Rereading Edmund Burke is, in the digital age, an exercise in “reactionary” rebellion. Nothing in Burke’s vision seems to make sense in the world we live in. The impatience of the present, the madness of the utopian experiment, the ignorance of the past — all these are signs of the radical sensibility which awakened in Burke two centuries ago his conservative reaction.

And perhaps the naturalness of freedom has become truly suspect in the age of digital technology. Crushed between rules and numbers, marked as a part of a whole to be drawn and controlled, a subject that is permanently re-educated, framed in social networks and threatened by the birth of an all-powerful artificial intelligence, a concrete person, one that cannot be reduced to statistics and reports, the actor is awkward and isolated. At the moment when radical voices cause the happiness of humanity, the person is forgotten. His personality melts into the paste of a bright future.

Because the naturalness of freedom is the very form of embodiment of existence, which is not reduced to the larval stage. Behind the screens, behind the big things lies life with its peace and unhappiness. Her strange discipline cannot submit to the equalizing impulse of the radicals. Moments of joy and sadness cannot be imitated by any perfect machine with its astonishing computational speed. A mother’s love cannot be replaced by a laboratory surrogate. Contemplation of the sky and the sea means an act of manifestation of humanity, which is not limited in its gestures to the automatism of the eternal present.

Those little islands that Edmund Burke spoke of are havens where the unemphasized nature of freedom can be found. Art, family, friendship, love, faith, sports, hours of rest – this is the barrier behind which a particular person hides when he is attacked by a state inspired by Promethean instincts with its chimerical projects. Passively or actively, people seek to build a territory of their own little autonomy: vague and not at all revolutionary, it gives them a solace that utopias cannot give them. As for my homeland, it is nothing more than a summary of small homelands: language and nostalgia create an organic unity that has nothing to do with the barracks order of demagoguery.

To this natural freedom, so despised by the murderous dreamers of politics, it is worth returning after Burke. Limiting the state, guaranteeing property, constitutionalism are the tools we can use to limit radicalism’s desire for eternal revolution. We can always contrast intellectuals and activists with a tendency towards the spontaneous and organic order of free life. Against utopia, we can mobilize the resources of the simple ingenuity of people who are not artificial intelligence, but unique, inimitable and imperfect individuals. The sealed perfection of the totalitarian dream forever crushes, obliterates and silences. Read the whole article and comment on Contribuotrs.ro