectives that wish the environment to assume a more spiritual role.
The economist and essayist E.F. Schumacher writes on the “proper use of land”. Anthropocentrically, this phrase seems to encompass everything to do with the ability of humans to sustain their lives on earth, and by default, the way we interpret and value nature. He accepts that it at first seems to be a question of achieving technical balance, but goes on to say that “the more I think about it the more I realise it is not; it is a highly philosophical subject and we are really deceiving ourselves if we think that it requires a special inventiveness of a technical kind” (Schumacher 1998: 172).
Herewith comes the realisation that the philosophical, the academic and the spiritual must all inform the practical. And that practical approach in our complex society must acknowledge the provision for succeeding generations. Here, to remain on economic terms, is the distinction between ‘natural capital’ and ‘natural income’. These terms acknowledge the reality that we gain subsistence from the natural world. Ideally, humans would live only from ‘natural income’, without exploiting or eroding ‘natural capital’, i.e. use of fossil fuels, unsustainable logging, practices which create air pollution.
It is a return to the “ambivalence of the wilderness,” where the choice may have to be made between the paradigm of human dominion to one of a role of stewardship of the environment. Essentially, a true reconciliation of the human-nature relationship would be one that recognises human dependency upon the natural world, and that, while we can influence and change it, even exploit it, that this really impacts upon the human world as much as it does the natural world.
References:
Simmons, I.G. (1993) Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment. New York: Routledge.
Borgmann, A (1995) The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature. In Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. M. Soule and G. Lease. Washington, D.C: Island Press.
Graber, D (1995) Resolute Biocentrism: The Dilemma of Wilderness in National Parks. In Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. M. Soule and G. Lease. Washington, D.C: Island Press.
Schumacher, E.F. (1998) This I Believe. Devon: Resurgence.
Death and the Afterlife in 20th Century Philosophy
How have 20th century philosophers approached the subject of death and afterlife?
In the minds of most people, death looms as the end of who they are. It is the end of mortal life, but for many, it is also the transition to the afterlife. Life and afterlife as separate experiences of the one being. Twentieth century philosophers and thinkers have generally approached the subjects of death and afterlife by attempting to understand them in relation to mortal life. It perhaps could not be otherwise, as on the face of it, dying is something the living do, and the afterlife is for those who are dead.
The following essay argues that for death to be understood, twentieth century philosophers have needed to consider death’s relationship with life, just as an explanation of darkness might be formulated as the opposite, or absence of light. Neither death, nor life, can be understood divorced from the other. Ways that death has been considered include life and death as a function of power; death as a social reality; the influence of death on individuals; whether life must have any meaning in the face of death; and, death as an end to life and being.
On the other hand, afterlife has been considered in the following ways: the beliefs of the living about those who are dead; eternal life; as a concept beyond human understanding or not worth pursuing; and, why it might be important to believe in an afterlife regardless.
Some of the thinkers and philosophers whose work will be discussed include D.Z. Phillips, Foucault, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, among others.
Michel Foucault approaches the subject of death as a function of power. From the right of the sovereign over life and death to the genocides performed by the modern state. But he argues that the modern state has more interest in holding power over life than it does over death. He writes that
If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.[1]
Foucault envisages the power of death as a form of power over life, in that it has the capacity to end life. But death is not the only power over life; living itself exerts power over life. But true to the theme that both death and life must be mutually considered to achieve an understanding of either, Foucault is able to comprehend modern genocide as an enormity of death through reference to an enormity of life, the modern ‘large-scale population’.
But for Foucault, the decline of death in favour of life as the primary function of power, has cast death into a new social role.
It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domination; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private’.[2]
If modern power is continuing to lose interest in death, then death, according to Foucault, can no longer mark the handing over of sovereignty to a higher power. The lack of pageantry, ceremony and public expression is linked with the modern anxiety about death. [3]
Death has become something to speak about in hushed tones, to avoid saying the ‘wrong’ or ‘insensitive’ thing to those who are bereaved, and many of us have very little personal contact with death. So pronounced is this anxiety, that Martin Heidegger was moved to write “the dying of others is seen often as a social inconvenience, if not a downright tactlessness, from which publicness should be spared.”[4]
Death in this sense is something in which we cannot share, although we know that eventually, we too must face death. It seems that death alone of those most common aspects of life -that of its finishing – is the most estranging. No other can communicate the experience of dying to us, nor shall we be able to impart our own experience, if indeed death is experienced at all. “Death” says Heidegger, “reveals itself as the ownmost nonrelational possibility not to be bypassed.”[5]
Death, that is, belongs to each of us alone in a sense greater than anything else, and it is inevitable. For Heidegger’s Da-sein, death has no before or after, as the life of a being must be understood in terms of its awareness of its own death. He writes
the ending that we have in view when we speak of death, does not signify a being-at-an-end of Da-sein, but rather a being toward the end of this being. Death is a way to be that Da-sein takes over as soon as it is.[6]
Thus from the beginning of consciousness death is an ever present reality. Death can only have a before and after when we consider it in the lives of others, while they lived, and then when life ceased. Jeff Malpas explains Heidegger’s thought on death as being the limit of Da-sein’s possibilities. [7] But not only is death the ultimate limit to all our possible ideas, projects and endeavours, it also represents “that mystery beyond which we cannot think…, but which forces us back to focus on the life that, so long as we are, always lies before us, that always remains in question, that is always demanding of our care.”[8]
In this sense death as a limit not only informs our understanding of our lives, but also is a requisite for this understanding. That is, not only is the fact that we must die relevant to understanding human life, it is essential. But if this is so, why is death evaded and feared? Roy Perrett suggests that the hereafter offers a transformed quality of life which is not easily obtainable in mortal life. “The fear of death is the response to the realization that one’s life does not possess this quality and death will destroy its meaning.”[9]
The search for meaning in both life and death has held constant fascination, but is this meaning obtainable? Schuon argues that,
If the cognitive faculty consists in discerning between the essential and the secondary and if, by way of consequence, it implies the capacity to grasp situations and adapt to them, then he who can grasp the meaning of life and thus of death will be concretely intelligent. This means that the awareness of death ought to determine the quality of life, just as the awareness of eternal values takes precedence over temporal values.[10]
When Schuon states that the ‘awareness’ of death should determine the quality of life, this falls short of the ability to ‘grasp’ the meaning of death. That is, death, like ‘eternal values’, is immutable and greater than that which changes – ‘temporal values’ – or in this case, the way in which we live our mortal lives. There is sympathy here with Heidegger’s view that awareness of death informs our being, but Schuon differs in that not only does the awareness of death inform our being, but that it must. Death, as eternal, must take precedence over life, as temporal.
For Keightley, however, “for someone’s death to be really his death, there must be no continuation of life in any sense, through revival, survival or resurrection.”[11] In this view, death and afterlife are antithetical, as an afterlife could not be reached except through death, but if one lives an afterlife, according to Keightley, then one cannot really be dead. This conception might pose death as an absolute limit to both the temporal and the eternal. But the eternal, by its very nature can have no limit.
Are the eternal and afterlife the same thing? The philosophers and thinkers being considered in this essay have generally approached the concept of afterlife from a practical perspective. As what happens after death is not something any of us can claim to ‘know’ about, D.Z. Phillips argues that those who argue that the dead are simply dead are arguing from belief, rather than the fact of death; “those who speak of the reality of the dead and those who insist the dead are dead share the same language, but take up different perspectives within it.”[12]
Death may be a fact, but Phillips argues that the dead are a reality that do not necessarily rely on an individual’s fantasy or imagination that the dead live on elsewhere. So despite having knowledge of the objective fact of death, even those who wish to assert that there is nothing more to death than this fact are, according to Phillips, confused if they see this as saying less about death than those who say that the “dead are transfigured, glorified, or raised up.”[13]
For Phillips, what people believe about the dead isn’t as important as the fact that people hold beliefs about the dead;
If one asks why people should believe in the reality of the dead, why the dead should be held in awe, reverence or dread, one can only reply that people do react to the dead in this way, that is all.[14]
To Phillips, this belief cannot be explained, but it is fundamental. It is not important how or why people believe in the reality of the dead, it is important that they do. So, just as night and day might not be explained without reference to the sun, a belief in the reality of the dead cannot be explained by merely focusing only on the individual who holds this belief, nor on the circumstances that have informed their belief. That is, to attempt to explain that a person believes in an afterlife in Heaven because they were raised in the Christian faith does not, for Phillips, say anything at all about why people hold beliefs about the dead.
