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Edmund Burke: I am Edmund Burke, and we have arrived at Part Three, in which Mr. Paine and I are expected to resolve our differences or at least to shout them at sufficient volume that the audience feels something has been settled. I have spent two episodes being told that my entire intellectual legacy is an elaborate justification for landlordism. I intend to respond to that charge with the patience and good humor it deserves, which is to say, very little of either.
Thomas Paine: And I am Thomas Paine, and we have arrived at the point in the argument where Burke’s defenses are sufficiently exhausted that the underlying position becomes visible. The underlying position, as it has always been, is that the people who currently hold power and property should continue to hold it, that the pace of any challenge to that arrangement should be set by the people most comfortable with the current arrangement, and that anyone who finds that insufficiently urgent simply lacks the philosophical sophistication to appreciate the wisdom of patience. I have been insufficiently sophisticated since 1776 and I have no intention of improving.
Edmund Burke: Your natural rights philosophy is a system of conclusions in search of a foundation. You assert rights as though asserting them loudly enough creates them. What is the basis of a natural right? Where does it reside? Who enforces it when the state that is supposed to protect it has been dismantled by your revolutionary colleagues? I have a rather sharp practical answer to the question of what happens to natural rights when the institutions designed to protect them are swept aside. It involves a great deal of blood and very little liberty. France, Mr. Paine. The answer is France.
Thomas Paine: And I have a rather sharp practical answer to the question of what happens to people whose rights are not recognized by the institutions designed to protect the privileges of others. It involves a great deal of poverty and very little justice and it has been the condition of the majority of British people for the majority of British history. Your institutions protected rights very selectively, Burke. They protected the rights of the men who built the institutions and the men who inherited from the men who built the institutions. The rights of a corset-maker’s son from Norfolk were somewhat less robustly defended.
Edmund Burke: You have been a corset-maker’s son from Norfolk for approximately two hundred and fifty years and it has not diminished the force of the point, I grant you that. But the National Health Service that you would invoke as evidence of what the British state can achieve when it tries was not built by pamphlet. It was built by Aneurin Bevan, who was a pragmatist working within the existing constitutional framework, using the institutions of parliamentary democracy that you and your revolutionary colleagues treated as mere obstacles to be cleared. He did not abolish the state and start again. He used the state as it existed and reformed it. That is the method I have always advocated and it is the method that has actually produced the best results in British history.
Thomas Paine: Aneurin Bevan also described the Conservative Party as lower than vermin, which suggests he had some sympathy for my general approach to the ruling class. But the difference between us is not that I want to burn everything down. I have never advocated burning everything down. Rights of Man advocates for representative government, for progressive taxation, for public provision of education and relief of poverty. It is not an arsonist’s manual. It is a remarkably detailed policy program that Britain implemented in fragments over a hundred and fifty years and then began systematically dismantling after 1979 in the name of economic freedom for the people who were already free.
Edmund Burke: The dismantling after 1979 is a genuinely interesting question, and I will tell you something that may surprise you. I have considerable sympathy for the diagnosis that Thatcherism applied the wrong remedies to real problems and destroyed things of genuine value in the process. The manufacturing communities, the trade unions as institutions of working-class solidarity, the sense of regional identity and civic pride, these were things worth preserving and the manner of their destruction was reckless and ideologically driven in precisely the way I have always criticized. But the solution is not to reach back to your abstract rights and your land value taxes. The solution is to rebuild what was lost through the same gradual, patient, institution-building process by which it was built in the first place.
Thomas Paine: Patient. Patient! You want the people who are sleeping in their cars because they cannot afford rent to be patient. You want the thirty-year-old who will never own a home to be patient. You want the person waiting two years for a hospital procedure to be patient. How long is the patience supposed to last, Burke? How many generations of gradual incremental improvement before the people who are actually suffering are permitted to conclude that the incremental approach is not working fast enough to reach them?
Edmund Burke: Impatience is precisely how you get the solutions that make everything worse. Every shortcut in political history, every revolution, every dramatic rupture with the accumulated experience of the past, has been justified by exactly the argument you are making now. The suffering is real, the urgency is genuine, and therefore we cannot wait for the slow work of reform. And the result, every single time, is that the people who were suffering before the shortcut find themselves suffering differently and usually more after it.
Thomas Paine: THAT IS A COUNSEL OF DESPAIR DRESSED AS WISDOM! YOU ARE TELLING PEOPLE THAT NOTHING CAN BE DONE QUICKLY ENOUGH TO HELP THEM AND THEY SHOULD THEREFORE ACCEPT THEIR CONDITION WITH APPROPRIATE PHILOSOPHICAL RESIGNATION!
Edmund Burke: I AM TELLING THEM THAT THE FASTEST ROUTE TO MAKING THEIR CONDITION WORSE IS TO TRUST THE PERSON HANDING OUT PAMPHLETS ABOUT HOW SIMPLE THE SOLUTION IS!
Thomas Paine: THE HOUSING CRISIS IS NOT COMPLICATED! TAX THE LAND! BUILD THE HOUSES! STOP LETTING PROPERTY BE USED AS A FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT BY PEOPLE WHO HAVE THIRTY OF THEM! THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE, BURKE, IT IS ARITHMETIC!
