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His arsenal included no un-British Activities Committee. He went to the bottom of French revolutionary ideas, explained them in terms his countrymen could understand, sharpened his own opposed principles, and expressed them with clarity and passion. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his naivete, believed that man had been all good in "a state of nature," and that he was only corrupted by wrong social institutions. Sweep these away, substitute institutions blueprinted by "reason," and man emerges perfect or, at least, readily perfectible.
Burke saw man in "a state of nature" as a prey to his own evil, violence and greed. Civilization was the process of holding the evil in check by treasuring experience from generation to generation, slowly building upon those advances which seemed in harmony with God's will as to human order. "Temporary possessors and life-renters [must not be] unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity," Burke wrote. "By [the] unprincipled facility of changing the state as often . . . as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with another. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer."
Burke's conservatism was universal in its application. In one of the most famous of all trials, he prosecuted Warren Hastings for colossal graft and misrule as Britain's Governor-General of India. But what Burke, the Anglican, detested most in Hastings' record was the Governor-General's roughshod trampling of Hindu tradition and religious ceremonial. Burke feared that Hastings, by destroying India's tradition, might destroy the soul of a civilization.
The Rights of Man. Burke's conservatism accepted and insisted upon the necessity of change. But change, said Burke, flows from the law of Providence; it should come as the result of "a need generally felt," and not by ukase based upon abstract theorizing. Conservatives can accept change as a matter of expediency, free of doctrinaire compulsion, because conservatives understand ultimate ends. "Conservatism," Kirk writes, "never is more admirable than when it accepts changes that it disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation, and the impetuous Burke, of all men, did most to establish that principle."
What of the rights of man, which Burke's erstwhile friend, Tom Paine, was proclaiming from Paris? Burke's answer, Kirk observes, is pertinent to an age which seriously debates the preposterous extremes of the United Nations' Universal