The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (38 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
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The rot proceeds from the head down. In the Enlightenment, that rot came with the growing acceptance of materialism, the belief that matter alone exists; the soul, if it exists, dies with the body. The ancient materialist Lucretius enjoyed a revival; Hobbes’ analysis of the condition of “natural” man is wholly Lucretian. Basically, Lucretius claims that only atoms and empty space exist, and that all the things we see are the results of random atoms, bound by physical laws, colliding without purpose. Although Isaac Newton was no materialist—he spent many years in alchemical and spiritualist “research”—still, his description of the world as made up of discrete particles was atomistic. So in “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau,” the poet William Blake blamed him, with some justice, for reducing the world to brute particulate matter:
The Atoms of DemocritusAnd Newton’s Particles of lightAre sands upon the Red sea shore,Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
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Now if man is but matter, why not use him as if he were iron or clay? What sense can “good” and “evil” make in such a world? In
The Fable of the Bees
, Bernard Mandeville argued that greed and pride and gluttony were good for the hive. Private vices would result in a roaring economy and public virtues:
The Fable of the Bees
, Bernard Mandeville argued that greed and pride and gluttony were good for the hive. Private vices would result in a roaring economy and public virtues:
Fraud, Luxury, and Pride must live;Whilst we the benefits receive. (415–16)
The Earl of Rochester, a sporadically brilliant drunkard and debauchee, citing poor temperate Lucretius throughout, reduces man to a speck, and scoffs at the notion that a speck could apprehend the divine. It’s as absurd as to think that an ointment could make
an Old Witch flie,And bear a Crippled Carcass through the Skie. (
A Satyr Against Mankind
, 86–87)
Man is ignorant, said the enlightened Helvetius, apologist for the totalitarian state. But man is made for virtue. What to do about the contradiction?
If force essentially resides in the greater number, and justice consists in the practice of actions useful to the greater number, it is evident that justice is in its own nature always armed with a power sufficient to suppress vice and place men under the necessity of being virtuous. (
On the Mind
)
Fine words, with terrible implications. When the French
philosophes
in the eighteenth century discarded the Christian belief in the fall of man, they turned, as Plato did, to
ignorance
as their explanation of evil. But if people do wicked things because they are ignorant of the Good, then we must teach them better, whether they like it or not. That need is at the heart of Plato’s fanciful regime in the
Republic.
Now, Helvetius does not even believe in the Good as such. What is right, he says, is what will be materially useful to the greater number. That means that the State will define good and evil, for the purposes of a numerical majority. As for the dignity and prescriptive rights of a man or family or village, they are the flotsam of a dark age, swept away in the flood. No protection, this, against tyranny.
philosophes
in the eighteenth century discarded the Christian belief in the fall of man, they turned, as Plato did, to
ignorance
as their explanation of evil. But if people do wicked things because they are ignorant of the Good, then we must teach them better, whether they like it or not. That need is at the heart of Plato’s fanciful regime in the
Republic.
Now, Helvetius does not even believe in the Good as such. What is right, he says, is what will be materially useful to the greater number. That means that the State will define good and evil, for the purposes of a numerical majority. As for the dignity and prescriptive rights of a man or family or village, they are the flotsam of a dark age, swept away in the flood. No protection, this, against tyranny.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to ReadIdeas Have Consequences
by Richard Weaver; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.A tightly argued, wide-ranging polemic against the intellectual and artistic decadence of the modern West, which Weaver sees as having sprung from one critical and avoidable mistake at the inception of the Renaissance. Knowledge was demoted from the attainment of timeless truth, to the ability to analyze particulars, in order to exert our power over nature.
What of God, who protects the widow and the orphan, who humbles the proud, and exalts the lowly? If God existed, he was a watchmaker who set the gears in motion, but had nothing
personal
to do with their operation. So said the Deists, agreeing with Lucretius that God could not be appealed to, “not won with virtuous deeds nor touched by rage” (
On the Nature of Things
, 1.49). The philosopher Baruch Spinoza talked a great deal about God, as a necessary being informing the universe. He defied his detractors who accused him of atheism. But one could as soon pray to the Spinoza’s God as to a galaxy. God is not Creator but the metaphysical condition undergirding a necessary and, in the whole, perfect world: “We deny that God can omit to do what he does,” Spinoza argues (
Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well Being,
ch. 4).
personal
to do with their operation. So said the Deists, agreeing with Lucretius that God could not be appealed to, “not won with virtuous deeds nor touched by rage” (
On the Nature of Things
, 1.49). The philosopher Baruch Spinoza talked a great deal about God, as a necessary being informing the universe. He defied his detractors who accused him of atheism. But one could as soon pray to the Spinoza’s God as to a galaxy. God is not Creator but the metaphysical condition undergirding a necessary and, in the whole, perfect world: “We deny that God can omit to do what he does,” Spinoza argues (
Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well Being,
ch. 4).
Man, the MachineHad Enlightenment authors known what their ideas would yield in the twentieth century, they likely would have recanted. Here, influential scientist Julien Offray de la Mettrie argues that natural law is a mere feeling:Now then how shall we define natural law? It is a feeling which teaches us what we should not do, because we would not want it done to us. Would I dare add to this common idea, that this feeling seems to me but a kind of fear or dread, as salutary to the race or to the individual?La Mettrie assumes that because man’s body is made up of the same matter as anything else, therefore man is simply a machine, and the natural law is but a wispy “feeling” he has developed over time. This feeling restrains him from hurting his enemy because he fears that he may someday be hurt in turn.From Plato’s
Republic
we descend to this—a bald assertion that our ideas of good and evil are nothing more than the working out of self-interest. But then, if you have the power, why bother about anyone else? La Mettrie believes he has reduced man to a machine; he has instead warped him into a moral monster.
