What I'm Reading #8: Edmund Burke and V.S. Naipaul

What Societal Change May Unleash

Books shape us. They give us diverse perspectives. They show us other worlds. They challenge us. Theology brings us deeper into understanding God. Philosophy forces us to think clearly and with precision. The great literary works of the world are sublime aesthetic achievements. And the time to read such books is short. I recently calculated how many books I could possibly read in the rest of my life and the answer was just shy of 3,100. In some ways, that’s a lot of books. In others, it’s not so many. I want to make the most of reading them and that’s why I’m writing these posts. So I can reflect on what challenges me and explore how these disparate types of books overlap in surprising ways—and what Christianity has to say in response.

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke

Burke, for many, is the father of modern conservatism. Insofar as conservatism can be identified with the virtue of prudence, this is true. Burke sees democratic systems as an inheritance from previous generations. Each subsequent generation is a link in a long chain with a responsibility to steward what it has been given. There are critics who argue such logic is illiberal, that these ideas are reactionary. But that’s not what I read. I saw an argument squarely in the classically liberal tradition. Individual rights (even if he thinks rights come from somewhere different than abstract natural rights), free market approaches, and legitimacy coming from the governed are all in place in Burke’s thought. Without question, Burke wants careful and slow change.

“Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together. The same lazy, but restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, directs these politicians, when they come to work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed.”—Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France (pp. 168-169). Kindle Edition.

Burke worried about the chaos that would result from uprooting everything that came before. He prophesied horrible things in France. He predicted that the speedy displacement of the monarchy, the church, the nobility, and individual rights would have dire consequences. And he was right. But this doesn’t lead him to reject all change everywhere. He fully recognized that systems without the ability to self-correct were not resilient.

“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.”—Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France (p. 28). Kindle Edition.

Burke falls in the line of conservative classical liberals that want measured, marginal improvements over time while respecting freedoms hard-won by previous generations. So while Buckley may have stood athwart history shouting ‘Stop!’ Burke simply says, slow down.

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Every once in a while, I read books simultaneously that complement each other fortuitously. A Bend in the River pairs well with Burke. V.S. Naipaul constructs a story that presents the dangers of a post-colonial Africa where the floorboards of seventy to eighty years of colonialism are ripped up with nothing solid to replace them. Naipaul was accused of being pro-colonial because he did not shy away from saying the post-colonial period would be chaotic, violent, and rudderless.

When the book was released, many were optimistic about the future of Africa, but like Burke before him, Naipaul was quasi-prophetic in predicting the instability that lay ahead for many in Africa. The main character Salim is exposed to various survival strategies, from pursuing pleasure, to becoming a ‘new man’ of Africa, to a grim realism that prepares him to act in the face of chaos. This last approach serves Salim best, but he still ends the novel as he begins it, as a man running because violence has broken out. He’s adrift in structural and historical currents he can’t fully escape.

This doesn’t mean Naipaul thought colonialism was good. Far from it, he knew that the ignorance, naivety, and oppression of Europeans did incalculable harm to Africa. His concern was that there was nothing substantive to replace it. We hear echoes of Burke’s call for prudence when making social changes. Was Naipaul right? Can someone generalize across an entire continent that large? Does it matter? If colonialism was evil full stop, shouldn’t it simply have been ended? The nation Salim inhabits is nameless, suggesting broad application of Naipaul’s diagnosis (it’s likely the Congo is the point of comparison). These are questions the reader is forced to grapple with. All the while, Naipaul makes the point that all we can do when stuck in such currents is embrace life as individuals and endeavor to survive as best we can. This is what Salim does. He doesn’t control all, but he controls himself.

“I will do what you say. And how are you, Ferdinand?” “You don’t have to ask. You mustn’t think it’s bad just for you. It’s bad for everybody. That’s the terrible thing. It’s bad for Prosper, bad for the man they gave your shop to, bad for everybody. Nobody’s going anywhere. We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where?” —V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (p. 272). Kindle Edition.

The tension is that Salim is still stuck in bleak circumstances. His individual achievements (in this case, survival and even moderate success) don’t free him from the currents around him.