This is the strangest video I've posted on this blog.
Oct 6– Reflections On The Revolution In France by Edmund Burke (1790)
Summary: Revolution bad! Subservience good!
Commentary: I'm surprised we don't hear more of Burke in conservative circles today. He's sometimes regarded as a "father of conservatism" but he's not quoted every 30 seconds like the Founding Fathers are in the US, or even Tocqueville. You could change like 3 words in some of these sentences, and make them exactly like how conservatives describe those godless socialists today.
This is the third or fourth selection from this piece, and my main takeaway is still the same. Burke is really upset about the fall of the monarchy. Not that the aristocracy were brutally murdered (he's upset about it, to be sure, but it's not the primary concern) or that such brutality was the method of a good cause (the ends can't justify the means if the ends are bad). He really wants us to still have kings and queens and such, and the world is a worse place for all this new fangled democracy, republicanism, etc.
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!
Dude is absolutely committed to proper rank, roles for the sexes, etc. 100% on board with servitude=freedom and such nonsense.
My initial assumption was that he was an important noble just trying to keep his place, but he doesn't even look that important (from my admittedly light research). He appears to have had to actually earn a living (as a writer) before being elected to Parliament (in his 30s). His family were nobility, but not super high up, and appears to have been on their way to not even that in his lifetime.
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