The Obsolsescence of Virtue

This is a paper I wrote this morning. It's unedited (as is traditional of my papers), very shoddily organized, and is written in a style more suited to pseudo-academia than entertainment, but it's about conservatism and virtue and modernity, so because I've been absent for a while I thought I might post it. After the cut.


Edmund Burke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau share an obsession with virtue, but it seems initially that that is all they share. Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, essentially desecrates the idea of enlightenment culture, disparaging the inauthenticity of modern social structures. Burke, in contrast, glorifies the aristocratic society of France and denigrates the extreme leveling of the classes practiced by the revolutionaries in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Despite their vastly different ideas of whence it is derived, both authors dramatically mourn the loss of virtue and criticize and prefigure the decline of society. Burke’s insistence on reasoned conservatism in the face of radical change seems like a watered-down and misguided version of Rousseau’s reactionary opinions, and the two authors’ iconic nostalgia prefigure the very real decline of virtue in the modern era.
Rousseau claims in his Discourse that mankind’s fondness for the arts and sciences have made societies soft and weak. He gives examples like Rome, “formerly the temple of virtue,” which, “after the likes of Ovid, Catullus, and Martial…became the theater of crime, the disgrace of nations, and the plaything of barbarians” (Rousseau 6). He suggests that rather than leave behind poems and equations, virtue is all society need be remembered for. To illustrate this, he employs the example of Sparta, where “‘men are born virtuous, and the very air of the country inspires virtue.’ Nothing of her inhabitants is left to us except the memory of their heroic actions. Are such monuments worth less to us than the curious marbles that Athens has left us?” (Rousseau 8) What good are the arts, Rousseau asks, if they cause the corruption of society? Complex civilization breeds homogeneity, and “without ceasing, common customs are followed, never one’s own lights” (Rousseau 4). In striving for a more enlightened society, we have abandoned the ability to judge right and wrong for ourselves, falling into a mass hysteria of mass consciousness. We have structures for the sake of structures, order for the sake of order, and “if there are still some [real citizens] left to us, dispersed in our abandoned countryside, they perish there indigent and despised” (Rousseau 17). Rousseau describes an era of inauthenticity, where society has “the appearances of all the virtues without having any” (Rousseau 4). He suggests that “these abuses come from…the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the degradation of virtues” (Rousseau 17). Good men are not respected, he says, and an artificial society that loses sight of its own good cannot last for long.
Amazingly, many of Rousseau’s auguries for the fall of civilization occur during the French Revolution. The aristocracy is punished, the mob of peasants rules the streets, and the society of France is turned upside-down. Edmund Burke, however, does not hail this rebellion as the fated triumph of virtue over verisimilitude, but bewails the fall of what he considers to have been virtue. He elevates the customs that Rousseau disapproves of to a lifestyle, saying that the prejudice, the practice of preserving traditions of the past, “renders a man’s virtue his habit” (Burke 183). Burke asserts that virtue lies in practice, and that the forsaking of the customary system would destroy it. The very concept of inequality that Rousseau declares to degrade virtues is exalted by Burke; he says that “the levelers…only change and pervert the natural order of things” (Burke 138). Civilization is too important to change much. Burke seems to agree that and excess of nuance has hurt the spirit of France, and he, like Rousseau, regrets the triumph of “sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators” (Burke 170) and vanquished “that proud submission, that dignified obedience” (Burke 170). This is, perhaps, precisely what Rousseau meant when discussing “the appearances of all the virtues.” The “age of chivalry” (Burke 170) of which Burke laments the destruction is hardly the sober virtue of Sparta. Burke reminisces about Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, “glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy” (Burke 169). It is the aesthetics of the ancient regime, the strict reverence for nobility qua nobility that he appreciates. “To make us love our country,” he says, “our country ought to be lovely” (Burke 172).
This is the central difference between Burke and Rousseau. Rousseau despises appearances; he faults mannered falsity for the corruption of mores, whereas Burke posits that it is the appearance of sublimity in society that gives society stability. Doing things because they are traditional, for Burke, is what maintains order, while for Rousseau the acceptance of petty customs clouds the real end of virtue. What both seem to reject are the terms of the enlightenment. Kant defines enlightenment with the phrase sapere aude, “have courage to use your own understanding,” but Rousseau and Burke derive different connotations of this. Rousseau’s contempt for all the arts and sciences reveals his complaint against sapere aude: he objects not to the courage but to the realization of that courage in the pursuit of knowledge. “Answer me, I say,” he demands of the philosophers, “you from whom we have received so much sublime knowledge; if you had never taught us any of these things, would we therefore have been any less numerous, less well governed, less formidable, less flourishing or more perverse?” (Rousseau 12) He denies the usefulness of haphazard curiosity, desiring to return to a state of nature that, however fictional, embraced individual instinct above overbearing rationality. Burke objects to the audacity of enlightenment more than to its specific practices. He does not disparage knowledge, but rather wishes that “learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor [the church], and not aspired to be the master” (Burke 173). These differently-aimed criticisms exhibit two different kinds of conservatism, Burke’s modern conservatism that is skeptical of change, and Rousseau’s reactionary conservatism that rejects the progress and utility of all modern thought.
In a sense, Burke proves Rousseau right: the decadence of enlightenment society in France cannot maintain its excesses, and the bubble of the chivalric sublime must pop. At the same time, what Rousseau advocates is admittedly contrived, “the evil is not so great as it could have become” (Rousseau 17). There is a resignation with which he hopes that “ordinary men...[do not] chase after a reputation that would escape [them]” (Rousseau 21). Both Rousseau and Burke are fighting the juggernaut specter of modernity, and only by freezing or even reversing time can their ideals of virtue be salvaged. It is for this reason that conservatism has adopted the ideology of nostalgia, the belief that “old establishments are tried by their effects” (Burke 285), that “individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages” (Burke 183). There is, of course, knowledge to be drawn from the past. There is, of course, purity in whatever the state of nature may be. But just as naïve purity yields to ambitious curiosity, so does methodical enlightenment gives way to passionate romanticism, and the angry mob can always bring down the proud standard of ancient virtue.