But in this, Phillips finds a position that satisfies Keightley argument on death. He writes
For the believer, his death, like his life, is to be in God. For him, this is the life eternal which death cannot touch; the immortality which finally places the soul beyond the reach of the snares and temptation of this mortal life.[15]
Eternal life, or the afterlife, in this view then, is outside of time, rather than for all time, just as God is outside of time. Keightley is able to assimilate this view of Phillips with his own by arguing that “for Phillips, beliefs about immortality, eternal life, the resurrection, if they are genuine, are expressions of the state of the soul.”[16]
This however, takes us no closer to understanding the idea of the afterlife. Like the earlier discussion on death, philosophers have sought to understand the afterlife by considering its influence on mortal life.
Keightley quotes the following passage from Wittgenstein which highlights the inadequacy of attempting to understand afterlife in itself by considering its influence on mortal life
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.[17]
But what is outside of space and time but God? Does this suggest that Wittgenstein believes that we might be unable to comprehend the ‘riddles’ of both eternal life and the present life? Are space and time as the boundaries of life inexplicable without reference to that which is beyond or outside it, just as darkness can be considered as that which is beyond light?
Heidegger seems to see little utility in considering these particular questions of afterlife while a full understanding of death has not yet been reached. He argues that “we cannot even ask with any methodological assurance about what “is after death” until death is understood in its full ontological essence.”[18] This may be so, but can death be understood in its “full ontological essence”, and if not, is pondering this question just as futile? Perhaps not.
Roy Perrett recognises, like Phillips, the importance of humans holding beliefs about the afterlife, but he does this pessimistically:
Most humans are deprived of the opportunity of realizing their potential. Thus for most the realization of this potential would require some form of continued personal life after death. In denying the reality of an afterlife, humanism is committed to the view that for the vast majority existence is in the end irredeemably tragic.[19]
Human potential in the general sense might be anything within the limits imposed by the horizon of death. But is reaching human potential the equivalent of achieving the utmost that is possible within those limits set by death, or is it a relative measure of achievement? Is human potential the same as the perfectibility of man and thus unattainable?
The twentieth century philosophers and thinkers who have been considered in this essay have almost exclusively attempted to understand both death and the afterlife by relating these ideas to the influence they have on our mortal lives. Some have suggested that the answer to these questions lies outside of the possibilities of human understanding, while others suggest that there may be no answer at all, but that it remains important for people to hold beliefs on these subjects.
It is clear however, that death remains a mystery, and the afterlife even more so; but that without an understanding of both of these, life itself can never be fully comprehended.
Bibliography
Foucault, M., ‘Right of Death and Power Over Life’, in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), London, Penguin Books, 1986.
Heidegger, M., Being and Time, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996.
Keightley, A., Wittgenstein, Grammar and God, London, Epworth Press, 1976.
Malpas, J., Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2006.
Perrett, R.W., ‘Regarding Immortality’, in The Philosophy of Religion Selected Readings, Yeager Hudson (ed.), Mountain View, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, pp. 592-607.
Phillips, D.Z., Religion Without Explanation, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1976.
Schuon, F., Roots of the Human Condition, Bloomington, World Wisdom Books, 1991.
[1] Michel Foucault, ‘Right of Death and Power Over Life’, in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), London, Penguin Books, 1986, p. 260.
[2] Ibid., p. 261.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 235.
[5] Ibid., p. 232.
[6] Ibid., p. 228.
[7] Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2006, p. 101.
[8] Ibid., p. 273.
[9] Roy W. Perrett, ‘Regarding Immortality’, in The Philosophy of Religion Selected Readings, Yeager Hudson (ed.), Mountain View, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 606.
[10] Frithjof Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, Bloomington, World Wisdom Books, 1991, p. 8.
[11] Alan Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar and God, London, Epworth Press, 1976, p. 90.
[12] D.Z., Phillips, Religion Without Explanation, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1976, p. 123.
[13] Ibid., p. 136.
[14] Ibid., pp. 134-5.
[15] Phillips quoted in Keightley, p. 89.
[16] Keightly, pp. 87-8.
[17] Wittgenstein, quoted in Keightley, p. 90.
[18] Heidegger, p. 230.
[19] Perrett, p. 593.
The Enlightenment, The French Revolution, and Edmund Burke
‘Burke was a lifelong student of the Enlightenment who saw in the French Revolution the ultimate threat to those modern, rational, libertarian, enlightened values that he sought to defend.’ Discuss.
The particular course of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution through to the Cold War which spanned almost five decades following the second world war, revived Edmund Burke from his eighteenth-century obscurity. Burke’s most famous work, his ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ offered a conservative moral and political philosophy which leant hope to those who held hopes of preservation – of religion, liberty, morality – in the most destructive century the world had yet known. This hope is able to be found in the writings of Burke because he clearly articulated the threats posed by ideology and revolution; because he was explicit in the values he supported; and staunch in their defense, from whatever threat. The following is an exploration of these three aspects of Edmund Burke.
Burke, unlike Nietzsche, did not suffer the fate of being largely ignored in the times in which he lived, before later being revived by the interest of scholars. Burke lived a public life as parliamentarian and writer, although he much abhorred the possibility of his private life being made public.[1]
On publication, his ‘Reflections’ sold extremely well with several new editions produced within a year of the first. Peter J. Stanlis, one of the most prominent Burkean scholars, believes the true success of the ‘Reflections’ is qualitatively different to that measured only by sales figures;
If we consider only Burke’s immediate practical intention, to warn against French revolutionary principles and to exalt a Christian and Natural Law conception of civil society, the Reflections was the most successful book of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and it was almost totally opposed to the prevailing spirit of the age.[2]
Burke confronted the general optimism which initially greeted the French Revolution in England with stern and dire warnings, delivered eloquently and with a modest wisdom in prose which sought not to dazzle the mind with its cleverness, but to appeal to the moral sense, heart and entrails of its reader.
Frederick Dreyer prefers to downplay this successful image of Burke. He argues, “that Burke condemned the French Revolution should cause no surprise. Eventually most Englishmen of his class would come to condemn it as well.”[3] Burke however, was Irish, which combined with false insinuations he was a catholic, created a tension within his identity as a British Parliamentarian. As for the reference to class, does Dreyer here mean the political ruling-class? If class were a determining and useful referent then perhaps Burke’s being the son of a successful lawyer, and his own experience of upward social mobility would suggest more affinity with the class of professionals that formed the vanguard of the French Revolution.
There was absolutely nothing “eventual” about Burke’s opposition to the Revolution, the quality of which was first articulated in 1756 in his satirical ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’. With “eventually” being the key word, the descent into violence of the Revolution may have been what “eventually” turned much of British opinion. But Burke had foreseen this, and in 1790 his highly successful and immediately influential ‘Reflections’ became the axis – and the dividing ground – upon which this opinion turned.
More usefully, Dreyer argues that much of the ‘Reflections’ is best understood as an attack or response to the Reverend Dr. Richard Price’s ‘Discourse on the Love of Our Country’;
Without Price, Burke would not have started the ‘Reflections’ when he did; without Price the ‘Reflections’ would have turned into a different kind of book. It is not too much to say that unless we keep Price in mind it is impossible to understand fully the logic of Burke’s argument against the French Revolution.[4]
That is, many of the attacks in the ‘Reflections’ ostensibly directed at the French were a reflection of threats to English circumstances.[5] J. G. A. Pocock concurs with Dreyer that the Reverend Dr. Price spurred on Burke to write the ‘Reflections’,[6] however the substance each attributes to this is different. Dreyer for instance, argues the passage on Marie Antoinette only makes sense when read with Price in mind.[7] On the other hand, Pocock sees at the heart of the ‘Reflections’ a question of political economy relating to the seizure of Church lands to use them as security for paper assignats (an action analogous to the spoliation of the monasteries under Henry VIII);
it is not possible to read Burke’s Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it presents this action – and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette – as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries.[8]
This variance in possible readings of the ‘Reflections’ is indicative generally of the unsystematic nature of Burke’s writings. As with the work of Nietzsche, this has seen Burke’s writing interpreted as the needs of different readers arose. And yet it remains, despite any charge of Burke’s writings being unsystematic (spread as they were across pamphlets, books, records of parliamentary speeches, and public and private letters), that his ‘Reflections’ were comprehensive; as Seamus F. Deane notes,
Few authors, important or obscure, managed in the following two decades to raise any objection to the philosophes which had not already been expressed by Burke; he reaped the whole harvest of disagreement, insult, and invective in that one sweeping and memorable attack.[9]
Despite his opposition to the French philosophes, which will be discussed later in more detail, there is little doubt that Edmund Burke indeed was a ‘lifelong student of the Enlightenment’, or that he was consistent in his feelings toward it.[10]
Dreyer argues “Burke can be seen as an eccentric thinker only if we define the Enlightenment in perverse and narrow terms.”[11] Burke was much involved in the thinking, writing and ideas of the age, and although his work can be seen as running counter to the ‘prevailing spirit of the age’, he is still of it. If the age of the Enlightenment were to be characterised only by the primacy of rational and scientific enquiry, then it would be no stretch to think of Burke as a nostalgic eccentric. Conservatism and nostalgia, after all, are no strange bedfellows.
