On my way to becoming a monarchist I read Edmund Burke’s, “Reflections on the Revolution in France.” Besides being an excellent showcase of Burke’s masterful use of language, Reflections is also the first book I read that really tried to explain certain traditional ideas about power, nationhood, and the origin of the state. These ideas are hardly amenable to being communicated, because they are concerned with very deep and almost inexpressible intuitions about the basic realities of political organization. Nevertheless, Burke, de Maistre, Cortes, and others all attempted to explain these guiding ideas of traditional thought.

I will be the first to admit that I am no equal to these great predecessors in the matter of explaining to rationalists the origin of the Church, the State, and human society. Nevertheless, I have been moved to provide a very brief comparison between the views of the revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries on these fundamental assumptions.

The Enlightenment Critique

Recently I had the great misfortune to listen to part of a lecture by Isaiah Berlin on Joseph de Maistre, “Enemy of the Enlightenment.” In his snarky leftist way, Berlin summed up de Maistre’s (and by extension Burke’s) view on stable political foundations: the foundation of our political institutions cannot in the end be subject to reason or rational scrutiny, because this scrutiny in the end teaches us things which are horrible or disturbing, and removes the mystery which is needed in order to preserve the sense of the sacred. In other words, de Maistre’s position is that rational inquiry into the origin of monarchy or the state is a bit like asking your parents how and when you were conceived – there is an answer, and a perfectly logical one, but it is the height of bad taste and impropriety to even pose such a question. Demanding a blow-by-blow account of the events which led to your own creation is something which you should avoid, more for your own sake and peace of mind than for any other reason.

Berlin then goes on to caricature de Maistre’s position as “making the darkest, most mysterious, impenetrable myth the basis of government.” The crowd attending his lecture of course burst into snarky laughter at this quip. At this point I turned off the lecture and started thinking…

Berlin is merely one of the many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment scoffers (I refuse to call them “thinkers”) who has challenged the “superstitious” character of pre-Enlightenment society. Over and over these hyenas have laughed down (and in many cases killed) traditional men who have tried to explain what is almost ineffable. Denunciations of “priestcraft” and “obscurantism” resound throughout the debates of the French Revolution. The critique is clear: “you can’t explain why we should have a monarchy or keep the Church involved in political decision-making because you are ignorant, dumb, superstitious, or can’t admit that religion is merely a cloak for brute power, enslavement, and oppression.” It is as if we are hiding something, something we’re afraid to admit – that we are hiding power grabs and brutality behind a shield of miracles which confirmed God’s movement in the founding of kingdoms and hierarchies.

Such a supposedly “rational” attack on traditional ideas of statecraft can be traced to Machiavelli, who quite frankly claimed to see through the myth of Moses in the Bible and Cyrus the Great in the writings of Xenophon. In both cases, Machiavelli claimed, the narrative presented to us is nothing more than propaganda made up after the fact to justify the outcomes of very secular power struggles.

I would happily contend that Machiavelli was doing nothing more than speculating, as indeed there is zero evidence in the historical record to back up his supposed insights. Everyone who has followed him since has relied upon the exact same (unchallenged) assumptions to make their case for destroying hierarchy and monarchy.

For example, Rousseau and Locke both posit an imaginary state of nature in which men were “free” (they differ on details) and chose to give up some or all of their freedom in order to live in organized human societies. While they draw somewhat different conclusions from this idea, the basic crux of their argument rests on a figment of their imagination. There is no scientific observation or logical deduction, just wishful thinking. “I don’t like x about the current state of affairs, and since it offends my sensibilities, it must somehow not be natural, ergo humans must have lived without it somewhere in the mists of primordial time.” Even Voltaire famously couldn’t pass up the temptation to quip, “how do you know that?” to the basic axioms of Rousseau’s proposed history.

The whole Enlightenment project thus becomes a simply substitution of one unverified myth for another, albeit one which is amenable to destructive revolutionary forces. No ground has been gained. The mythology of the philosophes went unchallenged in many cases, partly because those who objected and were in a position to bankrupt its progress in the here-and-now were the first targets of the murderous revolutionaries (kings, nobles, officers, and pious peasants a la Vendee). The revolution did not gain its stranglehold on our world by superior argument or flawless logic, but by bloodshed.

