“The individual is foolish, but the species is wise” has become one of my favorite Burkean quotes. The older I get, the more I realize how exceedingly complex the world is, and how little we know as individuals. Because of that, my skepticism of people who make bold claims about the certainty of their views on any issue has risen considerably in recent years.

Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is widely known for his aversion to revolutions. He was famously opposed to the French Revolution that began in 1789. Burke’s disdain for violent uprisings stemmed from his belief that positive social and political changes are best achieved when pursued within the parameters of a community’s traditions, rather than through a radical break with the past. This concept of gradualism is generally called traditionalist conservatism. Because the philosophy was originated by Burke, it is also often referred to as Burkean conservatism.

A number of contemporary American thinkers consider themselves Burkean conservatives. David Brooks is one of them—I have heard him say so publicly. Based on some of my lived experiences and my close observation of the world over the past several years, I have gradually become an adherent of the philosophy myself.

My first exposure to a violent revolution occurred when I was still a young boy in Ghana. I wasn’t old enough then to understand politics well but I had heard a lot of public talk over the years about rampant corruption in government. In June 1979, a number of junior military officers from the country’s armed forces successfully mounted a coup and overthrew the military government that was in power at the time. The head of the army was killed during the putsch. The new regime set up by the coup leaders was named the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC).

The AFRC quickly unleashed a reign of terror in the country. A number of the senior military officers who headed the previous regime were executed by firing squad on allegations of corruption. The AFRC modeled itself as a Marxist government. Properties of businesspeople that were thought to have been acquired through “greed” were seized, and the junta introduced price controls throughout the economy. There were extrajudicial killings of judges and widespread torture of civilians, often publicly. A pervasive sense of fear gripped the society.

As is often the case with these types of uprisings, particularly in Africa, a good part of the Ghanaian population cheered the bloodletting. After about four months of that “housecleaning exercise,” the AFRC handed over power to a civilian government but it swiftly deposed it two years later, retaking the reins of government under the new name Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC). The PNDC ruled Ghana until 1993.

The vast majority of Ghanaians today who lived in the country during that period will most likely agree that the current level of nationwide corruption is orders of magnitude greater than what it was back then. Over the past four decades, many of those idealists, who promised that they were going to create a socialist utopia in Ghana, amassed their own riches through highly dubious means. Most of Ghana’s wealthiest people today happen to be those who have acquired their assets through looting of state coffers.

The question that runs through my mind quite frequently nowadays is this: What were all those military officers and judges killed for? I can never think of a good answer for it.

That violent attempt to reorient Ghanaian society did significant long-term damage to the country. It disrupted the development of a robust national business architecture. The heavy-handed measures that the junta used to seize private assets essentially killed off the nascent private sector, and with that, eliminated much of the entrepreneurial spirit of the nation’s people. For the next several decades after that crackdown, the state became the only actor in town. The destabilization of the country’s politics for all this time can also be blamed partly on that shock to the system.

My distaste for violent revolutions originated from that experience, and what I have observed in the years since. I have learned that human frailties are many and varied. I have mine, and so does everyone else. I have also come to the realization that whenever I judge someone for some “sin” that they have committed, if I looked in the mirror long enough, I would likely see my own face in it as having been guilty of some form of that transgression in the past. Because of that chastening awareness, I am extremely careful nowadays about pointing accusing fingers willy-nilly. I criticize only after I have convinced myself that something someone has done is well outside the norm of what is generally acceptable behavior.

I generally abhor dictatorships for those same reasons. They are all based on rule by egotistical individuals who think they are wiser than the species. No matter how brilliant or visionary anyone thinks they are, it is impossible for any single person to have enough wisdom to effectively determine what is best for millions of people, even in culturally homogenous societies.

Almost four years after the PNDC came to power, I left Ghana for university studies in the Soviet Union, where the granddaddy of all revolutions had taken place about seven decades earlier. The place was supposed to be the heaven of egalitarianism, but what I discovered upon arrival was anything but. The Communist Party bosses and ordinary Soviets who were members of the party had numerous privileges that the rest of the population could not enjoy. There was also a lot more discontent within the society than one would expect in such an advertised utopia.

While my adherence to Burkean conservatism is quite strong, I am not a full disciple. Human nature is such that violent revolutions cannot always be avoided. In fact, they can be necessary sometimes. There are some vile tyrants and oppressive groups that even supremely moral voices like those of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela cannot persuade. So, occasionally, extreme force has to be applied to take down those entities.

I recently read Percival Everett’s highly acclaimed novel, James. I have learned a lot about slavery over the years, but books like James have a way of painting the picture of such human atrocities in starkly bright colors. The novel’s protagonist, Jim, is a runaway slave and suspected murderer who is on the lam with Huck, a young white boy who had faked his own death to escape from his abusive father. In one chapter, Jim and Huck have a conversation centered on the story about the genie. According to Huck, he first heard the tale from Tom Sawyer. Huck asks Jim to list three wishes he would ask for if the genie were to come out of the lamp and promise to grant them. Jim talks only in slave lingo, and during their time on the run, Huck at times speaks in that dialect as well.

After thinking briefly about Huck’s question, Jim realizes that whatever he desired could come with some negative consequences so he declines. Huck then proceeds to tell Jim what he would personally wish for. First, he fancied some adventure. For his second desire, he said: “Then I’d wish dat you was free like me.” When Jim thanked him for that thought, Huck added: “’Course. Well, I’d wish all slaves was free.” To that, Jim simply nodded. Sensing that Jim was quite detached from the feelings he was sharing with him, Huck asked: “Don’t every man got a right to be free?” Jim then says to him: “Ain’t no such things as rights.”

As I went through the book’s pages, I constantly wondered whether the slave owners were consciously aware of the cruelty of their treatment of their fellow human beings, or whether that abomination had become so ingrained in the cultural psyche at the time that they weren’t fully cognizant of what they were doing. But I kept returning to that little exchange between Huck and Jim. If young Huck knew so clearly that all men had the right to be free, then none of the adult white men who engaged in all those sadistic behaviors for all that time could have any excuses. Simply, they were driven by other impulses.

It may be an ugly truth, but the sad reality is that in their quest to protect whatever turf serves as the source of their wealth and power, some human beings will do anything, including the unimaginable. Throughout history, every war, large or small, and all other man-made catastrophes, have occurred because of this insatiable human appetite for riches and supremacy. And, it is infinitely harder to wrest control of power once it becomes entrenched in any hands. The slaveholders were never going to voluntarily dismantle the system that had served their interests so immensely for so long. It took a civil war to get slavery abolished in America.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) is not widely considered to be a revolution in the normal sense. But because it was fought to bring about a major social change in the nation, technically, it was one. It will forever remain one of the most violent events in human history. An estimated 750,000 Americans died in the war.

Burke himself is said to have recognized this inescapable reality that at times changing the status quo would require application of stronger measures. He was known to be an advocate for flexible conservatism, which allows for limited reform, as opposed to the inflexible type that was more dogmatic in nature. Unfortunately, human nature often makes Burke’s modest accommodation insufficient to get the job done. Hence the constant social and political turmoil we witness all around us.

In spite of those ugly realities that make revolutions inevitable at times in some places, I will continue to subscribe to Burkean conservatism. Today, there are too many people running around making brash proclamations about their capacity to remake the world on the basis of some grand visions they possess. I have seen enough of such characters, and the damage they often end up doing to their societies. Incrementalism, to me, is better than radicalism.