Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Edmund Burke

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on The Remarkable Edmund Burke. It begins:

It is a mark of how much has changed, how words have changed their meaning, that Edmund Burke who, more than anyone else in the 18th century, defined what conservatism meant, has next to nothing in common with those who call themselves conservatives today. Today’s conservatives think government the enemy of liberty, and public spending at best a necessary evil; Burke thought liberty impossible without government, and public spending better than the expenditures of private wealth. When government spends on public projects, “The poorest man feels his own importance and dignity in it.” When the rich spend on themselves, it “makes the man of humbler rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority and degrades and vilifies his condition.”

This may seem to suggest that Burke wanted to narrow, if not eliminate, the difference between rich and poor. That was the last thing he wanted. Give everyone an equal share in the wealth of the country, you might end up with a reasonably prosperous middle-class, but you would not have the landed aristocracy of 18th century England, the kind of “gentlemen” able to run a country. If this sounds decidedly undemocratic, it is; and Burke makes no apologies. Liberty requires more than individual rights and majority rule. Libery without wisdom and without virtue “is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” Liberty requires order, and order depends upon the existence of what both Burke and Thomas Jefferson called the “natural aristocracy.” Without this aristocracy, “there is no nation.” But what, exactly, beyond the wealth of the the landed aristocracy of England, makes one a member of this “natural aristocracy?” Burke tells us, tells us in a single sentence, a single sentence that would shock to the limits, which I confess are not very great, of every law school teacher teaching legal writing who fails to understand....[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmind Burke.

--Marshal Zeringue