the age of chivalry is gone. -That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Name | Edmund Burke | Life | 1729 - 1797 | Country | Ireland | Category | Wisdom | Wikipedia | >> |
The French Revolution of 1789 is the watershed, not only in European history but in European thinking as well. It was an enormously brutal affair, with the mob falling into a beastially bloody behavior, whipped on by ideologically blinded men to kill whoever did not conform to their monotheistic power urge. The hopeful dreams of Condorcet died with him in the prison into which the mob had thrown him, their great defender. The guillotine was invented, symbolically motivated as a progress on man's road to full humanism. This is because it was a more effective way to chop off heads than the sword of the famous Sansons. Efficiency in murder becomes humanism! Edmund Burke, sitting on the other side of the Channel, became more and more horrified - as my generation has been by the Gulag and Auschwitz. He grabbed his pen and wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France. It was published only a year after the first bloody explosion and became a huge success. Chivalry is now gone, says Burke, even before the beautiful head of Marie Antoinette was rolling in the mud. With that head and others, the optimistic dreams of the Enlightenment, as well as the golden rules by Hutcheson, Bentham and Kant, were also chopped off. What remained was vulgar sophisters, economists, and calculators. So it was. So it is. Burke had the right premonition. Chivalrous Christian knights, protecting widows and orphans, who had been transformed into grandious moral philosophers, were out. Petty-minded economists took over. Was that bad? Is it bad? We are again forced to look at the difference between intentions and consequences. The laments of the Enlightenment were the same as those of Amos: the world is unjust, a revolution against it is justified and can only give good results! The revolution, for which the philosophers must surely bear some responsibility, came. Barbarous bloodbaths came, too. But good results did not. After only a few years, a new dictator, Napoleon, took power. His only way of calming the masses was to turn them against external enemies. He wanted to unify Europe under his own monotheistic rule. To that aim, he killed half a million of the best youth of France in his mad attempt to conquer Moscow. The intentions were good. The results, again, were horrible. In England, private egoism was permitted, almost celebrated, to overtake good intentions. Work hard, enrichez-vous, take care of your own well-being and take responsibility for your own family! By such thinking and acting, England became the first nation of the "industrial revolution" and the leading power in the world until the first world war in 1914. The wealth produced for egoistic reasons gave a demand for labor and natural resources that led money down to the poor in both England and the colonies. Sure, in no way did it do away with poverty. But, as Mandeville had shown, it at least gave work and food to the growing masses. The intentions of the "calculators" had in no way any "chivalrous" nature. It was plain egoism. But the results were good, creating wealth in England and the beginning of the "population explosion" in the rest of the world. Now, what do your prefer: good altruistic intentions and bad results, or bad egoistic intentions and good results? |