Despite Burke’s devout belief in the ‘great chain of being’, he seemed ill-content with his place in it, not following in his father’s footsteps to the bar, instead pursuing a career of letters and politics. This is not to suggest that this ambiguity is the result of hypocrisy or vanity on Burke’s part. Rather, as Isaac Kramnick puts forward, “the beginning of wisdom in understanding Edmund Burke is… in discerning his basic ambivalence to the two great ideological currents whose confrontation dominated his age.”[12]
While this is good advice to keep in mind, I’m not sure it does sufficient justice to the strength of Burke’s convictions. His first published work ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’ demonstrated the need Burke felt to engage with and respond to the main current of the Enlightenment;
Burke’s satire reveals that even in his early twenties he was increasingly aware that the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment encouraged men to submit to destructive analysis and criticism all the achievements of men throughout history.[13]
The writing of ‘Vindications’ and its being misunderstood as a serious work by Bolingbroke, whom Burke was satirizing, highlighted to Burke the danger of moral and social theories and speculation. At the heart of Burke’s study and feelings on the Enlightenment is the perilous nature of ideas and words;
When men find that something can be said in favor of what… they have thought utterly indefensible, they grow doubtful of their own reason; they are thrown into a sort of pleasing surprise; they run along with the speaker, charmed and captivated to find such a plentiful harvest of reasoning, where all seemed barren and unpromising. This is the fairy land of philosophy… There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober part of truth…[14]
Stanlis is emphatic on this point; Burke “was convinced that words continue to influence people psychologically, even after they have rejected any belief in a historical state of nature.”[15] There can be little doubt that what Burke developed from his study of the Enlightenment was an utter revulsion for the immodest, elaborate, and self-contained historical and intellectual fictions such as ‘the state of nature’ and the abstract ‘rights of man’;
We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born…[16]
For Burke, the present state of British government, Constitution and society represented centuries of achievement. The Enlightenment in large part was represented by irreverent and self-satisfied schemers who would dare risk this for the sake of their untested speculations. It is a result of his study of the Enlightenment then that Burke, according to Jeffrey Hart,
was the first to recognize the deep moral division of the West, which was just then opening up, and which today, across the board, is decisive for our moral, political, and metaphysical opinions: and because Burke, having recognized the division and defined its doctrinal grounds, took sides.[17]
If Edmund Burke did not side with the doctrine that asserted no limits to the application of human reason and claimed universal rights and freedom for men, where then, did his values lie? The answer, of course, is that there were many things which Burke held in high esteem, but the three I wish to focus on are his conception of the ‘Moral Natural Law’, civil society, and government. On the ‘natural law’, my understanding of this in relation to Burke comes largely from the work of Peter J. Stanlis. Burke wrote;
Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform.[18]
God gives man his nature, and although we may not perceive clearly our origins or our end, let alone our purpose, Burke is arguing that we are able to perfectly perceive our ‘moral duties’, our obligation to which is the observance of the ‘natural law’.
Burke understood that there was a fundamental distinction between Natural Law and the philosophes’ natural rights.[19] The leveling zeal of the revolutionaries threatened the natural law, no matter how widely beneficial their egalitarian principles on the surface seemed. For Stanlis, this, rather than Price, or political economy, is the key to Burke’s response to the French Revolution;
To Burke the moral Natural Law was so basic to the ancient inherited social order of Europe that its subversion was enough proof that the revolution was the most extensive project ever launched against all religion, law, property, and real civil order and liberty.[20]
For Burke, because man’s nature was ordained by God, who prescribes his place in the ‘chain of being’, and it is in man’s nature to form society, civil society is then a divine bestowal.[21] Thus the subversion of the moral Natural Law was but one part of the blasphemy of the revolutionaries, in addition to which, Burke understood “that the spirit of the Revolution… was at its roots characterized by a hatred of the very idea of society.”[22]
In imagining a fictitious time where man in a ‘state of nature’ was uncorrupted, freer and supposedly happier than his modern counterpart, due to a lack of social roles and obligation which he must fulfill, the revolutionaries believed they could remove the ‘chains’ of society and free man within it, and without destroying it.
If Burke did imagine a ‘state of nature’, which I am not convinced he did, I imagine it may have been more akin to Hobbes than Rousseau; a ‘war of all against all’. Perhaps more telling than the comment on the ‘state of nature’ in Frank O’Gorman’s assessment is the view of civil society; “for Burke, the state of nature was anarchic and primitive from which civilised social life was a thankful deliverance.”[23] The use of the word ‘deliverance’ is perhaps no accident, through civil society might be achieved the redemption for the ‘fall’ from the biblical ‘state of nature’;
To Burke, man’s relationship to civil society is a moral necessity; it cannot be voluntaristic, for that would exalt will above right reason; nothing could be more false and wicked than the Lockian theory of a voluntary and revocable social contract based upon a hypothetical state of nature.[24]
In that man is a social creature by his ordained nature, and does not choose society but is born into it, he may not choose to forgo society and its rights or obligations. Natural Law, civil society and obligation are inextricably bound with religion. Indeed, Seamus F. Deane argues that;
The belief that the atheist should have no existence in the community because his creed denied the foundations of civil society is one of the most persistent and unshakable of Burke’s convictions.[25]
Thus the separation of church and state pursued by the revolutionaries is to Burke a repudiation of the divine gifts of government, society, and religion. Moreover, it is the interconnection of all these elements, what Rousseau would call ‘chains’, which shelters man and links him with his past and with his species
Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy – all of which radical man would rip off – man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy.[26]
The demystification of institutions removes the awe and respect with which Burke believed they should be viewed. None of these could be perfect for all at any given time, yet they were an inheritance that linked man with his past, and it was their duty to preserve or cautiously reform them as needed for future generations.
Kramnick asserts that “Burke repudiates the fundamental liberal belief that institutions are produced by the willful choice of specific individuals.”[27] Not only would the abolition of social institutions with the view to create new ones in their place not succeed to any specified plan, it would disinherit those yet unborn of the link to their history. Reformers in government, then, should approach with caution, with the preservation of the spirit of their institutions in mind and without false hope or millenarian pretenses; for Burke, “all that wise men ever aim at is to keep things from coming to the worst.”[28]
With more in mind, I believe, than simply preventing things coming to the worst, Burke would actively defend the principles of his convictions and the values of the moral Natural Law wherever he found them to be in danger. These occasions included the attempt to impeach Warren Hastings with regard to the abuses of the East India Company in India, and defense of the British Constitution to the point of sacrificing personal friendships. As a politician, O’Gorman argues, Burke’s
main concern was… to preserve the balanced constitution of the eighteenth century, with the separate spheres of influence apportioned to King, Parliament and People no matter from whatever quarter a threat to it might appear.[29]
The affairs of India, the actions of the East India Company, and the impeachment trial of the Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, were a significant part of the business of Parliament in the 1780s and 1790s. Burke sought to impeach Hastings on the basis of natural law. He argued that no-one had the right to exercise arbitrary power. That the British Parliament enabling Hastings to govern as he saw fit was not a justification for the exercise of arbitrary power, nor was the excuse of arbitrary power being a general and accepted mode of government in Asia.
