Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Paine vs. Burke
“Do we want to fix our health-care system by empowering
expert panels armed with the latest effectiveness data to manage the system
from the center or by arranging economic incentives to channel consumer
knowledge and preferences and address some of the system’s discrete problems?”
That sentence comes from the concluding chapter of a book I
have just finished reading. Yuval
Levin’s The Great Debate is a summary
of the competing philosophies of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke who were famous
essayists and pamphleteers during the last part of the 18th century,
and particularly during the American and French revolutions. They are given credit for having articulated
the disparate points of view that underlie what we have come to know as the
liberal and conservative branches of politics.
To oversimplify, Paine – seen as a father of liberalism - believed
that as individuals we are able, through the application of reason and
principles, to reconstruct society in whatever way we see fit without regard to
what came before or will come after.
Burke – a conservative - saw the institutions of society as reflecting
the accumulated wisdom and experience of the past and believed that changes and
improvements should come incrementally.
As with so many other things, perhaps the truth lies
somewhere in between. In general, I find
myself agreeing with Burke, but as the same time I can identify with Paine’s high
regard for the importance of the individual and impatience with those who
resist measures that seems to be logical and reasonable.
Paine and Burke made enormous contributions to the modern,
Western world as we know it and for that we should all be grateful. And it is sobering to realize that the
opinions we think we invented ourselves often have their roots in the thinking
of people we never heard of.
