My podcast conversation last week with Michael Walsh didn’t allow time for consideration of his book Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost, but at length I recalled part of Leo Strauss’s critique of Edmund Burke in Natural Right and History, which remains a point of contention on the 3WHH between me and Lucretia. Anyway, Strauss on this point:
[Burke] regarded it as possible that the victory of the French Revolution might have been decreed by Providence. In accordance with his “secularized” understanding of Providence, he drew from this conclusion that “if the system of Europe, taking in laws, manners, religion, and politics” is doomed, “they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs . . . will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.” Burke comes close to suggesting that to oppose a thoroughly evil current in human affairs is perverse if that current is sufficiently powerful; he is oblivious of the nobility of the last-ditch resistance. He does not consider that, in a way which no man can foresee, resistance in a forlorn position to the enemies of mankind, “going down with guns blazing and flags flying,” may contribute greatly toward keeping awake the recollection of the immense loss sustained by mankind, may inspire and strengthen the desire and the hope for its recovery, and may become a beacon for those who humbly carry on the works of humanity in a seemingly endless valley of darkness and destruction. He does not consider this because he is too certain that man can know whether a cause lost now is lost forever or that man can understand sufficiently the meaning of a providential dispensation as distinguished from the moral law.
I’m not sure this reading of Burke is correct, but the larger exhortation that fighting on against great odds or even eventual defeat is necessary and worthy in a larger sense is useful to all conservatives just now.
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