Fanaticism by Zachary R. Goldsmith;

Author:Zachary R. Goldsmith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812298628
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2022-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Moderation: Another Antidote to Fanaticism

Despite the impression that might be given in the foregoing pages, Burke’s writings on the French Revolution are not all shock, outrage, and opprobrium. Constantly—and especially in his letters, including the Reflections, to his French friend Depont—Burke recommends an approach to politics altogether different from fanaticism: moderation. Burke’s moving letter to Depont penned in November 1789 is itself a paean to the virtues of moderation. Burke (1992b) writes that “moderation is a virtue, not only amiable but powerful.” He continues: “It is a disposing, arranging, conciliating, cementing virtue” (16). Such a virtue, Burke insists, is desperately needed in a country like France seeking to adopt a new constitution. Indeed, Burke argues—with reference to the French situation—that, without it, “their acts will taste more of their power than of their wisdom, or their benevolence. Whatever they do will be in extremes; it will be crude, harsh, precipitate” (16). Unlike fanaticism, moderation requires not prophecy but prudence, which Burke calls “the first of virtues” in politics (15). A moderate approach to politics recognizes a “radical infirmity in all human contrivances” and therefore does not seek an elusive perfection in politics (15). Such an approach rejects perfectionism in politics as impossible—and the purported means to achieve this utopian goal as always unacceptable. As Burke reminds us, “An imperfect good is still a good” (15).

As Aurelian Craiutu (2012)—the foremost theorist of the concept of moderation—observes, moderation can be at least partially understood “as a superior form of ‘civility’ and an antithesis to all forms of monist politics” (5; cf. Carrese, 2016). Craiutu continues, “Moderates refuse the posture of historical generalizations and predictions. Anti-perfectionists and fearful of anarchy, they endorse fallibilism as a middle way between radical skepticism and epistemological absolutism, and acknowledge the limits of political action and the imperfection of the human condition” (15). For this reason, the moderate is less a revolutionary than a modest reformer, one who seeks to trim the sails of our common ship only if and where appropriate. Those seeking potentially disruptive changes to our common mode of life must always keep foremost in their minds that in so doing they are dealing with “man in the concrete,” as Burke (1992b) tells us; “it is with common human life, and human actions, you are to be concerned” (13). This central realization mandates, as Burke writes, that political actors “ought not to be so fond of any political object, as not to think the means of compassing it a serious consideration” (13). Further, to responsible political actors, Burke writes, you ought “never [to] wholly separate in your mind the merits of any political question, from the men who are concerned in it” (13). Indeed, the moderate not only recognizes the destructive consequences radical political action often entails in human terms but also its frequent futility in bringing about any positive changes. As Burke (1987) writes in his Reflections, “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years” (147).

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