TO V. FROM:

 It is easy today to dismiss Burke's politics as too rooted in history, too accepting of existing injustices, and too hostile toward demands for change. It is easy to do so because the language of politics has in large measure become the language of Paine. But this language also is the language of abstraction, of simplification, and of power. For Paine, in his drive for justice and individual freedom, sought to construct a politics rooted in the individual and the demand for equality here and now. Political structures were to be reshaped to make them democratic and to make them capable of remaking society so that it would be friendlier toward the demands of individuals seeking their own good on the basis of their own, unfettered reason. Paine experienced how the drive for such a radical transformation, and such a radical rejection of the institutions, beliefs, and practices inherited from those who went before us and believed they were leaving an inheritance for those who would come after us, led to mass murder in the French Revolution. But he remained convinced that only a forceful re-founding of society on the consent (however gleaned) of the people taken as an (undefined) whole could be just and could lead to justice. He followed his own reasoning to its logical conclusion: promotion of a secular state seeking to free individuals from want, from the past, and from the confines of the social order. Succeeding revolutions and their aftermaths have shown how bloody and enervating such a program is. Yet the political left continues to insist that these are the only true principles, and that we try again and again to put them into action, whatever the consequences, because this is the only just and caring way to proceed.

Burke, meanwhile, insisted that order is the first need of all, that it begins in the soul, and that the soul is shaped through normative education rooted in society seen as an inheritance we must preserve and hand on to later generations. On this view, injustices must be addressed, and reforms made. But this must be done with an eye toward ameliorating abuses in a manner that preserves the functioning of society and the ability of people to go about their lives with an assurance of stability and the support of the cultural institutions and norms necessary for any good life.

As Mr. Levin emphasizes, it is more than anything else the emphasis on simplification that makes Paine's assumptions regarding the good society dangerous to actual persons. The idea that society can be reduced to a set of principles, which can be imprinted upon a shapeless reality, is not merely wrong, but destructive. We are not merely individuals, but persons. We do not create our own characters, they are formed through the interaction of reason and experience; and each of these is a social endeavor. We reason together through classrooms, juries, and various other associations in which we must address problems of the day. Our experience is, if we are not angels or beasts (or the figments of philosophical imaginations) overwhelmingly social. Even reading is a form of social activity as it means entering the mind of another, or the world created or remembered by another.

What is lost in the demand for abstract justice, now, is the very process of pursuing the good in common with our fellows. And, having lost that process, we also lose the associations in which we once pursued the good. Our families, churches, and local associations lose their reasons for being as the state takes over the tasks of tending the sick, the needy, the powerless, and the general public. And the result is a society in which the individual is left alone, fending for himself in the face of life's tragedies and, more dangerously, in the face of a government convinced that it knows best and that opposition to its will means intolerable opposition to the will of The People.

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