Stanlis demonstrates that Burke’s attacks against Hastings’s justifications of the exercise of arbitrary power “derives wholly from his ardent faith in Natural Law”.[30] Burke is seeking to defend not only the rights of the people of India as he saw them under the Natural Law, but also to defend against the introduction of “‘Eastern’ principles into England.”[31]
Against what was essentially the cultural relativist position of Hastings, Burke invoked something he believed to be universal;
Mr. Hastings has no refuge… let him fly from common law, and the sacred institutions of the country in which he was born; let him fly from acts of parliament… still the Mohammedan law condemns him… Let him fly where he will… law, thank God, meets him everywhere – arbitrary power cannot secure him against law; and I would as soon have him tried on the Koran, or any other eastern code of laws, as on the common law of this kingdom.[32]
Yet what Burke considered to be universal was inimical to the definition supplied by the philosophes. So deep ran the convictions that Burke held regarding the French Revolution, that it had the effect of separating Burke both politically and personally from many of his allies and friends who sympathized with it, notably Charles James Fox and Sir Philip Francis. Burke’s conception of his duty to the British Constitution apparently left him with no other option.[33] His words in Parliament with regard to the break with Fox are included by Jeffrey Hart, and are worth repeating here for the sense they give of Burke;
It is indiscreet at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies or give friends occasion to desert me. Yet firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution places me in such a dilemma; I am ready to risk it, and with my last words exclaim, ‘Fly from the French Constitution’… yes, there is a loss of friends. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.[34]
Far from viewing events in France as a change of government, Burke observed the specter of rational revolution across the channel beginning to haunt the chambers of the British parliament. For Burke, the French Revolution wasn’t merely a turn of events he did not approve of, it was the culmination of decades of the sort of Enlightenment philosophy that he abhorred. The remaking of a constitution upon abstract universal rights and formalities invented through speculation would not be worth the paper it was printed upon. Rather, “Burke insisted upon the concrete realization of man’s natural rights in civil society, through the incorporation of basic moral principles in constitutional law.”[35]
An ailing constitution was neither the grounds for experimental surgery nor drastic doctrinal measures. In the following famous passage from his ‘Reflections’, Burke’s rhetoric paints a macabre and graphic picture of those that would tamper irreverently with the institutions of state;
he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion… he should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father’s life.[36]
To Burke, who spent his entire adult life in opposition to the main intellectual current of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution was the culmination of that movement. In this he saw the Revolution as a continuity of the Enlightenment, rather than an accidental misuse of its principles. Deane argues that in Burke’s view, the philosophes “helped to cause the Revolution. Burke, then, saw the French Enlightenment in terms of the Revolution.”[37] But we know that this is simply not true. Burke had strong feelings toward the Enlightenment thinkers which he expressed decades before revolution.
Burke knew that the threat to Europe didn’t originate in the French Revolution; it was born in the philosophy of sensibility which inspired and found full expression in the revolution. The combining of Cartesian reason with individualism and a conscience based on the feeling of the individual. For Stanlis, Burke’s condemnation of sensibility is the reverse side of the coin which put Natural Law at the heart of his response to the Revolution;
sensibility permeated an epicurean philosophy of pleasure, power, and will with moral feeling; it corrupted people by teaching them to justify evil means in practice for noble ends in theory, to act without restraint or a conscious reference to any legal precedents or moral code.[38]
In this is evidence of an idea that Burke would have found preposterous. The idea that the creation of a better future justified whatever speculative methods the rational politician could devise. As we have seen, Burke did not believe it possible for men to construct institutions according to their will, thus justifying harm to those living for an undeliverable benefit to those yet to be born was a frightful proposition which he saw in naked terms; “justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end.”[39]
Peter Stanlis saw that it was on this reasoning that Burke was able to predict the Terror. The Terror was murder done in the name of public good in the service of abstract rights, and “the ethical norms common to man in civil society would be extinguished in favor of emotional appeals to political slogans favoring the general welfare.”[40]
The attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the principles of government, with the view that through this reason might be discovered the perfect system that would be universal in its application, suitable and true for all men at all times, for Burke is an assault upon society and the divine. Deane remarks it unsurprising that Burke “should connect the abstract, universal theory of the philosophes with atheism” and that to declare this universality “is to assert human despotism against the divine plenitude.”[41]
Indeed, this despotism would also be extended over people in society in the exercise of arbitrary power in the name of abstract speculation and millenarian zeal, with no reference to the moral Natural Law. Burke detested arbitrary power, it is precisely this he sought to defend against in the impeachment of Hastings and his criticisms of Britain’s treatment of the American colonies. His support of the Americans and subsequent condemnation of the French confused many observers, but like his willingness to defend the balance of the British Constitution against the King, Parliament and the people as the need arose, so too would he employ what seemed conflicting intellectual defenses against the varied dangers of the Enlightenment thinkers; “Burke exalted reason over will when he opposed the excesses of Rousseau, and sentiment over reason when he opposed the extremism of the philosophes.”[42]
Government should be formed on a strong foundation of concrete moral standards, not on any formal division of power or scheme which is guided by theoretical and speculative rights. For Burke, the French Revolution simply provided the evidence of the intellectual sin and hubris of the Enlightenment philosophes. It was a realization of his deepest fear
that speculative abstract rationalism had the power to destroy all social institutions and conventions, all that people had constructed with great care and labor over centuries of building civilization up from crude barbarism to its present degree of perfection.[43]
What right had the philosophes to disinherit future generations of their property in society? What right to, at their fancy, undo the legacy left for them? While the philosophes would justify such actions against the universal freedom which they believed was the right of man, to Burke, this would be a liberty that encroached arbitrarily on others, those yet unborn. Sovereignty placed in the hands and whims of a majority of the people was neither legitimate or just. It was arbitrary power without check, and without deference to a moral code; and Burke would have none of it;
The French Revolution, say they, was the act of the majority of the people; and if the majority of any other people, the people of England for instance, wish to make the same change, they have the same right. Just the same undoubtedly. That is, none at all.[44]
Burke’s opposite conception of freedom and rights, argues Jeffrey Hart, was the essential element in Burke’s reaction to the Revolution; “ for Burke, freedom was a concrete and historical thing, the actual freedoms enjoyed by actual Englishmen: they enjoyed the historic rights of Englishmen.”[45] This is by no means to say that, because Burke regarded his freedom as privilege of being a member of English society, he would thus deny those same freedoms to other societies which had not managed to cultivate their own liberties and freedoms. Burke’s speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings demonstrate this conclusively.
Burke recognised that “to govern is to restrain man.”[46] Man left to his own devices without the bonds of society, the links rather than the ‘chains’, was corruptible and capable of much darkness and evil. Man’s ‘state of nature’ was civil society, and in this he had proved both wicked and good. “The restraints on men,” argued Burke,
as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule: and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.[47]
Man’s place in society was his link to the divine. Although he knew not how this came to be, nor for what purpose, as far as man could perceive what was moral and what was just, such was his duty. So far as man could humbly and venerably influence the institutions of his society, which were the legacy of his ancestors who themselves through civil society were connected to the divine, man’s duty was to infuse these institutions with the moral Natural Law.
Would the opportunity to create the ‘best of all possible worlds’ justify a sacrifice of human suffering to attain it? No; from this the best that could be created is the ‘second-best of all possible worlds’. The ‘best of all possible worlds’ would not require any extension of human suffering to bring it into being. Burke understood this, that although we could imagine something greater, we are restricted by what is possible. Burke believed that we always have the opportunity to work slowly and cautiously by degrees in effecting our reforms; but we do not have the ability to construct a new society from the wreckage of the old. The descent of the French Revolution into terror and violence is no small vindication of the principles of Edmund Burke.
Bibliography
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955.
Deane, Seamus F., ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 295-320.
Dreyer, Frederick, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 239-56.
Hart, Jeffrey, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-74.
Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977.
O’Gorman, Frank, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986.
Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 275-94.
Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991.
[1] Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977, p. 68.
[2] Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991, p. 39.
[3] Frederick Dreyer, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 239.
[4] Dreyer, p. 241.
[5] Ibid., p. 253.
[6] J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 278.
[7] Dreyer, p. 251.
[8] Pocock, p. 278.
[9] Seamus F. Deane, ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 319.
[10] Stanlis, p. 163.
[11] Dreyer, p. 256.
[12] Kramnick, p. 7.
[13] Stanlis, p. 150.
[14] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 148.
[15] Stanlis, p. 167.
[16] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 178.
[17] Jeffrey Hart, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-8.
[18] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 47.
[19] Stanlis, p. 39.
[20] Ibid., p. 49.
[21] Ibid., p. 43.
[22] Hart, p. 262.
[23] Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986, p. 14.
[24] Stanlis, p. 42.
[25] Deane, p. 301.
[26] Kramnick, p. 33.
