From the Mouths of Irishmen

Since St. Patrick's Day is on the way, I think it only fit to share some wonderful thoughts from another Irishman.

I have been reading massive selections from Reflections of the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, the Irish politician, in my Western Civilization class. It is a superb study of politics and humankind and is worth far more attention than it receives in modern political and educational circles. I have come across many quotes which I love, but this one particularly struck a cord. Though he wrote in the late 1700s, Burke's words describe perfectly the problem with modern man, politics, and especially education.

"This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast."

It is worth noting that though he was a thorough Westerner and Protestant, Burke has here an understanding of the Orthodox nous, a faculty which he calls the "heart" and C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, calls the chest. He does not mean that the Revolutionaries have pushed away emotions and feelings, but that they have "stopped up" the ways in which a human being understands the most fundamental parts of himself, such as his "nature" and the "sympathies" he is supposed to have toward each thing. Throughout the book, in fact, Burke approaches government with the same attitude which the Orthodox church possesses. Earlier in the book, he describes the British government thus: "In what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete."