The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

Burke appears terrified by the thought that the ultimate sources and sanctions of government should be brought out into broad daylight for the inspection of everyone, and the first effort was to clothe the British government with a kind of concealment against this sort of inspection, which could, of course, result in the testing of that government by what might have been or might yet be. The second effort was to show that France, instead of embarking on a career of progress through her daring revolution, “had abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.” It will be observed that in both of these, a presumed well-being is the source of his argument. Therefore we have the familiar recourse to concrete situation.

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen, pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France upon her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiring what the nature of the government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation on its freedom?[51]

In his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) he said:

What a number of faults have led to this multitude of misfortunes, and almost all from this one source—that of considering certain general maxims, without attending to circumstances, to times, to places, to conjectures, and to actors! If we do not attend scrupulously to all of these, the medicine of today becomes the poison of tomorrow.[52]

This was the gist of such advice as Burke had for the French. That they should build on what they had instead of attempting to found de novo, that they should adapt necessary changes to existing conditions, and above all that they should not sacrifice the sources of dignity and continuity in the state—these made up a sort of gospel of precedent and gradualism which he preached to the deaf ears across the Channel. We behold him here in his characteristic political position, but forced to dig a little deeper, to give his theorems a more general application, and, it is hardly unjust to say, to make what really constitutes a denial of philosophy take on some semblance of philosophy. Yet Burke was certainly never at a greater height rhetorically in defending a reigning circumstance. Let us listen to him for a moment on the virtues of old Europe.

But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, the subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which, without confounding ranks, has produced a noble equality and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the imagination ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exposed as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashions.[53]

With the writings on French affairs, Burke’s argument from circumstance came full flower.

These citations are enough to show a partiality toward argument of this aspect. But a rehearsal of his general observations on politics and administration will show it in even clearer light. Burke had an obsessive dislike of metaphysics and the methods of the metaphysician. There is scarcely a peroration or passage of appeal in his works which does not contain a gibe, direct or indirect, at this subject. In the Speech On American Taxation he said, “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them.”[54] This science he regarded as wholly incompatible with politics, yet capable of deluding a certain type of politician with its niceties and exactitudes. Whenever Burke introduced the subject of metaphysics, he was in effect arguing from contraries; that is to say, he was asserting that what is metaphysically true is politically false or unfeasible. For him, metaphysical clarity was at the opposite pole from political prudence. As he observed in the Reflections, “The pretended rights of these theories are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.”[55] In the first letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, he ridiculed “the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men, and who, dealing in universals and essences, see no difference between more and less.”[56] It will be noted that this last is a philosophical justification for his regular practice of weighing a principle by the scale of magnitude of situation. The “more and less” thus becomes determinative of the good. “Metaphysics cannot live without definition, but prudence is cautious how she defines,”[57] he said in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. And again in the Reflections, “These metaphysic rights, entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium are by the laws of nature refracted from a straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of man undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.”[58] Finally, there is his clear confession, “Whenever I speak against a theory, I mean always a weak, erroneous, fallacious, unfounded theory, and one of the ways of discovering that it is a false theory is by comparing it with practice.” This is the philosophical explanation of the source in circumstance of Burke’s characteristic argument.