That, as I’ve said, was one option. Consider man as stuff to be molded. Deny to God any providential care for man’s end. Instead, for practical purposes, grant that care to the State (run, naturally, by intellectuals). The other option was to put religion under house arrest: to drive it back into the conscience. This healthier option granted man the dignity of a being who might pray and praise his Maker. But it made the church go begging to the State, to see in what fashion the State would suffer it to exist. Not that the established churches in England or in the Catholic countries were healthy communities. All were subject to the State’s caprices: “Rulers interfered in its affairs,” writes the historian Gerald Cragg, “expropriated its wealth, and altered the structure of its life.”
13
13
That was symptomatic of the time. Voltaire mocked the church that educated him:
“Écrasez l’infâme!”
he cried, “Tear down the horrible thing!” Yet he had something of a guilty conscience about that. When he wrote, famously, “I entirely disagree with what you say and will fight to the death for your right to say it,” it was to Helvetius he was writing.
14
In other words, Voltaire did not care for the materialism that his own satires, long on style and short on philosophical depth, encouraged. The most decent character in his satire
Candide
is not Doctor Pangloss (a wicked parody of the quasi-materialist philosopher Leibniz, who argued, as did Spinoza, that the world
in toto
could not be other than it was, and as such was perfect) but a simple Anabaptist Christian, whose only creed seems to have been charity for those who suffer.
“Écrasez l’infâme!”
he cried, “Tear down the horrible thing!” Yet he had something of a guilty conscience about that. When he wrote, famously, “I entirely disagree with what you say and will fight to the death for your right to say it,” it was to Helvetius he was writing.
14
In other words, Voltaire did not care for the materialism that his own satires, long on style and short on philosophical depth, encouraged. The most decent character in his satire
Candide
is not Doctor Pangloss (a wicked parody of the quasi-materialist philosopher Leibniz, who argued, as did Spinoza, that the world
in toto
could not be other than it was, and as such was perfect) but a simple Anabaptist Christian, whose only creed seems to have been charity for those who suffer.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the Enlightenment support for religious liberty, and the Enlightenment desire that religion should grow more modern, that is, less religious, and finally decay. Then, as now, some people supported liberty for religions primarily as a means of drawing the teeth from them all. An especially easy target was the large, lumbering Catholic Church, that purveyor of what was scornfully called “priestcraft.” Then too, questions of religious liberty were embroiled in national politics. The English could not forget the attempt by the Catholic Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament in the days of King James I (1606). So when the widower James II, a closet Catholic, made the grievous mistake of marrying an Italian duchess and begetting a male heir, the people, meaning the Parliament, had to revolt. They invited the Protestant William of Orange, son-in-law to James by his first marriage, to invade the land, oust the king, and rule in his stead. This so-called Glorious Revolution (1688), glorious because hardly a drop of blood was shed, marked the victory of Parliament in its long struggle with the throne for supremacy. From then on, the monarchs of England would lose more and more of their power, until they became what they are now, luxurious figureheads. And the law that James had passed, allowing toleration for members of all religious groups, was repealed; Catholics would wait until the early nineteenth century to enjoy voting rights in England.
15
15
So religion, in Europe though not necessarily in America (and not at all in Catholic Quebec), retreats to the bedside and the hearth. Hence we see the effeminate emotionalism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Catholic piety, with its languishing Christ, a flimsy flower for a savior; and hence the spirited evangelical movements, with Methodism the most admirable among them, that fed the flocks, if not well-defined doctrine, at least the heart of the Gospel message as it applied to a sinner in need, often a half-literate sinner in the countryside.
Meanwhile, the newly expansive view of the State could feed from a “democratic” trough. If, as Helvetius argued, the enforcing arm of the State merely enacts the will of the people, why should the people fear? And how can people appeal beyond the people, if there is nothing higher than the State against which to judge its laws? It is a lesson that fascists, Marxists, and incautious liberals of the next two centuries would take to heart. Blood will be shed for the people, that is, for the great god of the State. The French Revolution was a clear case, but even the imperialist wars of England in the Crimea and in South Africa were spurred by the liberal “scientific” desire to siphon away to other lands the surplus population at home. The magnates of industrial Manchester, not the old lords in their manors or the enfeebled Anglican Church, provided the energy behind that desire to fight, to make all the world “democratic,” English, industrial, and rubberized.
16
16
How was the Enlightenment preference for democracy responsible for the bloodshed? Perhaps we need to distinguish among kinds of governments of, by, and for the people. It is not that democracy
per se
leads to tyranny, but that, as Burke observed, the “metaphysical” democratic state envisioned by the French revolutionists was already tyrannical, arrogating to itself the prescriptive rights of individuals, of villages, of groups and classes of society, and of the Church. It had already turned man into a machine or a number. At the same time, it was a kind of demolatry, to coin a term—elevating some abstract mass of the “people” into a totem for cultic worship, seeing the rule by the “people” as the natural and inevitable progression of history. Here is Burke, prompted to write by pro-revolutionary clergymen in England, who had supplanted God’s providence with the “science” of progress:
per se
leads to tyranny, but that, as Burke observed, the “metaphysical” democratic state envisioned by the French revolutionists was already tyrannical, arrogating to itself the prescriptive rights of individuals, of villages, of groups and classes of society, and of the Church. It had already turned man into a machine or a number. At the same time, it was a kind of demolatry, to coin a term—elevating some abstract mass of the “people” into a totem for cultic worship, seeing the rule by the “people” as the natural and inevitable progression of history. Here is Burke, prompted to write by pro-revolutionary clergymen in England, who had supplanted God’s providence with the “science” of progress:
It is said, that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.
But men are not arithmetical counters. They cannot truly love their countries, Burke suggests, unless they love them simply for what they are, with all their old ways:
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.
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