[27] Ibid., p. 25.
[28] Ibid., p. 22.
[29] O’Gorman, p. 13.
[30] Stanlis, p. 33.
[31] Ibid., p. 34.
[32] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 35.
[33] Hart, p. 259.
[34] Edmund Burke, quoted in Hart, p. 259.
[35] Stanlis, p. 45.
[36] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955, pp. 109-110.
[37] Seamus F. Deane in Hampsher-Monk p316
[38] Stanlis, pp. 186-7.
[39] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 177.
[40] Stanlis, p. 177.
[41] Deane, p. 317.
[42] Ibid., p. 310.
[43] Stanlis, pp. 149-50.
[44] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 93.
[45] Hart, p. 260.
[46] Kramnick, p. 30.
[47] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 67.
From Fallacy to Fable? Reading the Currie Diary against the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend.
The story of the farming life of the Currie family can be placed within two larger narratives of Victorian farming and rural life. The first is the yeoman small independent farmer ideal championed by the land reformers of the 1850s and 1860s. This was not just an agricultural ideal designed to foster a strong rural economy, but also a social and political agenda dedicated to some democratic principles and the opportunity for many to share in land and the status it could bring.
The yeoman ideal was a vision of the new Victorian society that would be created in the ensuing decades. Indeed, we shall see from our reading of the Currie diary that this new class of farmers would be active in creating and maintaining their communities.
But not only was the yeoman ideal a vision of the future, it was also rooted in the past. It was linked to romantic notions of a similar class of English farmers and to political philosophy which argued the moral, social and political benefits of property ownership in land. It was a political reaction to the ‘squattocracy’ and their control of vast tracts of land.
But just as the land reformers cast their eyes backward when creating land policy for the yeoman ideal, so too has Australian history and sentimentalism cast its eyes back to the selectors and created from their experience the pioneering bush legend. The story of the young man with his family carving a farm and prosperity out of the bush with nothing but his labour and an axe. It was pioneers, we are told, who made this country.
This view has been justly criticized in recent decades as simplifying and excluding the complexity of rural Victoria, but there is an underlying current of truth in relation to the resourcefulness, courage and achievement demonstrated by many selectors.
But while there are those who look to this period and to the pioneer for the formation of our national character, the result will be an homogenous European male character. The Currie diary can provide evidence that might simultaneously embrace and confound the pioneer legend.
We can use the Currie diary to test each of these narratives, if not to explode them, then at least to concede their limitations and attempt to colour a richer picture of rural life in the latter half of nineteenth century Victoria.
In this way, we can not only think critically about an historic political issue such as land reform, but also a modern one; one that is tied up with issues of heritage, values and identity.
The following quote from Charles Daley seems particularly pertinent when reading the Currie diary following the relocation of the family to Gippsland. Daley writes,
There was a curiously naïve idea, very prevalent at this time, that the more heavily timbered the country was, the more productive it would be, and so the fledgling pioneers rushed to peg the densest scrub, thus serving themselves a maximum sentence of back-breaking work and unremitting poverty.[1]
The diary shows, that for John Currie, clearing was practically a daily ritual. The notion of heavily timbered land holding the most productive soil is also referred to by Dingle, in that selectors had little else to judge land by other than the vegetation growing upon it.[2] But did the move from Ballan to Lardner bring ‘unremitting poverty’ to the Curries? If so, was this caused specifically by the labour of clearing, or as a result of being further from a large local market for their produce, such as Ballarat had been. The diary can help to answer these questions and test the assumptions prevalent in the historiography.
Daley reserves most of his attention to the nature of work performed by the men. He mentions techniques used for clearing, and the tools and clothing used and worn. He describes a McCubbin-like transition from the selection being little more than a tent in the scrub to shelter the men, to eventually comprising of a log house in a clearing suitable for the arrival of wife and family. But the hauntingly lonely image inspired by Frederick McCubbin’s ‘The Pioneer’ is at odds with the social and community life that even the perhaps somewhat anti-social Anne Currie describes and participates in.
Russel Ward in ‘The Australian Legend’ argues that the pioneers of the bush had a disproportionate influence on the shaping of the Australian mystique.[3] Indeed, can we truthfully assert that a national character and spirit can be defined by a group who were a minority both socially and economically? This disproportionate influence is the link between the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend, and the success or failure of a family like the Curries as documented by their diary is where it can be tested.
Daley accounts for the eventual abandonment of a third of the selected hill country of Gippsland being due to the 320 acre allotments being too large for a single family to manage, and laid out with a regularity that did not allow for variations of terrain and soil quality.[4] This perspective is clearly different to the view that, in other areas of Victoria, 320 acre allotments were much too small for a family to make a successful living from. John Currie selected 110 acres in Gippsland, so the diary might prove able to test Daley’s thesis, however we also know that John spent much time working James Currie’s selection.
In ‘The Tyranny of Distance’, Geoffrey Blainey continues this theme of small acreages and high land prices, when compared with North America
Dear land cursed farmers. One of Australia’s tragedies in the second half of the nineteenth century was the failure of tens of thousands of farmers and their families to make a living from small farms after slaving for years.[5]
But even if the land prices made Australia unattractive for new migrants, for John Currie the arduous move to Gippsland was in search of better quality land. The squatters had used many nefarious means to preserve their runs, or cherry-pick the best land on it. The heavily forested land in Gippsland was of little interest to pastoralists.
Michael Cannon in ‘Life in the Country’ argues
Much of the deplorable state of political morality in the eastern colonies during the remainder of the century, and the evil flowering of the urban land boom, had their origin in the corruption encouraged by evasion of the land acts.[6]
He is referring to the corruption of the squatters and elements of the Lands Department and the surveyors. It is cautionary to note that the legislation designed to create a conservative, democratic and respectable rural class initially had the opposite effect of encouraging corrupt behaviour and consolidating the power of the squatters.
John McQuilton in his chapter on selection from ‘The Kelly Outbreak’ also links this yeoman ideal with the ideals of the Chartist movement. Land reform undertaken on these principles could allow the ‘democratic’ diggers to take up land and create a rural class to rival the squatters. But he describes this as an initial failure, as the established squatters were able to make conniving and illegal use of their resources as a means to select the best land. This paints a corrupt image of the squatters who otherwise have been considered to embody part of the pioneering legend.[7]
For Cannon, the yeoman selector as a new class was doomed to fail;
The old ideal of a huge self-sufficient ‘yeoman’ population covering the nation always was a fallacy under Australian conditions, and led to wide-spread unnecessary hardship for as long as the dream persisted.[8]
Selectors often required large families to succeed on their small allotments, indeed a large family was sometimes seen as a substitute for sufficient capital. But the children of large families raised on selections had little choice but to eventually leave to find employment or new land. A 320 acre selection could not be divided between several children with any hope of it supporting all their families.
John Hirst argues that the pioneer legend is an empty myth, which although democratic in its pretense is fundamentally conservative, and does little to reveal the complex nature of social and economic life in rural Victoria in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [9] We can read the Currie diary with this criticism in mind, and use it to highlight the complexities of life as experienced by the Currie family.
For Dingle as well as Hirst, the yeoman farmer ideal was also a conservative notion that romanticized a particular class of farmers in English history that had been threatened by the industrial revolution. They were seen as the backbone of a rural and pre-capitalist England that was quickly disappearing.
Dingle concurs with McQuilton that the initial experience of the Land Acts and selection was one of failure. The land reformers and many of the selectors were inexperienced when it came to farming in Victorian conditions, and, Dingle argues, the attempt to plant families on the land was both daring and foolhardy, but would eventually succeed.[10] But this success would always be limited by the number of viable small farms and the limit to how many families they could support.
It is worth considering then the difference between viewing the selectors as a pioneering class that created or served as the basis for the pioneer legend, and considering them as a created class that was based upon a social idea that was at once both radical and conservative.
When looking at the wider history of rural settlement in Victoria, observing the changing trend from pastoralism to agriculture, the yeoman ideal must be considered. Certainly, by historians writing of the land reform movements which followed the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s, it seldom is ignored. The yeoman ideal was a vision of a rural landscape dominated by small landowners. These small farmers would be free of the corrupting vices of the cities, living a simpler and more virtuous agricultural life. Owning property would give them a vested interest in the state and create a stable, dependable and conservative political class.