The Revolution in all its stages then consolidated its gains by telling people not to question its origins, and much of modern academia still sidesteps or dismisses many embarrassing episodes in revolutionary history. A perfect example would be Madame de Stael’s book on the French Revolution, where she waves off the gratuitous bloodshed and obvious conspiracies of 1789 to 1793 as “the will of the people” or “excesses.” When James Billington wrote his invaluable treatise Fire in the Minds of Men, he called out this exact conspiracy of silence among his fellow “scholars.” In essence he asks, “why can’t anyone bring themselves to look at these mountains of primary sources which explicitly lay out the occult, speculative, mythical, and conspiratorial elements without which the Revolution would never have happened?” Revolutionaries think they can forever tear down their opponents with “logic” and “reason”, but will happily send to the guillotine or the gulag anyone who dares to do the same to them.

A New Conundrum for the Revolution’s Narrative

My purpose is not merely to call out revolutionary hypocrisy. Instead I want to 1) make a very brief defense of traditional origin myths and 2) point out how the Revolution has shot itself in the foot from within the walls of its own stronghold.

1. The very simple fact is that life, the cosmos, the answer to the big “why” questions, is irreducible. No matter how minute our analysis, no matter how small of a slice we study, we come again and again to unfathomable mysteries which are simply baked into the universe. We can explain in completely material terms the process of how two people fall in love, but if someone asks why humans have pheromones or produce chemicals in response to physical touch, the answer gets lost in an unsatisfying jumble of speculative Darwinist gobbledy-gook. The ultimate questions, like “why does the universe exist at all?”, are unanswerable without reference to something beyond the thing in question. In order to make sense of history, the universe, Man, or anything else, we ultimately must refer to the transcendent or fall into complete and hypocritical skepticism (this argument is a bit beyond the purpose of this article, but I believe it is within the grasp of most people on its face). There is a mystery which lies behind everything, and no amount of science or philosophy can unravel it. Naïve assertions that “science will find the answers someday” are unsatisfying and do not express anything other than a refusal to acknowledge the mystery that religious people have apprehended the whole time. We are thus back to using myth and mystery to explain why things are the way they are (or were); there is no lab that can duplicate or observe the origin of the universe. Burke is thus vindicated: the mythical foundations of the state, its God-given power, the anointing of the monarchs by the Church, the sacred quality of a healthy society, are all rooted in the transcendent, which we sense and apprehend but cannot comprehend. We cannot speak exhaustively about these things because we are finite and flawed; either we accept this in humility and bless God for giving us these things, or we engage in a futile attempt to rebel against the given-ness of the world.
2. Unfortunately for revolutionaries, their own skepticism and inquiry led them not to a dream-like past of primitive and anarchic men (which has never been seen or left any traces), but into the fever dream of Darwinian evolution. Marxists have given up on the myth of the peaceful, utopian past shattered by the introduction of private property. Revolutionaries now admit that life before civilization had more than its share of conflict, that cracked skulls and deposits of spearheads buried in glaciers really do not vindicate the older Enlightenment myths. Man is now spoken of in terms of “lizard brain,” “outmoded instincts”, “primitive taboos,” etc. Because the real goal of revolutionaries was never to get us back to a state of nature…

…it was always a way to justify upending the order of nature. Kings and priests are extremely natural – crowns, vestments, and temples conjure up instinctual reactions in everyone. No material explanation of a cathedral can do any justice to simply standing in front of it, participating in it as a conduit to the other World. No abstraction about the height or alignment of the stones in the edifice can do justice to our gut reactions. It’s beyond description.

This is where all Enlightenment/revolutionary attacks on Burke et al. ultimately break down. Burke cannot describe the deep darkness of the origins of the British monarchy to their satisfaction, but they are not in any privileged position to foist their own ideas on him. He has already made peace with the given-ness of the political and cosmic order, which is apprehended, not comprehended. They cannot understand him because they are full of hatred for the state of the universe – and though they could not touch him, safe in England, they could assassinate millions of other Europeans who shared his convictions.

If revolutionaries were really so smart and logical, they would have talked us into following their program. We all know that they resorted to force, which is exactly what they accused the kings and churches of doing.