THE MASCULINISTS ARE NOT MEN:

As Greg Weiner puts it in his fine, recent book Old Whigs: Burke, Lincoln, and the Politics of Prudence, the prudent statesman must learn to combine "principle and circumstance" and, I would add, moderation and courage in a judicious and prudent way. Those noble virtues have an essential place in the exercise of judgment and action informed by prudence and are virtues in and of themselves. Weiner expertly shows that, for Burke, prudence is inseparably connected to "politic caution, a guarded circumspection" and a "moral rather than complexional timidity." Those qualities, Burke wrote, were always "among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their most decided conduct." Weiner quite rightly remarks that Burke "was perhaps the first commentator fully to theorize the case for caution as a sort of default position rooted in the moral virtue of humility." The statesman is first and foremost the caretaker of a noble (if imperfect) inheritance that must be safeguarded and even cherished. Precipitous and presumptuous efforts to depart from the tried and true woefully exaggerate the human capacity to begin things de novo, from scratch, without the guidance of the wisdom of the past or the experience of our forebears. Burke's endorsement of "politic caution" is thus both practical and epistemological in character since the revolutionary "innovator" has little or no appreciation of what he does not know. From this fatal mixture of ignorance and hubris only reckless destruction can follow.

But once the ideological temptation is afoot in the human world, moderation must be accompanied by courage and no inconsiderable amount of spiritedness if civilization is to survive. When many in the English political class mistook post-Robespierre France with an ordinary European power, pursuing its national interest like any other great people or nation, Burke took aim at a "misguided prudence" that confused cowardice (or confusion) with humility. Burke saw "imprudent timidity" all around him rather than the true "wisdom of a nation." Confronted by an aggressive ideological despotism that aimed to upend all governments not based on its revolutionary principles, Burke attacked the "unworthy hesitation" that flowed from the lack of "the courage to see" (to use a phrase of Solzhenitsyn's addressing a similar tendency among twentieth-century politicians and intellectuals who refused to acknowledge expansionist Communism for what it really was). Weiner draws our attention to a distinction Burke introduces in the Letters on a Regicide Peace between "courageous wisdom" and a "false, reptile prudence" that arises not out of salutary "caution" but out of "fear" and misjudgment perhaps rooted in the failure to cultivate "the courage to see." Yet whether as an advocate of "politic caution" or as a critic of "hesitating prudence" and "weakness of will," Burke continues to exercise all the humanizing arts of prudence. In addition, his appeal to courage is never severed from an underlying moderation committed to the preservation of a civilization that bows in gratitude before the inherited wisdom of the past and that upholds the permanent necessity of "sacred limits and restraints." Few statesmen can match the capaciousness of Burke's soul, one that ties together courage and moderation and nobility of spirit with a humble deference before both God and the great inheritance that is civilization itself. Burke exudes nobility in his every thought and deed. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd