Last week, I mentioned Edmund Burke in a blog about Downton Abbey.  As a result, I dipped into his “Reflections on the Revolution in France”.  Burke was a man with a powerful mind and the ability to express himself in clear and robust English.  It is a pleasure to read him.

One remarkable thing about the Reflections is that the work was written when the French Revolution had barely begun and yet seems to anticipate what was to come.  Sometime in the summer of 1789, Burke received a letter from a young friend in France asking for Burke’s thoughts about what was then taking place across the Channel.  Burke wrote a reply that was ready to send in October 1789, but he held back on sending it “for prudential reasons”.  Ultimately, he wrote a longer response and then published the work in November 1790 as a single essay.

At the time of writing, Louis XVI had not yet been tried for treason nor beheaded.  The Terror and the Thermidorean Reaction were years in the future.  Napoleon rose to power after Burke was already dead.  Yet, he saw the potential for all of it, even if he did not predict the particulars.

He did all this without the benefit of reports on the scene from a 24-hour-a-day news service.  He knew enough of France and of human affairs to generate a remarkably clear picture from the limited hard information available to him.  Consider this passage from the early pages of the work (and therefore I assume, without knowing, from his earliest impressions):

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate insulated private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. . . .

I thought of those words during the “Arab Spring” of 2011.  You will recall that the political and intellectual leadership of the West was head over heels crazy for the flowering of liberty and progress that was then opening before our eyes.  The journal “Foreign Affairs” summed up the American attitude this way: “President Barack Obama described the uprisings as “a historic opportunity” for the United States “to pursue the world as it should be.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed these comments, expressing confidence that the transformations would allow Washington to advance “security, stability, peace, and democracy” in the Middle East. Not to be outdone, the Republican Party’s 2012 platform trumpeted “the historic nature of the events of the past two years — the Arab Spring — that have unleashed democratic movements leading to the overthrow of dictators who have been menaces to global security for decades.””

Egypt deposed a military dictator and held free and fair elections as a result of which the electors returned a parliament two-thirds of whose members favored the imposition of Sharia law.  A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose long-term goal has been the implementation of Sharia, was elected president.  Yet, the news coverage had focused on the students and professionals who gathered in Tahrir Square, where not a single member of the Muslim Brotherhood was to be found.  (“Those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.”)

In neighboring Libya, coherent government, even by Libya’s loose standards, ceased.

Consider as Exhibit B, these comments on the Russian Revolution by Woodrow Wilson:

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.

Wilson was addressing a joint session of the United States Congress on April 2, 1917.  Having won re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war” Wilson went to Congress less than thirty days after his second inauguration to ask for a declaration of war against Germany.  He was asking the Congress to send American troops to Europe, something that no American government had done.  Such an undertaking was justified on the grounds that the war would make the world “safe for democracy”.  The alliance of the liberal British and French democracies with Czarist Russia was inconsistent with this view.  The Provisional Government then nominally in control in Russia enabled Wilson to tie the Russian Revolution to his request for a declaration of war.

Wilson was one of the best-educated, most literate and knowledgeable men to hold the presidency.  When he made this statement, he was in possession of all the information held on the subject by the United States government.  Yet, before the year was over, Russia had fallen under the control of one of the darkest tyrannies in human history.  Perhaps he took solace from the fact that the summit of Russia’s new political structure “was not in fact Russian in origin”.  Karl Marx was German, after all.

At the other end of the dark history of the Soviet Union, we have this prediction from Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent historian, who told us in 1982: “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”  I believe this comment was intended to put Ronald Reagan in his place.  When Reagan was asked about his desired outcome for U.S.-Soviet relations, he said “We win.  They lose.”  This lack of sophistication had to be answered, and Professor Schlesinger lent his prestige to remind us that a rube may become president but he is still a rube.  By the end of the decade, the Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union was no more.

The list could go on.  Eminent, learned individuals with access to the best available information allow their hopes or their agendas to cloud their vision.  And there sits Edmund Burke in his London room with a quill, an ink well, and some paper, turning limited but accurate information and a profound understanding of human affairs into insights whose depth we can still admire after 225 years.