Edmund Burke, Meet Edmund Bug

Dublin, Ireland — Edmund Burke in bronze appropriately gazes at the world surrounded inappropriately by overgrowth at the front gate of Trinity College.

During the Covid lockdowns, school officials publicly reasoned that transforming the tiny, tidy, and trimmed lawns around the statues of Burke and his friend Oliver Goldsmith into an uncut half-acre might help save the planet. Trinity Senior Dean John Parnell explained that “lawn-mowing, ground preparation, and pesticide control can disturb important insects that feed and nest in the soil.”

Edmund Burke, meet Edmund Bug.

Trinity’s favoritism of an imaginary future in which insects fend off the apocalypse over its very real past shows the degree to which its famous graduate clashes with prevailing fads and fashions.

Burke, of course, identified a greater threat to people than cut grass long before French revolutionaries guillotined the king and queen, displayed Princess de Lamballe’s head on a pike, and even murdered weeks, days, and seconds on the clock and calendar through their numerological obsession with the number ten.

“When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France. “From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.”

The November 1790 publication of that book effectively marked the start of conservatism, a word that entered the lexicon in a political sense shortly thereafter just as “left” and “right” became a part of common usage because of the Jacobin–Monarchist seating cliques in the Estates General. Burke in the 1790s very much sounded like his heirs in the 2020s when he wrote that “to provide us in our necessities is not in the power of government.” During the Age of Reason, he countered that past practice trumped schemes and experiments. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,” he wrote in his most famous work, “and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.” Certainly, conservative ideas and thinkers preceded Burke. But the ability to apply labels familiar to modern political observers upon past political actors eased because of Burke and the revolution he lamented.

Steven Blackmore referred to the French Revolution in the Ian Crowe-edited The Enduring Edmund Burke as “the first totalitarian event in history.” Without using such a term, Burke understood the purely ideologized essence of the revolutionaries before others did. He noted the irony that revolutionaries touting individual rights inevitably centralized power, that so many speaking for “the people” privately exhibited contempt for them, and that true believers in an idea proved impervious to reason.

He came to conservatism not from the cradle. As a Whig with a track record of highlighting the injustices of colonialism in India, Ireland, and America, the longtime member of the British parliament lectured the enthusiasts of the French Revolution with the credibility of a friend and not the condescension of an outsider. Nevertheless, heretofore political allies ostracized rather than listened. Burke understood whither the French Revolution — a premature anti-Jacobin, if you will — and for this, fanatics noted this one sin against their political faith as eclipsing his regard for slavery as a moral evil, opposition to capital punishment, and career that essentially put on trial not merely Bengal governor Warren Hastings but the very nature of British colonialism. As Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bari Weiss, Joe Rogan, and Tulsi Gabbard learned in recent years, to veer from part of the cause means total anathematization.

A fading Burke prepared for worse than pariah status.

“Fearing that triumphant Jacobins would treat his corpse as Cromwell’s had been dishonored at the Restoration — that his head and limbs might be impaled on some Temple Bar — he left instruction for his body to be buried secretly, somewhere in Beaconsfield church or churchyard, and to this day no man knows the precise spot where Burke lies,” Russell Kirk wrote in Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered.

The Jacobins neither triumphed in the United Kingdom nor desecrated his hidden corpse as Burke feared. But Burke’s bead on the future anticipated that the fanaticism of Jacobins — whether they called themselves Wobblies, Bolsheviks, Weathermen, or Antifa — permitted neither forgiveness nor forgetting. During 2020, this meant statuary defacement in Washington, D.C., and, at his alma mater in Dublin, encirclement on an unkempt lawn that, if on private property in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, would coax periodic nuisance-ordinance citations. As Trinity Dean Parnell put it in 2020, the uncut weeds and browned grass “will send out a strong signal that Trinity College Dublin is not bound by the past but engaged with the future.”

Such a sentiment would have certainly struck Burke as an oxymoron. “People will not look forward to posterity,” Reflections on the Revolution in France explained, “who never look backward to their ancestors.”