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While Steve Hayward continues to nurse his voice back to full strength, this episode of the Power Line Show offers another of Steve’s Yale lectures on conservative philosophy, this time on the topic “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative.” Unfortunately Burke wasn’t available for an interview, so it’s just Steve’s introductory thoughts on why Burke’s writings remain highly relevant to our own times and troubles.
(Bumper music at the end this week is “Recreational Chemistry” by moe.)
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I hope you post the full series.
This podcast has extreme distortion – too much high frequency (> 8 kHz) over the main voice band. Is there a bad MPEG or other voice compression technique being used?
Stopped listening after 1 minute.
Oh. I’m re-editing the file.
Try it now. I cleaned it as best I could. You may need to delete the old file and redownload if you’re using iTunes or etc.
It sounded ok on Stitcher.
Much better. It is listenable now. The intro was fine. Still has some leftover high frequency items in synchronization with Steve’s voice.
Interesting lecture; but Steve pulls a boner when he quotes Burke as follows (at 43:30):
“I confess to you, Sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance, and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary …”
Steve goes on to misinterpret the old word, “valetudinary”, as meaning something like “valedictory“. It actually means “hypochondriac“.
If we continue the Burke quote, the medical nature of the witty play on words becomes a little more obvious: “… it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty.”
Cantharides were aphrodisiacs, while mercury sublimate was a treatment for syphilis! (I had to look that last one up.)
Burke’s point is that radicals, like hypochondriacs, always think society is much sicker than it really is, and so are too quick to opt for the extreme “medicine” of violent revolution.
That’s a great catch!