Edmund Burke: YOU CANNOT SIMPLY TAX AND BUILD YOUR WAY TO A FUNCTIONING SOCIETY! YOU NEED THE INSTITUTIONS, THE LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, THE COMMUNITY STRUCTURES, THE ACCUMULATED UNDERSTANDING OF HOW PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIVE IN PLACES! ALL OF WHICH YOU WOULD HAPPILY SACRIFICE ON THE ALTAR OF YOUR PRINCIPLES!
Thomas Paine: I WOULD SACRIFICE NOTHING THAT SERVES THE PEOPLE! THE THINGS YOU WANT TO PRESERVE DO NOT SERVE THE PEOPLE! THEY SERVE THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THE THINGS!
Edmund Burke: THE PEOPLE ARE ATTACHED TO THOSE THINGS! THAT IS WHAT YOU HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD AND WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND! ORDINARY PEOPLE HAVE LOYALTIES AND ATTACHMENTS THAT ARE NOT REDUCIBLE TO MATERIAL INTERESTS AND YOUR INABILITY TO COMPREHEND THAT IS THE CENTRAL FAILURE OF YOUR ENTIRE PHILOSOPHY!
Thomas Paine: AND YOUR REVERENCE FOR THOSE ATTACHMENTS IS THE REASON BRITAIN HAS A HOUSE OF LORDS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! AN UNELECTED CHAMBER OF LEGISLATORS! SOME OF WHOM ARE THERE BECAUSE THEIR ANCESTORS WERE PARTICULARLY USEFUL TO A MEDIEVAL KING! THIS IS YOUR ACCUMULATED WISDOM! THIS IS YOUR INHERITANCE OF THE AGES!
Edmund Burke: THE HOUSE OF LORDS HAS BEEN REFORMED REPEATEDLY AND IMPERFECTLY AND CONTINUES TO REQUIRE REFORM! THAT IS HOW INSTITUTIONS WORK! THEY ARE REFORMED INCREMENTALLY RATHER THAN ABOLISHED IN FAVOR OF WHATEVER A PAMPHLETEER HAS DECIDED IS RATIONAL THIS WEEK!
Thomas Paine: NINE HUNDRED YEARS OF INCREMENTAL REFORM AND YOU STILL HAVE HEREDITARY PEERS! HOW MANY MORE CENTURIES DOES INCREMENTAL REFORM NEED?
Edmund Burke: HOWEVER MANY IT TAKES TO DO IT WITHOUT BREAKING EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE PROCESS!
Thomas Paine: BRITAIN IS ALREADY BROKEN! LOOK AT IT! THE EVIDENCE IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!
Edmund Burke: Britain is strained. Britain is struggling. Britain is not broken. And the difference between those descriptions is precisely the difference between a conservative disposition and a revolutionary one, and it matters enormously which frame you apply.
Thomas Paine: When seven million people are on a waiting list for medical treatment and an entire generation cannot afford to buy a home and real wages have not grown for fifteen years, the word for that is broken, Burke. Calling it strained is not wisdom. It is anesthesia.
Edmund Burke: And calling it broken as a prelude to justifying whatever radical solution happens to be on offer is not diagnosis. It is recruitment.
Thomas Paine: I have been consistent for two hundred and fifty years. The recruitment pitch has not changed because the problem has not changed. That is not ideology. That is evidence.
Edmund Burke: The problem has changed enormously. The specific institutional failures of modern Britain are quite different from the specific institutional failures of eighteenth-century Britain, and applying the same abstract remedy to different specific problems is not evidence-based reasoning. It is the application of a fixed template regardless of circumstance.
Thomas Paine: The underlying cause has not changed. The people who make decisions are the people who benefit from those decisions. The people who suffer the consequences of those decisions are the people who had no say in making them. You can call that eighteenth century or twenty-first century. It is the same problem and it will be the same problem until it is solved, which it will not be by waiting politely for the people causing it to experience a change of heart.
Edmund Burke: And on that characteristically bleak note, I understand we are required to ask the audience to like and subscribe. I do so in the full expectation that anyone who has found this three-part exchange illuminating has almost certainly already concluded that I am right, which is to say they are people of sound judgment, good taste, and admirable historical literacy. The kind of people, in short, who would never have bought a pamphlet from a man who was subsequently imprisoned by his own revolution.
Thomas Paine: And if you have found it illuminating and have somehow arrived at the conclusion that Burke is right, I urge you warmly to like and subscribe, and also to seek some form of qualified assistance, because you have watched a man spend three full episodes defending the House of Lords and the gradual accumulation of institutions that have produced the precise crisis we began by agreeing was a disaster, and you have found that convincing. That is a remarkable achievement in self-deception even by the standards of Burke’s readership.
Edmund Burke: Mr. Paine suggests you seek assistance. This from a man who was imprisoned in France by the very revolutionaries whose principles he championed, who was nearly guillotined by the movement he inspired, who was then abandoned by the American government he had helped create, and who died in poverty in a boarding house in Greenwich Village and was denied a Quaker burial. If this is what success looks like in Mr. Paine’s philosophical system, one shudders to imagine what failure resembles. Like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.
Thomas Paine: And Burke spent his final years writing increasingly frantic pamphlets warning that the apocalypse was coming, was ignored by most of his own party, watched his son die before him, and is remembered primarily by people who want an intellectually respectable reason to keep things exactly as they are. He was the establishment’s philosopher, which is to say he was the philosopher of the people who needed a philosopher least. The future, unlike my colleague, is worth your time. Like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk. And visit AITalkerApp.com to create your own animated conversations.
Edmund Burke: Good day.
Thomas Paine: Good riddance.
