50 Big Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupré

Author:Ben Dupré
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9781849165600
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2009-09-02T23:00:00+00:00

The democracy of the dead Tradition, wrote G.K. Chesterton with gentle mockery, is the ‘democracy of the dead’, which involves ‘giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors’. For conservative traditionalists, however, ‘being disqualified by the accident of death’ is no disqualification at all. Burke sees the accumulated wisdom of tradition, broadly interpreted to include the sum of the customs and practices that together form our culture, as a trust to be reverently passed from generation to generation. He agrees with Hobbes and Rousseau that society is a contract, but in his view the agreement is honoured not through fear of the state’s absolute power but because it is in essence a harmonious ‘partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. The steady progress of society is guided by this collective wisdom, which inevitably exceeds the intelligence of any individual and which invariably counsels restraint when it comes to social change. As Gladstone later noted, conservatives (unlike liberals) share a basic ‘distrust of the people tempered by fear’. They are inclined to believe that humans are naturally selfish and base; and hence that political and social practices and institutions that have stood the test of time – ‘the pleasing illusions which make power gentle and obedience liberal’ – are required to curb these destructive instincts.

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