“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”
So wrote Edmund Burke, perhaps the greatest political mind these Isles have produced. Like his many other adages, this one builds on the past to prophesy the future.
What we are witnessing today isn’t so much the diminution of liberty but its corruption: too little of it where it’s vital, too much where it’s harmful. Modernity can’t find the right balance because it looks down on the past with contempt.
Yet many political realities we take for granted today were born in the Middle Ages. That the rulers as well as the ruled are to be subject to legal and moral restraints is one such reality, and perhaps the most important one.
While in the Hellenic world every new official document expanded the public domain at the expense of the individual, the great legal charters of the mediaeval world aimed to protect the individual from the despotism of the rulers. The Charter of Liberties, Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were only the culmination of this development; its beginnings go back centuries earlier.
Tracing them back step by step, we’ll arrive at their provenance in the Christian doctrine of the autonomous individual as the focus of earthly life. While early Christians didn’t use the term ‘human rights’, they wouldn’t have been unduly bothered had an intrepid stranger explained what the term meant. By contrast, Plato or Aristotle would have thought the stranger not so much intrepid as mad. People to them only had rights as citizens, not as mere human beings.
The modern system of representation has ancient roots as well, and it was from barons’ councils that our modern parliaments have evolved. In pre-Norman England it was the Witenagemot, the assembly of the kingdom’s leading nobles, convening after a king’s death to choose a successor. That was, to name one instance, how Harold Godwinson took the throne, which he then lost to a Norman arrow in 1066.
The same can be said about the system of adjudication and property protection, whose historical antecedents go back to the Old Testament but whose political embodiment was mediaeval. Above all, during the Middle Ages the individual could feel relatively secure behind the wall of local institutions patterned on the family. Parish, village, guild, monastery, cooperative, neighbourhood and even the family itself had their autonomy generally respected.
Originally created mostly for the purpose of keeping people safe from encroachment by central government, in time such institutions assumed the role of the formulator, educator and custodian of the social and moral order. It was such institutions that gave physical shape to the three pillars on which, according to Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.
The social and moral order maintained by the church and familial institutions was by definition conservative – its origin was assumed to have been derived from the word of God, and that word wasn’t subject to change. For the same reason, the church is (or rather ought to be) ipso facto a conservative institution – its function is to preserve the tradition that’s not only two millennia old but is also based on eternal and immutable truths.
Politically too, the church either has to eschew progressivism or betray its own function in earthly life, that of acting as social adhesive, moral judge and mediator of salvation. The first means staying intertwined with secular society; the second, rising above it; the third, eventually leaving it behind.
While the second and third are self-explanatory, the first in the mediaeval world meant mainly ensuring that the patchwork quilt of numerous, and often competing, familial groups wouldn’t threaten social cohesion. The danger was inherent: it could be assumed with certainty that various groups would at times pursue clashing ends.
Whenever their secular interests were pulling them apart, the church would step in to remind, say, the warring clans that at the highest possible level they had more to bring them together than to tear them apart. Without this moderating, conservative role played by the church, familial institutions would never have added up to a cohesive society.
The political realm outside that familial order was always fluid and tactical in its modus operandi. Rooted not in ideology but in expedience and custom, it wasn’t so much chiselled in stone as drawn on quicksand. While personal relationships within a family clan were constant, the political relationships among various elements of the feudal political order changed all the time.
Such fluidity wasn’t then, nor is now, contrary to real conservatism – it is in fact its essential characteristic. Burke said as much when commenting that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation”.
Change was aplenty in feudal times: a vassal could become stronger than his lord, or the latter richer and more powerful than his prince. The formal bonds among them might have survived the shifts, but the vessels would be empty – the contents were no longer there.
Geographic demarcation was equally fluid: a lord could switch his allegiance from one prince to another, taking his land into another domain. Or else he could become a prince himself, claiming new lands and rearranging the political geography of his region.
Thus no nations could have appeared, at any rate not in our modern sense of territorial, political, economic, legal, cultural, ethnic and linguistic unity. The genitive designation of the Holy Roman Empire as that ‘of the German Peoples’ referred to religious and cultural commonality only, not to an entity definable in clearly drawn geographical terms. Even England, whose geographic limits are defined naturally, remained an agglomerate of independent provinces throughout the Middle Ages.
Weak or at least limited central government had neither the strength nor the inclination to encroach upon the autonomy of local institutions. Though it sometimes had to regard them as competitors and act accordingly, an all-out attack was unthinkable until a mighty absolute state appeared and began to put its foot down.
The triad of state, church and family (along with family-like institutions), with the last two at least holding their own against the first, was then destroyed. The state emerged victorious. And once the protective wall of intermediate institutions was swept out of the way, the state’s power over the individual could be reliably predicted to gravitate towards becoming absolute at some point.
The conclusion is clear: the social and moral order of Christendom is incompatible with a political triumph of central over local institutions. Since such a triumph always involves the subjugation of the personal to the collective, and therefore some enslavement of the individual, it could only be achieved at a cost to such institutions.
The ultimate cost was their demise, which was the levy no traditional state was prepared to pay. For the modern state, however, it was cheap at the price.
Modern democracy is inseparable from central government riding roughshod over local pluralism. Strip the word ‘democracy’, as used today, of its armoured shell of demagoguery, and it becomes synonymous with limitless centralisation, leaving people unprotected from the encroachments of an impersonal, omnipotent state run by an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy.
Hence a democracy unaccountable to a transcendent authority and uncontested by competing forms of government is incompatible with the traditional moral and social order in the West. That’s what Burke meant and what we have forgotten.
The upshot is clear: read Edmund Burke, ladies and gentlemen – and weep.