Furthermore, land in Europe was a cornerstone of status and wealth, and almost totally inaccessible to those without significant means. Settler colonialism in both North America and Australia was fuelled by the promise of land for all. In his chapter in Greenwood’s ‘Australia: a Social and Political History’, McNaughtan argues
The spectacle of Australia as a “vast sheepwalk” was distasteful to the overwhelming majority of settlers who had not been bred in the Colony and who carried with them from the old country an unvarying picture of a proper rural landscape. It is curious that the ideal of an Australia peopled by a “sturdy peasantry” or “industrious yeomanry” should have made such an irresistible appeal among all classes of people which, in the British Isles, had long since extinguished its own peasant class and was even then in process of reducing its yeomen to beggary.[11]
The yeoman ideal then, similarly to Australia’s conservative notion of the pioneer legend, was thus also part of a romantic view of the English past. But what is interesting is that this romanticized view of England’s rural past was not revived in Australia by immigrants from conservative land-owning families, but rather from those who in England were both urban and radical. Williams argues that the Chartist Movement in Britain cannot be ignored when considering the theoretical underpinnings of the debate and anxieties over land reform in Australia.[12]
Is it a paradox then, that the yeoman ideal in Victoria was composed and enacted as a mixture of radicalism and conservatism? Not exactly, because although land reform as a way of further democratizing the ‘old societies’ threatened longstanding and powerful interests, the same sorts of reform in Australia had to contend with the only recently established squatters and pastoralists. In this case, the evocation of the yeoman ideal could be used to prevent the further entrenchment of a landed elite in Australia; as F.G. Clarke argues
one of the greatest stimulants to electoral reform and universal manhood suffrage in all colonies stemmed from the realisation by liberals and radicals that the pastoralists’ grip on the lands of Australia could only be broken once their control over the colonial legislatures was also reduced.[13]
Ultimately, the image of the yeoman farmer was an idealistic rather than practical approach which focused on an abstract creation of an orderly system rather than any tangible reality. It was as much about politics as it was about farming.
But why might it be important when studying the Currie diary and the fortunes of that family? The almost universal appeal in Victoria of the yeoman farmer ideal is what later made selection possible for the Currie’s. Without this mythic ideal, and the Land Acts which embraced it, the family would not have been farmers at either Ballan or Lardner. It is important to consider the yeoman ideal when reading the Currie diary because it reminds us of the pattern of ideas behind the forming of legislation, which in turn has influence on the behaviour of people. As Williams suggests
rural settlement was seen as a vehicle for influencing the type of society that the colonies wanted, or at least, thought that they wanted; it was an early example of a type of social engineering.[14]
The Curries then, were a living part of that particular rural vision of Victoria, but they were by no means passive participants. There were many other factors which would influence the fortunes of the Currie family; personal and environmental factors. It is however, important to remember that in some respects, their course had been charted by the aspirations of an earlier generation.
The pioneer legend is one of the many narratives of Australian history. For Russel Ward, it is part of the search to find what is unique in the Australian character and identity, and he argues that it developed first amongst the workers employed by squatters and pastoralists.[15] The pioneer legend assumes that unique Australian character was both the product and the requirement for settling the frontier, or at least that they developed mutually. Donley argues that
Whether they succeeded or not depended on their personal qualities. Good judgement, perseverance and the ability to withstand loneliness and hardship – with the aid of good fortune – decided whether a squatter made or broke himself in the outback.[16]
Broadly, the pioneer legend embraces groups as varied as the first squatters and pastoralists, and the labourers they employed, to the stockmen who worked the cattle stations, shearers, and the bullock drivers who were relied on for the transport of goods before the railway networks spread. It celebrates a male-dominated world of hard work and self-sufficiency, both of which are considered impeccable conservative values.
It is curious that the life of the itinerant rural labourers like the shearers or the swagmen venerated by the pioneer legend was in some ways an impediment to the success of selection. Furthermore, that many selectors had to resort to this life was also a demonstration of the short-comings of the Selection Acts. As Bessant argues
Legislation alone was seen to be all that was required to establish this yeomanry. Hard work and sacrifice which it was assumed every selector would enjoy, would do the rest. It was taken for granted that the selector and his family would be on the farm for life. Yet the Australian rural worker was notoriously nomadic, quite out of character with the demands of the Land Acts.[17]
At its most superficial, the pioneer legend implies a homogenous class of men, white and of European origin. Frederick McCubbin’s most famous work is titled ‘The Pioneer’, referring singularly to the man in the painting and not his wife. The Currie diary is useful here, in that it gives a voice to the sort of woman depicted in this painting. The bleak, lonely image inspired by ‘The Pioneer’ is contradicted in the Currie diary by the almost daily recording of visitors to the farm, whether they be social calls or visits to borrow equipment or goods
Part of the mystique of the pioneer legend is not just in the character of the pioneers, but also in the landscape they went into. The Australian bush could be a dangerous place. Peter Pierce writes of the ‘lost child’ in Australian mythology who gets lost in the Australian bush
the lost child is an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia. More profoundly though, the lost child is the symbol of essential if never fully resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this country.[18]
In some ways this tragic mythology is also experienced by the Currie’s in 1880 when their young daughter drowns in the waterhole after wandering away from the house
I had no heart to fill up my book since we lost our wee pet on the 24th of the last month, it was oh so sudden… I carried her to the hole to dip a bucket of water. I stood her down and dipped it and she had a drink out the bucket, I led her by the hand to the door and said to her come in…I feel sure she came in and went back to see where I got the water… I then ran to the water hole. The first thing I saw was a little foam on the water. My heart told me what that was oh shall I ever forget it, I looked under the sticks and saw my wee pet, but oh dear I never thought I was too late, as she was such a short time in… I’ve lost her my heart is breaking and I feel frightened to grieve for fear I am punished even more severely for it must have been as a punishment that she was taken from us like that. I can’t help blaming myself for letting her out of my mind… but she was so clever. There was never one so knowing of her age.[19]
In his book ‘The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety’, Pierce discusses the contemporary illustrations, literature and paintings which showed or described lost children in nineteenth century Australia as ‘asleep’. The viewer, like perhaps the rescuer when they first come upon the child, cannot be sure if the child is sleeping or dead. Likewise Catherine Currie thought it might not be too late.
Writing about Frederick McCubbin’s ‘What the Little Girl Saw in the Bush’ and ‘Childhood Fancies’, Pierce argues McCubbin “made visible… that nameless force which had for so long attracted children across boundaries, so that they wonder and wander, then become lost. This innocent attraction to the bush can be fatal.”[20] Was Catherine’s daughter perhaps attracted by her prior view of the waterhole to return for another look?
Almost three weeks passes before Catherine resumes her almost infallible daily journal entry. There is a strangely selfish sensation in reading this series of entries of Catherine having held back on this significant event, as though the information was being kept from the reader. It makes one wonder if the diary was a largely personal task, or whether it had been intended as a simple chronicle which from time to time happened to expand to include her thoughts, anxieties and feelings. We can perhaps surmise from the fact that no entry whatsoever was written on the fatal day of 24 November 1880 that diary entries may have been generally a task reserved for the evening, despite Catherine’s immediate writing style which often reads like it has been set down as events were occurring.
When Catherine Currie does resume making entries on 14 December 1880, she initially talks about John’s work and other comings and goings before mentioning her child dying. Had she not intended to write about it when she first sat down to make her next entry? Perhaps the process of writing brought forth the feelings and emotions which cover the rest of the page and a large part of the next one.
After the Curries along with many of their neighbours moved from Ballan to take up their new selections at Lardner, the task of building a new community existed alongside the building of new farms. John Currie was regularly involved in these processes. Catherine records in her entry for 15 January 1876, “John away to Brandy Creek to attend a meeting to get a Shire Council.”[21]
Several years later on 7 September 1879, and 15 September 1879, the diary records John organizing and collecting signatures from neighbours for a petition, which he then presents to the Council about clearing the road running near or past Rintel’s store. A later entry on 13 October 1879 records that this petition is read at a Council meeting, and it is decided to take action about “our road.”[22]
These are just some of the many occasions that John attends meetings, or is active in community business. The selector did not farm his selection in isolation. Support and links with neighbours and the community were essential to selection life. Although land reforms enacted in the spirit of the yeoman ideal may have envisioned a certain sort of rural society, it remained that it was up to families like the Curries and their neighbours to build their own community.
