The past is present

In England in 1788, an impeachment trial began against Warren Hastings, governor general of the notorious East India Company – accusing him of corruption, cruelty, crimes against humanity (in modern language), and of wielding the worst of the worst – which is “arbitrary power”. Edmund Burke made a couple of fiery speeches at the impeachment hearings (Hastings was eventually acquitted – but Burke’s incandescent condemnation is there in the record – and history has proven him right) – and Burke stuck up for law and order, as well as for the ancient civilization of India – and its laws. (Burke observes cuttingly that India was a dazzling complex civilization – complete with legal code – “when we lived in huts in the woods.”) He notes that corruption and arbitrary power can never be separated. They go together.

I’m reading his complete works right now because … well, why not. In college, I read his essay on the “sublime and the beautiful” and how these two things manifest in art – I had to read it for some class – it’s so good! and should definitely read by cultural critics since it’s such a great example of a man in real time sensing what was going on aesthetically and putting it into words. You don’t have to wait 10 or 20 years to figure out such and such was a “movement” . You could even argue that with that essay he launched the Romantic movement – or at least predicted it – 30 years before Byron and Shelley were even heard of – and then – turned on by that – I read his famous condemnation of the French Revolution (complete with the fanboy passage about Marie Antoinette which has to be read to be believed. it sounds like a slash/fic post on Tumblr circa 2008 starring the two hot leads of Supernatural.). Not too many people predicted that a Napoleon would rise like a dictatorial phoenix out of the ashes of what was left after the French Revolution. But Burke did.

So now I’m checking out what Burke had to say about Ireland, India, the American revolution, religious freedom, and the upheaval across the channel.

Coincidentally, I read Burke’s speeches in Hastings’ impeachment trial yesterday morning at the exact same moment a certain social media platform was exploding into a fireball of blue checks floating down over the scorched earth. And I was like, “In 1788 Burke said it best.”

Nick Tosches was always searching for the source of things – whether he was writing about Dean Martin, Jerry Lee Lewis, dive bars on the lower East Side, or the surreal experience of watching Elvis movies as a horny teenage boy from the balcony of a movie theatre in Jersey City. If I had to sum up his attitude (recognizing he can’t really be summed up) it would be “there is nothing new under the sun, and most everything – from hippies to boxing to drunken hookups to the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis – has already been covered – and better – by Dante.” I’m not comparing myself to Tosches, but he inspired me to look for sources too – and precedents set – because 9 times out of 10 they are there in history, human beings being what they are, and we can learn from the arguments made by people 200 years ago or 2000 years ago. It’s one of the perks of reading history, imperfect though history may be. It’s not exactly comforting but it is instructive.

So here’s Burke, naming and shaming the sinister: a company pretending to be a company while wielding enormous unchecked arbitrary political power:

“The whole exterior order [of the East India Company’s] political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and mercantile principles. In fact, the East India Company is a state in the disguise of a merchant. Its whole service is a system of public offices in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly, the whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is commercial; the principle, the inward, the real, is almost entirely political.”