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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 11 May 2013

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As the Western world now seeks to reset its political and economic course, whilst searching for its moral compass, it seems it is the Burkean vision of human possibility and renewed social value that may prove to be what is required to guide us to a better world.

As Roger Scruton* notes, Burke was a great writer, a profound thinker and a high-ranking political practitioner, with a keen sense both of the damage done by the wrong ideas, and the real need for the right ones. Political wisdom, Burke argued, is not contained in a single head. It does not reside in the plans and schemes of the political class, and can never be reduced to a system. It resides in the social organism as a whole, in the myriad small compromises, in the local negotiations and trusts, through which people adjust to the presence of their neighbours and co-operate in safeguarding what they share. People must be free to associate, to form "little platoons", to dispose of their labour, their property and their affections, according to their own desires and needs.

 But no freedom is absolute, and all must be qualified for the common good.

Until subject to a rule of law, freedom is merely "the dust and powder of individuality". But a rule of law requires a shared allegiance, by which people entrust their collective destiny to sovereign institutions that can speak and decide in their name. This shared allegiance is not, as Rousseau and others argued, a contract among the living. It is a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead – a continuous trust that no generation can pillage for its own advantage.

Burke, as Jesse Norman+ has reminded us, came to prominence in the age of Dr Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. Over his long career he fought five great political battles: for more equal treatment of Catholics in Ireland; against British oppression of the 13 American colonies; for constitutional restraints on royal patronage; against the power of the East India Company in India; and most famously, against the dogma of the French Revolution. Their common theme is his detestation of injustice and the abuse of power.

According to Norman, Burke foresaw some of the greatest discontents of the modern era, including its extreme liberalism and individualism. Various disasters have gravely undermined conventional beliefs in the primacy of the individual will, in the power of human reason alone to resolve political and economic problems, and in the capacity of unfettered individual freedom to deliver personal or social well-being.

Thus the White House under John F Kennedy gathered together one of greatest assemblages of expertise ever seen in American politics, yet they took their country into Vietnam. Western policy towards Russia in the Nineties all but ignored the country’s low levels of trust and social capital, and actively assisted the loss of public assets at fire-sale prices to the new oligarchs. The euro was introduced, and has been sustained, as an elite project that deliberately ignored, and ignores, long-standing concerns about the huge differences in the societies of the various nations involved, and the legitimacy of the euro’s own surrounding institutions.

Yet Burke also reminds us of threats within Western societies themselves. For there is increasing evidence that extreme liberalism causes people to lose sight of the true sources of human well-being and to become more selfish and individualistic, by priming them with ideas of financial success and celebrity.

In his own time, Burke regarded as his greatest achievement his campaign to restrain the crony capitalism of the East India Company, and to insist on the accountability of private power to public authority. In effect, he offers a profound critique of the market fundamentalism now prevalent in Western society. Markets are not idolised, but treated as cultural artefacts mediated by trust and tradition. Capitalism becomes not a one-size-fits-all ideology of consumption, but a spectrum of different models to be evaluated on their own merits.

As Burke shows us, the individual is not simply a compendium of wants; human happiness is not simply a matter of satisfying individual wants; and the purpose of politics is not to satisfy the interests of individuals living now. It is to preserve a social order which addresses the needs of generations past, present and future.

In his own life, Burke was devoted to an ideal of public duty, and deplored the tendency to individual or generational arrogance, and the “ethics of vanity”. His thought is imbued with the importance of history and memory, and a hatred of those that would erase them. He insists on the importance of human allegiance and identity, and social institutions and networks.

Let us hope that the current neo-liberals, abusing the world today, can learn a thing or two from Burke, that extreme liberalism promotes arrogance and selfishness- which has brought us all, nothing, but a very bitter harvest.

Read more:

'Tory leaders have forgotten what Edmund Burke understood: true conservatives are driven by more than economics.'

*Identity, family, marriage: our core conservative values have been betrayed 

Edmund Burke – the great conservative who foresaw the discontents of our era

The philosopher Edmund Burke reminds us of the threat to society from rampant individualism

+Edmund Burke--the great conservative who foresaw the discontents of our era

For further readings see the links below:

The Broken Economic Model of rampant individualism, selfishness and greed

What might an Economy for the Common Good look like?

In Search of Global Healing: Buddhist Economics- Cultivating Wisdom, Kinship and ‘Right Livelihood’ to Build a Better World

World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Ancient Wisdom

(This Blog was updated on 8 Dec 2022)

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Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 10 May 2013

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The voice that must be heard and heard again, lest we forget

Is Cameron's Britain what we fought for in the war?

At 90 I'm too old to fight those who seek to wreck the civilisation we shed blood, sweat, and tears for in the second world war

Harry Leslie Smith

“Every year, the spring rains fall hard and heavy to a parched and hungry earth. Life is reborn from the long slumber of winter. For me the beauty in this annual transformation stings as if I caught my finger on a thorn from a rose. These lengthening days remind me of another time, when I was a young man. Back then the sun's rays were just as warm and sensuous but the splendour of nature being reborn was tainted with death. It was 1945, and Europe was still caught in the dying grasps of a cruel and unforgiving world war.