Catherine Currie may have rarely mentioned her own attendance at church after the family had moved to Lardner, but her diary entries reveal interest in the members of her family attending, and who they met there. She also often recorded who gave the service, which early on would often be John Currie. Sometimes the quality or punctuality of the minister would be worthy of being recorded. For example on 20 April 1879 and 27 April 1879 the family went to church, but both times the minister did not attend; “the minister did not attend again”, wrote Catherine, “he must not be [of] much account.”[23]
Catherine also very regularly mentions the attendance of the children at school and Sunday school, and also occasions when either Katie or Tom might be home from school to help John or if the schoolmaster had given them holidays.
Whether the minister was on time for church on Sunday, or indeed whether he showed up at all, were not the most serious sorts of incidents which occurred in the new community. The hardships endured by the selectors and their families may have created a higher level of social tension than might otherwise have been experienced. We might never know the precise circumstances behind the incident which Catherine records in her entry of 26 September 1878, and it is of limited use to speculate whether it was due to personal differences, or an argument over borrowed money or equipment. But we can learn something from the various responses to the incident which Catherine records
we are all upset… we were called up at about 12 o’clock last night by Hamilton and Gregory. They told us that Syme had nearly killed McKay on Monday evening and they wanted John to go over at once to see him… John got a great fright when they told him as we never expected anything to happen old Mac he was such a quiet old fellow. John has taken him to Drouin today, he lent the poor old man £2-16/ and paid other expenses for him. I am afraid it will be all lost as John thinks he will not get better.[24]
This entry shows that beneath the rhythms of farm life recorded in the diary there were similar tensions and violence which have always occurred in human society. Also interesting are the circumstances in which John is called upon to go and see McKay. Was he perhaps an older man looked up to by the others? We might also surmise something of John possessing a generous and charitable nature by his lending of money to McKay, especially considering John thought he would not recover. It shows also that the Curries could spare money at this time, whereas almost a decade later this may not have been so. Even so, it is difficult to escape how valuable money was to the selectors. Two days later on 28 September 1878, when Catherine records that McKay had died, as much on her mind as what might be Syme’s fate because of the incident, is whether Syme will pay them the money he owes; “McKay… died yesterday morning. I wonder how it will be for Syme now and if we will get the money he owed us.”[25]
From the diary, it appears that not much in the way of consequences befell Syme, although it is possible that the Currie’s opinion of him had diminished. The following year there is an entry mentioning Syme “John… saw Syme, and he say the post office has been robbed last night, we don’t think it, there has been something else behind the scene that we do not understand.”[26] The suggestion that the Currie’s don’t trust Syme’s account of the robbery is intriguing.
In ‘The Land Hunger’, Bessant argues that “the most common picture of the lives of the selectors painted by historians and writers is one of poverty, hardship, ignorance, struggle against the wicked squatter, desperation and defeat in the end.”[27] Indeed, Bessant also includes excerpts from the works of Steele Rudd and Henry Lawson to illustrate the hardships of the selectors.[28]
These sources, along with some of the mentioned works of McCubbin, provide much of the imagery for imagining what life looked like, and how people experienced it. But we must remember that these are all produced for an audience in a very different way to what the Currie diary is. Still, we should take note where parallels in subject matter occur. For example, the anxiety produced by the use of fire to clear scrub and bush is described by Steele Rudd in ‘On Our Selection’
It was a delightful topic before we started, but in two weeks the clusters of fires that illuminated the whooping bush in the night and the crash upon crash of the big trees as they fell, had lost all their poetry.[29]
The enormous task of clearing, and the fears of falling trees and fires are echoed in the Currie diary in a series of entries in January and February of 1880. On 30 January 1880, Catherine writes “James’ new hut was burned down sometime yesterday, and everything in it, we never saw anything of it”,[30] and a week later in February she records, “I am so afraid of the fires that I am wishing for rain.”[31] To be effective in clearing the land, the burn required hot dry weather. Although rain would bring greater safety, it might also undo much of the hard labour of clearing.
As the decade progresses, farm life on the Currie selection and in the surrounding area seems to become more precarious. Catherine Currie’s diary shows how setbacks such as the one described 10 October 1887 could take a heavy emotional toll on the morale of the family
I feel quite unhappy this morning. I suppose Judy and all her pigs being dead has something to do with it. I don’t seem to see how we are going to manage to get through at all if something don’t turn up and I don’t know of any possibility of a turn for the better.[32]
These hard times continued throughout October of that year. Catherine makes an entry on 21 October 1887 recording Mr. George’s selection being sold; “I should be very sorry to leave it if it was mine,” she writes, “I suppose they all are it is one of the signs of the hard times as I am sure they would not leave it if they could help it.”[33]
The summer of 1887-88 must have brought no respite to this trend, but there is not a sense of defeat comparable to this stanza of Henry Lawson’s poem ‘Past Carin’’, which Bessant includes in full to illustrate the despair experienced by some selectors
My eyes are dry, I cannot cry,
I’ve got no heart for breakin’,
But where it was, in days gone by,
A dull and empty achin’.
My last boy ran away from me –
I know my temper’s wearin’ –
But now I only wish to be
Beyond all signs of carin’.[34]
When Catherine’s son Tom leaves in January 1888 to find work her entry is not despairing like Lawson’s poem, nor like her entry describing the dead pigs. Rather, there is a sort of wry irony to the tone; “Tom went off this morn I am so sorry he has to go… of course it must be for the best, how can we make anything farming the grasshoppers.”[35]
The Currie diary lets us explore notions like the pioneer legend and the yeoman ideal against the experience of the people that each of these meta-narratives encompasses. It allows us to see that there could be both good times and bad times, and successes and failures. It removes the temptation to generalize judgements of success, failure, hardship or happy times on the story of selection. Success varied from district to district, family to family, and from year to year. The diary demonstrates that although the larger narrative stories are important and useful for conceptualizing history, they can have a tendency to be both mythic and shallow.
Yet it is also somewhat reassuring to find in the Catherine Currie’s diary a very small hint of the sort of humour the likes of which Steele Rudd and others have given to selection life. The Australian landscape and its wildlife brought many hardships and difficulties to the selectors, especially the wallabies and parrots getting into the crops, but as Catherine’s entry of 8 November 1879 shows, the Currie’s had the resourcefulness and endurance to meet them: “we catched a King Parrot in the trap, we tied it to a stick to frighten the rest, and it laid an egg.”[36]
Bibliography
Bessant, B., The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980.
McNaughtan, I.D., ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.) Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, pp. 98-144.
Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966.
Cannon, Michael, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973.
Clarke, F. G., Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992.
Daley, Charles, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960.
Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria.
Dingle, A.E., The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984.
Donley, R.J.R., Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979.
Hirst, John in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008.
McQuilton, John, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979.
Pierce, P., The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Williams, M., ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.), Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 61-103.
[1] Charles Daley, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960, p. 96.
[2]A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 64.
[3] Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.
[4] Daley, p. 101.
[5] Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966, p. 166.
[6] Michael Cannon, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973, p. 139.
[7] John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp. 25-60.
[8] Cannon, p. 176.
[9] John Hirst in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, South Melbourne, Thomson, 2008, p. 139.
[10] A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 74.
[11] I.D., McNaughtan, ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.) Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, p. 115.
[12] M. Williams, ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.), Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 72.
[13] F. G. Clarke, Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992, p. 128.
[14] Williams, p. 61.
[15] Ward, p. v.
[16] R.J.R. Donley, Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979, p. 8.
[17] B. Bessant, The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980, p. 51.
[18] Peter Pierce, The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. xi.
[19] Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, 14 December 1880.
[20] Pierce, p. 58.
[21] Currie, ‘Diary 15 January 1876’.
[22] Currie, ‘Diary 7 September 1879’, ‘Diary 15 September 1879’, ‘Diary 13 October 1879’.
[23] Currie, ‘Diary 20 April 1879’, ‘Diary 27 April 1879’.
[24] Currie, ‘Diary 26 September 1878’.
[25] Currie, ‘Diary 28 September 1878’.
[26] Currie, ‘Diary 18 July 1879’.
[27] Bessant, pp. 58-9.
[28] Bessant, pp. 58-62.
[29] Steele Rudd, in Bessant, p. 58.
[30] Currie, ‘Diary 30 January 1880’.
[31] Currie, ‘Diary 7 February 1880’.
[32] Currie, ‘Diary 10 October 1887’.
[33] Currie, ‘Diary 21 October 1887’.
[34] Henry Lawson, in Bessant, p. 66.
[35] Currie, ‘Diary 3 January 1888’.
[36] Currie, ‘Diary 8 November 1879’.
