Enlightenments, modest and otherwise

Public Interest, Spring, 2005 by George Weigel

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the 2004 election, Garry Wills, who has been known to write sensible things on occasion, came apart at the seams. In a New York Times op-ed titled "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out," Wills bemoaned an America in which more people "believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution." He then went on to characterize the United States today as a land beset by "fundamentalist zeal," "rage at secularity," "religious intolerance," and "fear and hatred of modernity"--qualities that Americans often ascribe to their unenlightened and premodern Islamist enemies. Whatever their source, Wills concluded, "Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment."

Wills' jeremiad undoubtedly read well in Europe, where, for the previous two years, a raucous debate over the preamble to the new European constitutional treaty had pitted "the Enlightenment" against religious conviction. Listing the sources of contemporary Europe's commitments to human rights and democracy, the drafters of the Euro-constitution cited the classical heritage of Greece and Rome and then, well, the Enlightenment, thus summarily airbrushing 1,500 years of Christian history from the historical picture. Despite protests from some governments and several impassioned pleas from Pope John Paul II, the paladins of the Enlightenment carried the day, and a European constitutional treaty of some 70,000 words could not, in the name of "the Enlightenment," make room for one word, "Christianity."

All of which rather proves the point made in the very last sentence of Gertrude Himmelfarb's latest book: "We are, in fact, still floundering in the veracities and fallacies, the assumptions and convictions, about human nature, society, and the polity that exercised the British moral philosophers, the French philosophes, and the American Founders." By styling her book The Roads to Modernity, [dagger] Himmelfarb signals her revisionist intentions clearly: There was not one Enlightenment (Garry Wills and today's European hyper-secularists notwithstanding), and any attempt to reduce the Enlightenment to its French embodiment is historically fallacious and intellectually sterile. Moreover, Himmelfarb insists, it was the British, not the French, who rate the title of "progenitor" of the Enlightenment, not simply in its seventeenth-century antecedents (Bacon, Locke, Newton) but in the eighteenth century itself--historical turf long claimed by France as its own.

HIMMELFARB'S concern, however, is not simply to establish the chronological priority of the British form of the Enlightenment, but, as she puts it, "to establish its unique character and historic importance," which lay in the sphere of social morality. While the French trumpeted the virtues of reason, the British Enlightenment emphasized the reasonableness of virtue. The French Enlightenment was driven by a passion for the abstract, which was likely one reason for its lethal afterburn in the French Revolution and the Terror. By contrast, the British Enlightenment stressed the social virtues of compassion, benevolence, and sympathy. The results, in the actual playing-out of history, were, to put it gently, noticeable.

Throughout her discussion of the British Enlightenment--by far the most thorough section in the book--Himmelfarb insists that the British social philosophers aimed at an "Enlightenment within piety," not an Enlightenment against religious conviction. Thus Edmund Burke's avowal that (as Himmelfarb puts it) "religion itself, and religious dissent most noticeably, was the very basis of liberty--of all liberty, not only religious liberty" would find social expression in John Wesley's Methodist "Enlightenment for the common man." By ameliorating the disruptions of a newly modernizing society, this movement of moral and social reform helped prevent the sanguinary upheavals that destroyed the ancien regime (and so much else) across the Channel. Religious conviction and modernization went together in Britain, as did religious establishment and (a considerable degree of) religious tolerance. Some might suggest that such seeming contradictions are another example of the British penchant for "muddling through." Himmelfarb sees instead a superior form of the Enlightenment: not so contemptuous of tradition as the French, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, empirical rather than abstract, stressing what Adam Smith called "fellow-feeling" over fraternite as conceived by intellectuals.

ALTHOUGH Himmelfarb is far too polite to say it, The Roads to Modernity demonstrates yet again that the French Revolution was the world's first experiment in totalitarianism--an experiment prepared, in the realm of ideas, by anti-democratic philosophes. Rousseau and Voltaire were unabashed elitists. The former hadn't much use for the family and proposed that the state educate children in the "general will," such that "a child, on opening his eyes, should see his country, and until he dies he should see nothing but his country." At the root of the French Enlightenment--both its elitism and its statism--however, lay its Christophobia--its virulent bias against religion in general and Christianity in particular. As Himmelfarb writes: