When the Lamps Went On

Did intellectual progress truly only begin when thinkers began to question religious authority?

 Kenneth Minogue reviews Anthony Pagden's "The Enlightenment."

We tell the story of our Western past as great blocks of events—Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and the like. Historians love to take these constructions apart, and revisionism flourishes. Fashion, as ever, plays a part. One hot topic of the moment is the Enlightenment; it is the plaything not only of historians but also of intellectuals.

The historians ask whether the Enlightenment is a single Europe-wide movement or a set of rather different intellectual adventures in different counties. Scotland is a center of enlightened thought, with Adam Smith and David Hume heading a list of stars, but the commoner understanding of the Enlightenment is that its center is the France of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. For the intellectuals, by contrast, the Enlightenment is a single Europe-wide event and marks the moment when we abandoned religious superstition and advanced boldly into the light of reason. We are all, it seems, secularists now.

 "The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters" doesn't fit perfectly with the broad claims of either the historians or the intellectuals. It is, however, unmistakably a political tract for our time. The Enlightenment features here as the moment when the West not only embraced reason but also became cosmopolitan. Mr. Pagden presents these qualities as the source of such political decency as we may claim in dealing with other peoples. It inspires the internationalist passion for peace and progress that are today in confrontation with the kind of person he refers to, at one point, as the "ignorant, unthinking, sentimentalist usually identified as a 'nationalist.' "

We think of ourselves as enlightened, Mr. Pagden tells us, if we are tolerant and forward-thinking and "if stem-cell research does not frighten us but fundamentalist religious beliefs do." His account of the Enlightenment itself follows several themes, ranging from transcending religious dogma to aspiring to include the whole of mankind within a political structure, thus involving us with one another as fellow citizens. Enlightenment is an optimistic attitude, Mr. Pagden says, in which human beings are thought to be linked by mutual sympathy. Forward-thinking, as he calls it, adumbrates a cosmopolitan future that might ultimately remove the scourge of war from the planet.

One problem with this version of the Enlightenment story is the difficulty of deciding who, from the founding period, counts as belonging to the "club" of the enlightened. After all, one of the more dramatic climaxes of the 18th century was Robespierre's reign of terror during the French Revolution. According to the revolution's enlightened theorists and philosophers, society was to be newly based on virtue. The result, as we know, could be a murderous frenzy. Mr. Pagden is of course eager to drum Robespierre's Jacobins out of his club.

What about Marxists and other revolutionaries supposedly guided by the imperatives of reason? Mr. Pagden excludes them too, but it's hard to see why. A great deal in Marx had been said in one way or another by Hegel, and Mr. Pagden treats Hegel with appropriate respect. It would be absurd to blame Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot on Rousseau and other thinkers who imagined the ideal society, but it is important to trace the subtle causal relations among intellectual currents and political ideology if you are determined, as Mr. Pagden seems to be, on elevating certain ideas and denigrating others. Mr. Pagden acknowledges that Kant and one or two other enlightened thinkers were unsound on the question of race, judging some races inferior to others. He defensively reminds us that the enslavement of Africans was not so "unlike what centuries of absolute, despotic monarchy and the intellectual tyranny of the Church had done to the Europeans."

In that case, we should apparently count ourselves lucky to have broken free of theological prejudice and achieved enlightened wisdom. We had, it seems, been sunk in despotic slumbers (like Kant before he read Hume) until awakened by early figures like Hobbes, Locke and Spinoza, after whom the club finally set itself up in the business of turning our civilization the right way up. What can it be that caused this remarkable change of course? We are not told.

Mr. Pagden's basic take on the Enlightenment is locked into secularist legendry—as if intellectual progress only began when philosophers questioned religious authority. Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire and other leading thinkers of the Enlighenment, he says, "effectively discredited the idea that any kind of religious understanding might prove a true source of knowledge."

Our Western civilization is indeed remarkable, but the reason is that, well before the 18th century, it had been the only culture in the world exploring the possibilities of free inquiry and intellectual rigor. The complex beginnings of what makes the West different go back to medieval times and indeed in some respects back to Greece, Rome and Christianity itself. The individualists who transformed our world appeared all over Europe, rather fitfully in medieval times but from the 16th century onward with increasing confidence. As Montesquieu observed, European monarchies were quite different from both the Roman republic and the despotisms prevalent elsewhere.

"Every nation, convinced that it alone knows what wisdom is, despises the folly of all the others," remarked Helvétius, one of the Enlightenment figures Mr. Pagden so admires. But it was only in free Europe that we find a passion for traveler's tales and for investigating the lives of other cultures as well as criticizing our own. At the moment when every other culture illustrated Helvétius's broad claim about insularity and close-mindedness, Europeans were curious, outward-looking and inquisitive. "Persian Letters" was a best seller in the France of 1721. Did anyone outside write a book called "French Letters"?

Mr. Pagden thinks that it is the enlightened who have taught us to behave altruistically toward distant people we have never meet. He admits that caritas is a Christian virtue but then solemnly explains to us that Christians merely practiced it so as to increase their credit with God. On the very same page we learn of Diderot's complaint that theatergoing Parisians wept over the fate of Phaedra but, as Mr. Pagden puts it, "never gave a single thought to the plight of African slaves." Mr. Pagden fails to note that William Wilberforce and his Christian supporters got the slave trade eliminated.

Whether it is the truth about reality or not, Christianity has been central to creating a gentle and decent (and philosophically lively) civilization of such power that our problem is accommodating the people who want to join it. "Go thou and sin no more" is way ahead of beheading or stoning sinners and probably ahead of counseling or psychotropic medication as well.

We are today, it appears, entering a new era of secular triumphalism, with a renewed emphasis on tolerance and liberation and a dismissive view of conventions and duties. How will the West fare? Mr. Pagden's cosmopolitanism is frightfully open to the customs of others (as long as they are not Christians) but low on allegiances. "Partners" are a lot more temporary than spouses used to be, and patriotism ranks much lower these days than national self-criticism. Authority has fared badly, yet authority is (as Hobbes argued) the self-generated moral basis of modern states, replacing the virtue of republics and the caprice of despotisms.

It is hard, then, not to be puzzled by Mr. Pagden's argument. It is historically knowledgeable yet strangely unsophisticated in its up-to-the-minute familiarity with who counts as friend or foe in the progressive circles in which he seems to move. We do indeed owe some of our tolerant openness to the writers of the Enlightenment, but we also owe to them the nightmarish passion to meddle with human life and to attempt to create utopian societies. One benefit of Christianity was that it construed politics as a rather perilous activity carried on by imperfect people within some larger story about God and creation. The first figure who broke out of these confinements (apart from the monstrous Robespierre) was Napoleon. As we now know all too well, masterful radicals come in shapes more horrible than his, but the fashion for ideological enthusiasms to improve our world keeps on generating surprises. The thing about light is that it casts shadows.

—Mr. Minogue, a professor emeritus
at the London School of Economics,
is the author of "The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life," now in a paperback edition from Encounter Books.