Nietzsche and the Enlightenment
A response to Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’
The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is often rightly considered a break with the Enlightenment. However, a close reading of his 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ reveals that it very much is a work of the Enlightenment, in that it deals with some of its claims and key concerns. Herein, we can discover thoughts on human nature, society, morality, rational man and truth. But do we need to understand Nietzsche himself to understand the ideas in his writing? The substance of the essay in question suggests Nietzsche might be unsympathetic to our claims of understanding. Indeed, were such a thing as understanding possible, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, it might yet still remain impossible.
Two popular interpretations of Nietzsche have been; first, that he was a sort of proto-Nazi, an idea which has since been discredited as stemming from deliberate misinterpretation and integration of his work into Nazi philosophy; and second, that his writings were contradictory and inconsistent, which has in part been blamed by scholars on Nietzsche’s sister, who herself edited and published some of his work posthumously. Nietzsche perhaps would not have been concerned with inconsistency or contradiction. His writings are very different in style to the orderly presentation of Descartes’ ‘Discourse on the Method’ or Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History’, and yet, especially in the case of this essay in question, they remain powerful, lucid and rich.
Nietzsche is well known for the proclamation ‘God is Dead’. The controversial phrasing means this expression is not surprisingly often misunderstood, but for Nietzsche it means that the idea, the belief, the possibility, the illusion and the need for god is dead. Heidegger understood this as the death of metaphysics, although Nietzsche himself saw the metaphysical need as an offshoot of religion, rather than a precursor to religion. But if there is no god, then the foundation of morality and truth is removed, and anything might be possible. Nietzsche realized that the consequences of this could be terrible.
Dorinda Outram describes a common interpretation of the Enlightenment as
a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.[1]
Against this reading, it is relatively unproblematic to present Nietzsche as a break with the Enlightenment project. Indeed, Nietzsche is often placed by scholars as a descendant of the German Romantic movement. This movement was in part a reaction to the ideal of rationalism as presented by the Enlightenment. He was influenced by or admired men such as Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Wagner, among many others, although many would eventually fall out of his favour. As an anti-Enlightenment thinker, Nietzsche seriously questioned the idea of progress, and of the perfectibility of man or society.
While some writers such as Hobbes and Rousseau have rather distinct views of human nature when it is not constrained by society, Nietzsche, in this piece, has little interest in portraying human nature as either fundamentally good or bad. Human nature is what it is. What others with a pessimistic view of human nature might call bad, would perhaps be of little concern to Nietzsche. Indeed, it is precisely the capacity and desire for deception in man which shields him from the true nature of his existence,
And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous.[2]
While Nietzsche may have been angered by some of the ‘life-denying’ aspects of Christian morality, there is a sense that despite this general ‘self-deception’ toward human nature, he might have tentatively approved, if not with the means then at least with the end. According to Graeme Garrard, Nietzsche “thought that Voltaire had correctly realized that man is a ‘beast of prey’ and that civilization is a ‘tremendous triumph’ over his bestial nature.”[3]
One cannot help but get the impression from Nietzsche that he felt society to be limiting both to species and individual. In Nietzsche’s view of society, where ‘truth’ and morality are derived from using the established conventions, there arises a contradiction or tension between the unrestricted inquiry encouraged by the Enlightenment and the stability of the society. This can be linked to Nietzsche’s concept of herd morality, where truth means using the accepted designations for things, and the resisting of both lies and truths which could prove harmful. Unrestricted inquiry could challenge the accepted metaphors. But Nietzsche, as evidenced by his essay, does not hesitate to question the accepted metaphors and concepts.
For Nietzsche, it remains that man chooses for himself these limitations to form a society
From boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes – war of all against all.[4]
The use of the phrase ‘war of all against all’ demonstrates an intellectual link with Hobbes,[5] and is at odds with Rousseau’s conception of man in the ‘state of nature’. For Nietzsche, society is at least a ‘cease-fire’ if not a peace treaty, and also a first step in the origin of the puzzling human drive for ‘truth’.[6]
While society here may be considered a choice, humans are almost always born into society, the only choice being perhaps the unlikely decision to leave it. The consensus of society may equally be one of superstition, rather than that of reasoned explanation. According to Garrard, “Nietzsche enthusiastically commends the Enlightenment for its attacks on Christianity and its elitist disdain for la canaille, as Voltaire sometimes contemptuously referred to the masses.”[7]
But this disdain for the unenlightened mass, the mass which may not make as full a use of the faculty of reason, or adequate use of rationalism and skepticism, which may favour traditions and religion over science and critical enquiry; this disdain suggests that a rational education is a prerequisite for human value, for that is what the class whom Voltaire criticized lacked. Despite the heralding of universal and inalienable rights in the political movements which embraced the Enlightenment, it yet remained that the worthy person was the educated person.
In ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, Nietzsche unravels the web of pretensions which comprise the human intellect. The first pretension is the invention of ‘knowing’, the supposed ability to grasp ‘truth’. ‘Knowing’ is the source of pride which validates for man the value of his existence. Intertwined with this pride is deception, which the individual uses several forms of in maintaining himself against others, and which his nature leads him to use against himself.
In relation to the title of this essay, Nietzsche distinguishes lies from truth as a misuse of the fixed conventions of language. Lies or deception are not hated in themselves, but their harmful consequences are. Nietzsche considers any pretension to the possession of pure truth to be the result of forgetfulness; thus any moral obligation toward truth and away from lies is in the service of minimizing harm, and is a social obligation not stemming from any truth in itself.
“So far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.”[8] That is, to lie with the herd. The morality of truth is derived from the social obligation to comply with the fixed conventions and metaphors.
For Nietzsche, language demonstrates not only the subjective nature of perception (and thus the myth of objectivity) but also the human disregard for pure truth .
The formation of language is the result of metaphors built upon metaphors into the creation of concepts, which themselves have no direct relationship with the original unique experience, or the thing in itself. This concern partially echoes Descartes geometric argument involving a triangle; we know of a perfect triangle but have “no reason to be assured that there was any such triangle in existence”.[9]
The philosophical claim to truth is parallel to the claim of science to see material reality objectively. Both are impossible as they involve the subject. Logic, reason, time, space and numbers are all constructs, those means by which we attempt to ‘know’ are also the barriers to truth, dividing us from the ‘thing in itself’.
Towards the end of the essay, Nietzsche makes a distinction between intuitive and rational man. What they have in common is that the “drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive”[10]; but this drive is by its nature a creative drive. They are both creative in the sense above, yet have different aims. The creativity of rational man is used in concepts which can be used to guard against the uncertainties of life, whereas intuitive man regards life as something good in itself and uses his creativity to celebrate life. For Nietzsche this is a deception of a different nature, but one he seems more sympathetic towards.
The final paragraph of the essay is used to mock rational man. His ability to learn from and master circumstances which bring misfortune and thus not be perturbed by it, results in his deception being executed precisely when misfortune arises. The rational man who understands weather and can make the causal link between thunderous dark clouds overhead and imminent soaking rain, instead of using this knowledge to protect himself from the elements, must otherwise maintain his dignity and composure, to surrender to the elements he understands precisely because he understands them, rather than to flee from beneath them.
Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ constitutes an attack on the very foundation of the Enlightenment project; an undermining of the idea that man can objectively harness this faculty called reason and apply it to the world, in a sense, knowing and wielding truth. But with truth thus undermined, without subsequent destruction of the belief in reason and truth, we are left with a feeling of teetering and sinking, perhaps even of imminent collapse. Nietzsche has torn back the veil of concepts and shown us metaphors, the shedding of a façade revealing a rotting frame, safe perhaps only while all agree that it is so.
Bibliography
Descartes, Rene, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in David Weisman (ed.), Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 3-26.
Garrard, Graeme, ‘Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment’, The Review of Politics, Fall 2008; 70, 4; pp. 595-608.
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 114-23.
Outram, Dorinda, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 1-13.
[1] Dorinda Outram, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 3.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, p. 117.
[3] Graeme Garrard, ‘Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment’, The Review of Politics, Fall 2008; 70, 4; p. 607.
[4] Nietzsche, p. 115.
[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, p. 185. “They are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man”.
[6] Nietzsche, p. 115.
[7] Garrard, pp. 599-600.
[8] Nietzsche, p. 117.
[9] Rene Descartes, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in David Weisman (ed.), Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 25.
[10] Nietzsche, p. 121.
ashhughes 