More on Enlightenment

Enlightenment as Sympathetic Liberty The Enlightenment is interesting both as a historical event and as an idea. At Policy Review Peter Berkowitz examines the same book that Jonah Goldberg looked at on NRO a few days ago, Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. I find much to admire in the English and American experience and find the French positively frightful. England:

[Edmund Burke] best known for his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which defends the wisdom embodied in tradition and condemns the French revolutionaries for seeking to remake political society on the basis of abstract theories of political right, Burke is often thought of as a leading figure of the counter-Enlightenment. But, as Himmelfarb observes, though a conservative, he is a conservative defender of liberty. He argued that free-market economics was essential to prosperity while insisting that the institutions and sentiments conserved across the centuries work to keep a commercial society from deteriorating into barbarity. Moreover, in The Sublime and the Beautiful (1774) Burke places the passion of sympathy — by which we enter into the concerns of others, see and feel as they do, and take pain at their suffering — at the center of the moral life. His credentials as an Enlightenment figure are further enhanced by the progressive stands he took on foreign policy. He supported the cause of the American colonists, insisting that England had a duty to respect their rights. And he criticized British policy in India, not because he opposed imperialism but rather because he favored, as Himmelfarb puts it, “a benevolent imperialism — a liberal imperialism, it would later be called — an empire worthy of an enlightened England that would respect the rights of the Indian people and the traditions of an ancient civilization.” ... the British example shows that enlightenment needn’t be seen as diametrically opposed to religion. Most of the outstanding thinkers were deists for whom reason and faith could coexist peacefully and who believed that both mandated the principle of toleration. Moreover, argues Himmelfarb, some explicitly religious thinkers should be considered members in good standing of the distinctly British Enlightenment. She makes the case for John Wesley and Methodism. Focusing on the feeling and experience of faith, Methodists left individuals free to form their own opinion. Insisting only on the desire for salvation of the soul, they prescribed no particular form of worship. Articulating a religious ground for the moral sense, Methodists preached the obligation to relieve the suffering of the poor and the sick.

Nor was it only for the devout that the British Enlightenment flowed readily beyond the realm of ideas. The eighteenth century was also the “age of benevolence” for the British in practice. They formed civil or voluntary associations in abundance. They established clinics and hospitals, reformed prisons and workhouses, cared for orphans, and sought to abolish slavery. Their ambition, Himmelfarb approvingly notes, was not to remake society from the ground up but to improve it.

I don't have any difficulty with Enlightenment of this sort. It is the more radical thinking of the French that is prickly:

Whereas intellectuals in England were closer to and exchanged views with those who governed, intellectuals in France sought to elaborate abstract principles for good governance and did so in complete independence of those who had responsibility to administer the state. The literary expression of their surpassing confidence in reason was the Encyclopedia, which aimed to provide a comprehensive account of human knowledge. Such was the advanced state of understanding, French thinkers believed, that they could conclude without hesitation that religion in all its forms was false.

The idea that religion and science are polar opposites is extremely commonplace today. It might be described as a bedrock idea of modernism. In other posts, I have tried to show that sound religion is the bedrock of good science, providing the axioms from which we begin. The shortest proof I think I can give is the painful circularity of the statement - "There is no such thing as Authority." Modernists don't see a problem and postmodernists embrace it as funny in a tragic, funhouse kind of way. Either way, embracing that malarkey impairs our ability to think about the existence of anything objective, leaving little room for the sympathy Burke represents:

Reason as understood by French Enlightenment thinkers issued in universal laws good for all human beings everywhere. From their point of view, there was no reason in principle that an enlightened despot could not elaborate and administer these universal rules and good reason, given the typically low opinion French Enlightenment thinkers had of the people, for believing that only an enlightened despot could grasp, and govern in accordance with, the dictates of universal reason.

This French Absolutism is in fact the rallying cry of the Starbucks' philosophe gnashing his teeth over things like the 'electoral hijacking of the Red States.' He rails against the result and cares nothing about due process. In such a line of thought, there is nothing about social ends and how to achieve them that we do not know; we fail only when we don't push the common man, who is a pig after all, hard enough. Mercy and sympathy are corruption and dissent is darkness. This Absolutism is the lodestar of people who embrace policies like Kyoto, the bicycle helmet law, the gun registry and so on. Today they like to call one another Progressives. They like it best if you don't ask them where they are progressing to or why, however. That might lead them to let it slip that their end game is 'Enlightened Despotism,' and they'd rather not let that cat out of the bag. The pigs don't like it, so what else can you do? As for me, I stand with Burke and voluntary sympathetic association.