<html><head></head><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2633"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2634">Burkophiles,<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2635"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2633"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2636"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2637"> My
first contact with Burke in print was an independent study course 40 years ago
this summer at Temple U. I don’t remember everything I read, but I do recall
something of a concentration on <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2638">P&C</i>.
When I reported to my monitor, Jim Chesebro, at the end of the summer, one
thing I said was, according to Burke, human beings would rather love than hate.
This somewhat positive interpretation seems congruent enough with Burke’s
“Anatomy of Purpose” as ultimately distilled at the end of the communication,
cooperation, participation trajectory:<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2639"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2636"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2640"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2641"> “Here,
in all its nudity, is the Jamesian ‘will to believe.’ It amounts in the end to
the assumption that good, rather than evil, lies at the roots of human purpose.
And as for those who would suggest that this is merely a verbal solution, I
would answer that by no other fiction can men [sic] truly cooperate in historic
processes, hence the fiction itself is universally grounded.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2642"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2640"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2643"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2644"> “If
one says that activity is merely a neutral quality rather than a good, I should
answer that inactivity is categorically an evil, since it is not possible to
the biologic process. To acquiesce in the methods that preserve humanity is per
se to concede that life is a good, however perversely one may choose to
verbalize such implications. Life, activity, cooperation, communication---they
are identical; and even the Schopenhauerian philosopher inevitably proclaims
their goodness by the zeal with which he [sic] frames his message” (see pp. 235
and 236).</span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2643"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2740"> <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2645"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2646"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2647"> Note
beginnings and endings, Burke has admonished, and here we’re pretty close to an
ending.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2648"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2646"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2649"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2650"> More
steeped in Burke’s total corpus than I, Chesebro cautioned me: Don’t stint on
the power of the polar dialectics that can erode an overarching incentive to universally
cooperate, a god-term or its motivational equivalent, as it were. There’s
always a tension there between those hierarchal forces.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2651"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2649"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2652"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2653"> Almost
half a century after he wrote P&C, I was corresponding, and arguing, with
Burke on my Burke-as-coy-theologian theme.
Burke, of course, demurred. Among other things, he warned, “I ‘gin fear
that, in o’er-desecularizing my logological involvements with the negative, you
will ‘prove’ me to be a Manichee, with Mephisto as real as the Logos.” I later said, in the piece that came out of my
back-and-forth with Burke, “Unlike the Manichaean he claims to be, Burke views
dialectic as ultimately culminating in a title-of-titles that unites the oppositions
and the disparate particulars of the polar and ‘positive’ levels of language”
that lie below. <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2654"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2652"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2655"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2656"> A
triumph of the “god-term,” right?---of that communication, cooperation,
participation incentive on the broadest scale. Burke, the quasi-Gnostic
UNIVERSALIST friendly to process theology, I concluded. In Manichaeism, the
powers of good and evil hold equal sway. The battle goes on eternally. That’s
not Burke’s notion, it seemed to me. Do symbolizers get more or less
permanently stuck along that great “Upward Way,” that Yellow Brick Road of love
and comity? Tell me, Joe, it ain’t so! <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2657"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2655"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2658"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2659"> I’m
beginning to wonder. Is it time to distinguish between what Burke may have
taught and enjoined, and what Burke came, in his late stage, at least, to
expect and prophecy? <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2660"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2658"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2661"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2662"> Last
winter, I gave my take on this list on the evolution of Burke’s thought from
“dramatism: to ”logology.” I saw it as a further working out of implications,
not a jarring dislocation. Whether I got
that unfolding of thought right or not, could there not also be another axis of
evolution, that from a qualified optimism to a qualified pessimism? I ask.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2663"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2661"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2664"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2665"> Two
recent and powerful papers have, for me, brought this Burkean quandary to the
fore. I speak of Ann George’s Friday Keynote at East Stroudsburg, “The ‘Art of
Living’ in An Age of War,” and Elizabeth Weiser’s article in the current KBJ,
“Technological Devolution, Social Innovation: Attitudes Toward Industry.” Directly or indirectly, both documents touch
on the issue, and Burke’s mercurial take on it, that’s front and center in our
time: technology, climate change, and the survival of humankind in something
close to a livable global order.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2666"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2664"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2667"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2668"> An
op-ed by Michael Mann of Penn State and Susan Joy Hassol of Climate Communication LLC last week
in the <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2669">Washington</i> <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2670">Post</i> can be a jumping off point for a
discussion. <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2671"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2667"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2672"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2673"><o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2674"> </o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2529">
</div><div dir="ltr" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2675"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2676"> Ed <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2677"></o:p></span></div></div></body></html>