Conservatives, Romantics, and Intergenerationality

Or, something about the tangles of Edmund Burke

Before the Revolution in France ecology and sociology were synonymous. The Revolution was an earthquake to both.

Early Romanticism popped up in different places, but regardless of where it was an reactionary ideological cocktail made up of some mixture in opposition to industrialization, democratization, rationalization, and urbanization.

Unlike Enlightenment humanism, the romantic critique often favored a moralistic view of nature, or one where the natural was good and unnatural as bad (as opposed to say, justice and equality). Whereas some German Romantics supported the French Revolution and were largely just skeptical of the rationalizing black hole of scientific thought, others instead rejected democracy and urbanization. For us today, some might appear as radical leftist bohemian movements and others radical rightist. Whether right or left, everywhere ecology and sociology were tangled.

Literature from the early conservative Romantic period often portrayed the burgeoning world of privatization and political progress as threats to the harmony between social hierarchy and local ecology. The critique frequently took the form of moral localism, standing in stark contrast to the concept of a placeless modernity, and perhaps setting the stage for 20th-century organicism and the eco-social concept known as "blood and soil". A fundamental aspect of this early Romantic critique was a focus on bioregionalism and a conservationist ethos, which, unlike today's neoliberal conservatism, aimed to safeguard culture and land from privatization through community practices.

The concept of "habitation", combining a sense of place both spatially and temporally, was prominent in the work of the Romantic conservative Edmund Burke, forming the basis of his moral imagination. This idea fostered an intergenerational environmental ethic, encouraging each generation to cherish and preserve land as a testament to their dedication to past and future generations.

In Burke's view, the task of protecting agrarian ecology from industrialization and protecting hierarchical sociology from democratization were interconnected. He envisaged the ideal community as striving for a holistic, organic union of the individual with their environment and local community, a concept that would later shape forms of fascist organicism.

Unlike today’s place-based education which is focused entirely on space, the concept of place in the mind of Romantics included that ever lurking other dimension of nature, time. From the perspective of Burke, place-based education should take place where people have spent their lives, not in an ecotourist context in the Tetons or Yosemite Valley.

Intergenerationality

Although today we might be grappling over intergenerational justice in the context of climate debates, the same debate occurred when the West decided to go the way of individualism, capitalism, and democracy. In a sense, we should understand the period from about 1800-2040 as a radically different period in human history with regard to how humans locate themself in the stream of space, time, and thus nature. These debates played in Europe between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine and in the United States between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

The arch-conservative Burke championed the idea of societal continuity and conservation. He saw society as an ongoing partnership between the living, the deceased, and the unborn, urging caution against swift changes due to their potential unforeseen impacts. This outlook of course echoes today's precautionary principle in environmental law, which promotes avoiding possible harm until an agreement on its mitigation is reached, and makes those advocating change responsible for proving it won't be detrimental. This is an elegant way to see the ways that early conservatism and environmental thought are in fact conceptually unified.

In contrast, Thomas Paine advocated a liberal viewpoint. He believed that each generation should be free to shape its own societal norms and institutions, unhampered by the past. Paine's viewpoint encourages fluid societal structures that evolve with each generation, implying that every generation has the right to use and shape the environment to suit its needs, unfettered by the choices or expectations of past or future generations. Paine’s liberal viewpoint was echoed by Thomas Jefferson, who believed that "the earth belongs usufruct to the living," even suggesting in a letter to James Madison that every law "naturally expires at the end of 19 years."

Madison, although agreeing with Jefferson on the principle of individual rights, asserted that a degree of continuity in law and government was necessary for societal stability. Though their exchange centered primarily around government, debts, and the obligation to future generations, it's just important to point out that the argument that we have a duty to respect the interests and rights of future people didn't stem from modern environmentalism, but [in the West] rather as a response to the rise of Enlightenment individualism and the nation-state. Indigenous cultures worldwide who are in millions of unique ways not global liberal capitalists of course continue to understand this.