Instead, it is civilized through adopting past values and customs, along with past prejudices.
Yet, he does not believe that we can civilize our sentiments on ungrounded zealous deliverance of justice and righteousness like that of those part of the Revolution. He continues his argument that our natural sentiments can be destructive or civilized, and it is through civilized sentiments that can uphold some degree of order or justice in a society. He condemns those who support the Revolution and preach of a completely just government that could rule solely on reason as one such perfectly rational entity could never exist since humans are driven by sentiments and humans make up the government. Humans are emotionally driven beings that rely on their sentiments to make decisions. Yet, Burke defends prejudice by drawing upon the nature of human beings. A government driven by emotion and prejudice in any way or form is what we would normally regard as a corrupted government. It seems ludicrous initially as it seems that we as society try to strive towards justice by abandoning prejudice and unreasoned emotions and feelings towards another, and relying solely on rational principles and facts to determine what is right or wrong in order to govern a body. I am not a philosopher or a political scientist, my degree is in economics and my occupation is musician.In a very controversial manner, Burke defends the notion of prejudice, and speaks about how the English uphold their prejudices or “untaught feelings” of what is right or wrong based on prejudices passed through generations. To me, saying that Burke was a conservative makes as much sense as saying Eduard Bernstein (the revisionist Marxist) was a conservative, it only works in the narrow context of their own political camp. into context (as a conservative I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that today’s conservatives are indistinguishable in ideology from progressives a few decades ago, and now I realize that it’s because the difference between these two camps is essentially procedural) I am confused as to how this happened. Though this does put mainstream conservatism in America, the UK, Canada, Australia etc. In every respect he was a liberal, he was just a more cautious liberal that believed that existing institutions should be used in service of liberal ideals instead of being abolished and replaced, as they were in revolutionary France.
I’ve heard him referred to that by my high school civics teacher, my college political science professor and in several other contexts, but I have been reading his work and about him and I am confused.
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