On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason. - book reviews

National Review, April 8, 1996 by John Gray

IT is a natural inclination, as we approach the end of the present millennium, to take stock of our civilization and look to its future. If recent experience is any guide, however, much of that stock-taking will express the callowest futurism. It will consist of empty techno-utopian babble about the prospects of improvement that are opened up by new technologies, whose inherent ethical ambiguities and potential for harm will be ignored; triumphalist affirmations of the end of history that neglect the oldest lesson of history, which is that no form of government is ever secure or final; and confident predictions of a global civilization built on a Western model, made at just the historical moment when the many evidences of Western decline are encouraging non-Western peoples to return to their own traditional values.

The shallow hopes that such fashionable futurism betrays are testimony to an undeniable truth: that all Western cultures, but above all the United States, are today children of the Enlightenment. They cannot help viewing themselves and the world through the lens of Enlightenment conceptions of steady historical progress toward a universal civilization, even though this lens has been shattered, not once but again and again, in our century. It was broken, above all, by the Holocaust, but also by the Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodia of Pol Pot, and many a lesser atrocity.

A sober and dispassionate stock-taking of the Enlightenment is then needed, as a part of the assessment of our cultural condition that we are bound to embark upon as we near the millennium. It is difficult to think of a better survey of our civilization's current discontents than the one Conor Cruise O'Brien gives us in his short new book.

On the Eve of the Millennium comprises the Massey Lectures, given in November 1994 under the co-sponsorship of the University of Toronto and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The manner and format, which its chapters retain, of spoken addresses and radio broadcasts give them an easy accessibility that may lead some readers to doubt the profundity of O'Brien's diagnosis. They would be entirely mistaken. What Mr. O'Brien achieves in this book is a masterly tour d'horizon of late-twentieth-century liberal culture. The book is animated by his conviction that the Enlightenment's cultural inheritance is less secure than most Western liberals imagine. He seems to think -- rightly, in my view -- that it is endangered as much by its own doctrinal excesses and hubristic hopes as by its avowed enemies, such as the Islamic fundamentalists. In an analysis that exemplifies the Enlightenment intellectual virtues of balance and moderation, he is nonetheless caustic in his assessment of the follies to which liberal democracies appear peculiarly prone.

Some of his sharpest words are reserved for Operation Restore Democracy, a sordid political expedient dressed up in the Wilsonian sloganry of liberation and universal human rights, whose actual objectives were to stem mass Haitian immigration into the United States and to improve the chances of Democratic candidates in the midterm congressional elections.

Since the lectures published in this book were given, a further example of liberal self-deception on a grand scale suggests itself -- that of American policy in the former Yugoslavia. Like the examples Mr. O'Brien himself gives, this policy seems based on the improbable supposition that a quick fix of Realpolitik and high-flown moralizing, administered in doses of roughly equal strength, can absolve the world of the necessity of thinking or doing anything further about conflicts whose resolution -- if they can be resolved -- will undoubtedly demand the labor and fortitude of generations. Such policies distract us from the hard work of tough-minded diplomacy and unending political bargaining that makes conflicts that are intractable nevertheless manageable. It is a characteristic irony of liberal cultures that, in denying the manifest truth that many human problems are insoluble, they thereby render those that are at least partly soluble less so.

Mr. O'Brien is surely right when he identifies the cultural sources of liberal self-deception in the secular utopias that emerged from the French Revolution. It is less clear that the Enlightenment cultures of the West can shed these disabling utopias without undergoing a traumatic loss of self-confidence. The Enlightenment, for example, is so essential an element in America's self-image as the model for a universal civilization that it is scarcely imaginable that the hopes -- or illusions -- that the Enlightenment has inculcated should be displaced from centrality in the public culture.

To be sure, Mr. O'Brien is not suggesting that the Enlightenment can or should be relinquished. He proposes rather that its hopes be chastened, tempered by an awareness of the fragility of reason and the ubiquity of evil. This is surely a noble ideal. Yet it seems to me that O'Brien exemplifies a characteristic Enlightenment optimism in calling for Enlightenment without illusions.