Enlightenment values have not led to political unity

The lights are going on all over Oxford Street. “God rest ye merry, gentlemen/Let nothing you dismay.” If only. Despite the tinsel decorations and the tinned music, anyone in the entire civilised world who is much over the age of believing in Santa Claus must see manifold reasons for dismay. The Carol reassured the merry gentlemen that Christ had been born to save mankind from Satan’s power. In Luke, the Angel proclaiming the birth declared; “On earth peace, good will toward men.” Yet after two millennia, Satan is still very much in the game and there is little to justify that Angel’s serene confidence. Give us peace in our time: today, that prayer is more needed, more heart-felt, than ever. When if ever will it be heeded?

We cannot blame the Creator. He endowed humankind with free will. It is not His fault that we persistently misuse it. 

Two highly interesting pieces appeared last week which invite us to go beyond our present political discontents and think more deeply about what has gone wrong. In different ways, David Howell and A. N. Wilson – writing about C.S. Lewis – come to similar conclusions. The Enlightenment has let us down.

Consider. The Christmas of 1913 is approaching. Assume that you had been born a couple of years after Waterloo, in comfortable circumstances and with – most comforting of all – a strong constitution. Like David Cameron, you are disposed to believe that the glass is half-full, not half empty.  Given all that, you ought to have enjoyed the long nineteenth century which, did you but know it, would come to a brutal end in the following year.

Although now increasingly decrepit, you have enough wits about you to make sense of events in a long perspective. Looking back over the two centuries since the Glorious Revolution, you still believe that Lord Macaulay was broadly right. This has been a splendid era in British history, with the growth of prosperity, freedom, scientific knowledge and power. British commerce bestrides world markets. The Royal Navy patrols the oceans, safeguarding our trade and protecting the spread of civilisation in our imperial possessions. True, there is trouble in the Balkans. Then again, there usually is. There is also trouble in Ireland. But we have dealt with that sort of difficulty before and will no doubt cope, as we always do.

Admittedly, social conditions in some of the great industrial towns are fairly bleak. Yet the industrial revolution did lead the way to a decisive break with the scarcity and barely subsistence-level existence which had been most of mankind’s lot in all previous eras. Admittedly also, it is not many years since the Afrikaners gave our army no end of a lesson. But the last time he lunched at his club, the old boy was assured that the generals have learned that lesson.

All in all, the great Whig historian was right. We have benefited from as much progress as can reasonably be expected in this world. As he is musing along these lines, the old fellow hears cheerful young voices planning imminent festivities. As his decline will gather pace in the next few months, he will no longer be there for shock and mourning when the first owners of those happy voices turn up in the casualty lists: the initial dispatches from the second dark age; almost, one might say, from the second fall of man.

The thirty years from 1914: was there a worse period in the whole of history? Ezra Pound described European civilisation as an old b*tch gone in the teeth. In 1945, that seemed a fair assessment. Although the good side had won in western Europe, to the east the jackboot prevailed. There seemed every reason to expect a Third World War which would surely have sent Pound’s old b*tch on a final visit to the vet.

Europe was saved, but not by any moral exertions or answered prayers. We have survived – up until now – because of mutually assured destruction. We were deterred from shattering our continent in further conventional warfare because we feared weapons which were even more terrible. This does not justify any large measure of political self-esteem.

So what went wrong? A religiously-minded sceptic might well argue that beneath its pretensions to culture and civilisation, the Enlightenment was a purveyor of subtle devilry. It encouraged humans to think that they were higher beings who could brush aside any nonsense about original sin. But if you persuade humans to think that they were better than they ever could be, and hence to try to reshape human nature in the pursuit of idealism – they end up worse. The First World War gave vainglorious Enlightenment its opportunity. Out of the chaos or war, Its two bastard children, communism and fascism, tried to reconstruct humanity and ended by killing tens of millions of human beings.

The Enlightenment also encouraged its devotees to believe that they could do without religion. Personal faith might survive as an antiquarian eccentricity, but enlightened humanity did not need the Christian ethic. After 1914, we learned what a post-Christian ethic could look like. In France, the first attempt by Enlightenment activists to abolish Christianity ended in the terror. That might have been another endless lesson. But it was not learnt.

After 1945, “enlightened” thinkers continued to make mistakes. One of these involved learning the wrong lesson from recent history. Another arose from a collapse in self-confidence. The final two were further assaults on common sense.

In its modern form, the nation state originally seemed to be an expression of the Enlightenment. It promoted social and political reforms. Its anthem might well have been “Ode to Joy.” By 1945, that had given way to the Horst Wessel Lied. The perverted nation state became a hideous instrument of oppression. So a lot of highly educated wise men concluded that humanity ought to move beyond the nation state: hence the EU, the latest Enlightenment project. 

It has not worked and it could not have worked. Maximum cooperation, yes. A great expansion of free trade, ditto. But political unity: impossible. Most people want to live in nations. This does not mean some orgiastic indulgence in patriotism. It simply means, in that homely word, a belief in a homeland. Fatherland would also do: a Gaullist Europe des Patries should ensure harmony among democratic nations. To go beyond that invites conflict. For a start, it would leave the demos behind.

The self-confidence question: perhaps too many people had been reading Ezra Pound. There has been a collapse of confidence in old European high culture. The Enlightenment savants cannot be blamed for this. None of them would have entertained the notion that the Beatles were as good as Beethoven. But even before the full horrors of wokery, there had been an erosion of faith in European traditions. Wars may have encouraged this, as did a determination to rewrite European and imperial history according to the dictates of political correctness. But a Europe which refuses to defend its culture and its history is indeed a old b*tch gone in the teeth. 

Since 1945, the attack on religion has continued, often abetted by the churches. There has been a further related subversion, which has been at least as damaging: the crumbling of the family. The family is social penicillin. In the vast majority of cases, it promotes health, education, prosperity – and happiness. The breakdown of the family promotes crime, ill-health and unhappiness. Family life does entail the acceptance of limits and restraints, especially on self-indulgence. So highly educated people who would be pleased to call themselves enlightened decided that those restraints were unnecessary. We had outgrown the disciplines of previous years. But that is refuted by every statistic related to social disorder.

So we can set out the case for the prosecution. But what could we actually do to rectify matters? It would be better if more people went to church and fewer to the divorce courts; how could that be brought about? Perhaps we should pay more attention to Hobbes in public discourse, and less to Locke, though he cannot be blamed for the excesses of Enlightenment liberalism. 

Even if there is no practical solution to these problems, we ought to recognise that we cannot ultimately enlighten our way out of original sin. That salutary disillusion may lead to the beginning of wisdom.

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