Friday | October 16, 2009

Every now and then I re-read works of enduring value. One such is Edmund Burke’s “Reflec­tions on the Revolution in France”. The title, much longer when first published, provides context for his opposition to the French revolution.

The title page continues: “and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event in a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman in Paris.” Cheerful reception of the Paris ‘events’ — as he referred to them — by some in London distressed him. Burke is generally thought of as modern conservatism’s founder.

An enduring aspect of “Reflections” may be summed up simply: while demolition is easy it is rather difficult to build, construct or re-construct. One need not be ideologically a conservative, to discern the insight and contemporary relevance of some of his ideas to Jamaica’s debate on management of our affairs in this period of economic crisis.

Contrivance of wisdom

Government he said, “is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.” This of course may be contrasted to the view of government as necessary evil, tolerated purely because human nature has its overwhelmingly selfish, sinister side. Writing in 1789 we must forgive him for speaking only of ‘men’.

That done, we might observe the basic idea: politicians — both opposition and governing — with primary temporary responsibility for our governance, even if they themselves are not possessed of wisdom, ought at minimum to be mindful of the wisdom of the ages. Burke provides an interesting standard for judging the acts of politicians.

Speculative benevolence

“A man full of warm, speculative benevolence”, he says “may wish his society otherwise con­stituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

I imagine, apart from ubiquitous opinion surveys, we, in modern 21st century Jamaica, might have no quarrel with this set of criteria for grading our political elite’s performance: good intentions are never enough.

Queries

But the following raises another set of questions: “Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure — but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little tempo­rary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.”

Our concern ought not to be fo­cused purely on matters of bread and butter, the bottom line and powerful vested interest — the state is more than that and must be respected. The ordinary citizen’s interest is indeed vested but never normally powerful except in the revolutionary situation Burke abhorred.

Government and people, governors and governed in this contract must be considered with some reverence because “it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society.”

Here is a vision of society and state in which arrangements reveal a contract among the dead, the living and the yet unborn. Sung and unsung heroes, freedom fighters, elders and nature poets, though from our past, they too are parties to this contract with us — governors and gov­erned — as are future generations.

This we may view as the call to cultural and environmental maintenance, wise, prudent, non-generationally burdensome state expenditure, avoidance of corruption, payment of all fairly determined taxation, compliance by all, with all constitutionally determined laws of the land. Does ‘garrison constituency’ have a place in this dispensation?

January 2009: citizens of the March Pen Road community in Spanish Town protest resident Gregory’s extra-judicial killing by Police. © 2009 The GleanerThere are many other aspects of acceptable behaviour that may be teased out of this idea of society as, in part, inter-generational contract. Viewed in this way, our response to the crisis, layoffs, sale of national assets be they Air Jamaica, Jamaica Pegasus or others, decisions about priorities and allocation of loan funds, inputs of competing groups to policy formulation — in ef­fect the social partnership — should all be on the table.

One is led to wonder, really, is this sweet potato pudding in the sky? Perhaps not!