It was a conflict that consumed tens of millions of lives through military battles, air bombardment and pure and simple mass murder. For five years of war, through defeat and bitter struggle, the calendar changed from humid summers to crisp fall days, to the bitterness of winter and then back to the optimism of spring. As clocks in every household and in every town square moved forward, day by day, marking our mortal time through this struggle between good and evil, soldiers were maimed or killed on all our military fronts, convoys sunk in the cold North Atlantic, cities reduced to rubble and children left hungry orphans.

Across the world death moved, for too many years in lock step with both the season for sowing and for reaping. We were a world at war, and for those of us in Britain the cost was enormous in lost and ruined lives. But it didn't matter because we believed that the cause was just and that, whether we came from humble or refined stock, we were all in this war together. It was that common and shared faith in ourselves and in the notion that everyone's contribution, large or small, was important to the war effort that saw us through those dark hours. It was what kept us buggering on until our fortunes turned and the war against Nazi Germany reached its bloody end in the spring of 1945.

In those heady days leading to peace, I was just twenty-two and as green as the grass that had started to shoot up across the silenced killing fields. As I travelled from liberated Holland to the crumbling remnants of Nazi Germany, I was sure of one thing: I was a lucky man. I had what was called back then a good war and I was not disappointed by my survival. I had done my bit and I never shirked my paymaster's orders, but I was one of the fortunate few; death had eluded me while I served in the RAF.

I felt blessed by luck because so many others – friends, neighbours, acquaintances and complete strangers – had not been so lucky. They were never going to see twenty-five or be able to put down roots and raise a family and enjoy the fruits of peace. I knew like the rest of my compatriots knew, the dead had reluctantly sacrificed their existence to preserve civilisation for the living.

Perhaps that is why even though I am now 90, I still go every spring to my local cenotaph and commune with unfamiliar names etched in stone. I read out their simple epitaphs, their age and wonder, what if these young men had lived? What would their lives have been like? Would they have found true love, happiness, a rewarding profession and had healthy children? Would they have felt content with the democracy they had fought so selflessly to preserve? It has been almost 70 years since the guns of the second world war fell silent and I am no longer sure if the dead would agree that their lives were worth the price of today's society.

To me, this brave new world feels all wrong, out of tune with what the men and women of World War Two accomplished with our "blood, sweat and tears". It just seems too flippant, too easy, too profane in this present world; for our politicians, our media pundits, and our industrial military complex to intone the beaches of D-Day, Sword, Juno, Gold and Omaha as if it were the catechism for freedom, when our individual and collective liberty is more at risk now than it has ever been since the end of Nazism.

We have somehow broken our solemn bond with those warriors of yesterday and forgotten that when the survivors of the Second World War returned to their homes, they were like a tide that raised all boats. My generation's shared experience of suffering, of witnessing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and enduring unspeakable privations as both soldiers and civilians made us vigilant when it came to demanding our peace dividend. We knew what we deserved and that was a future that didn't resemble our hard-scrabble past. The Green and Pleasant land was for everyone after the war because we had bled for it and died for it. We demanded a truly democratic society where merit was rewarded and no one would be left behind because of poverty, poor health or an inadequate education.

After the war we revolutionized the western world and introduced the notion that all human beings deserved dignity, freedom of movement, due process before the law, and social safety nets to protect those affected by economic uncertainties. We knew the cost of not creating a just society was the end for democracy, and a life sentence of misery for too many people in our country. We knew the price of failing to create and maintain universal health care was a return to a two-tier society where the few held dominion over the many.

Today, however, in a world where our reservoirs of wealth are as deep and enormous as all the mighty rivers of the world combined, our politicians, financial institutions and megalithic industries tell us we can no longer afford these human rights that men sacrificed their lives for: the freedom to live with dignity in a compassionate society. We are told by those in charge that we can no longer live with luxuries like healthcare, proper state funded pensions, decent wages, trade unions and most aspects of our social safety network.

At 90, I am too old to take up the fight, too old to stand in demonstrations with a placard denouncing this madness. All I can do is bear witness to my times and our heroic struggle fought so long ago against Hitler and against men who would wreck the foundations that made civilisation tolerable and decent for its inhabitants.

The problem with society, today, is not lack of money or debt but lack of ideas, lack of commitment by our government to realise that its constituents are the people, not city bankers and hedge fund managers whose loyalty is to their ledger books rather than to the community. I don't know if we will come out of this present darkness. Perhaps humanity will simply retreat into the caves whence our ancestors came because we were cowed by self-serving political parties and dubious leaders of business. I hope not, for the sake of the generations to come, but there is one thing I am certain of: had the politicians and business mandarins of today been in power in 1939, they wouldn't have had the bottle to fight Nazism. There would have been no Dunkirk, no Battle of Britain, no Finest Hour. Our leaders today on either side of the house would have allowed the lights across Europe to grow dim, because after all that would have been the cheapest and most prudent solution to Hitler's tyranny.”

Original Source:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/09/is-camerons-britain-what-we-fought-for/print