The National Interest

Summer 2005

The Origin of Modernity

by S. T. Karnick

 

Christie Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2004), 264 pp., $39.95.
Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers, 2002), 480 pp., $14.95.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity (New York: Knopf, 2004), 304 pp., $25.

In the last several decades, modernity--the period initiated by the Enlightenment--has come under increasing criticism. Most prominently, of course, the postmodernists have put together a critique of pure reason, as it were, that uses logic to question the rationality of modern, Enlightenment-based philosophy. In arguing that all reasoning is based on attempts to gain, sustain or increase power, postmodernists openly seek to obliterate the very foundation on which the modern world was built: the supremacy of reason.

The provenance of modernity is a vitally important matter, because a West based on a lie can hardly be seen as worth defending. It is especially important when Western civilization is being challenged from without by forces that, like the postmodernists, see the West as uniquely and inexcusably oppressive. Might the seeds of modernity's problems be located in the original premises of the Enlightenment? If they are, knowledge of the mistakes of that era might help us to remedy our own.

In The Roads to Modernity, Gertrude Himmelfarb journeys back into the past to uncover the Enlightenment roots of the modern world and discern whether a healthy, defensible image of modernity and the West can be found. Although the common view of the Enlightenment assumes that modern Americans, Britons and Continentals have the same cultural and philosophical origins, we come to very different conclusions on many (if not most) matters today. The recent disagreement over the war in Iraq, both within the United States and with "Old Europe", exposed powerful fault lines in the West. Similarly, the European Union's plan to build itself into a bulwark against American power suggests more than just geopolitical maneuvering. It reflects a deep unease with America's desire to sow political liberty and representative democracy on ground that Europe considers to be insufficiently fertile.

Two of the most obvious differences between America and Europe today are in the areas of economic freedom and religious observance, with the United States scoring significantly higher in both--and Britain appearing to be somewhere in the middle, identifying with both America's economic freedom and Europe's secularity. Himmelfarb addresses the possible origins of these differences, starting with the premise that our common Enlightenment background is not as unitary as we think. She posits that there were actually three Enlightenments: a British one representing "the sociology of virtue", a French one based on "the ideology of reason", and an American one pursuing "the politics of liberty."

Himmelfarb makes clear that the sources of our current woes are to be found fully developed in Enlightenment ideas. Consider, for example, the tendency of the modern Left to feel passionate about distant problems but ignore those close to home. As Himmelfarb observes, Rousseau wrote in Emile that "To prevent pity from degenerating into weakness, it must . . . be generalized and extended to the whole of mankind." Rousseau also anticipated today's leftist disdain for parental authority. As Himmelfarb explains his attitude, education "was too important to be left to the 'understanding and prejudices' of mortal fathers, for 'the state maintains, and the family dissolves.' Thus public authority had to take the place of the father and assume the responsibility" of educating the children.

Similarly, Himmelfarb notes that "the purpose of the new regime" that Rousseau called for in his Social Contract "was nothing less than the radical reshaping not only of society but of humanity." That goal, of course, has been a driving force behind much political mayhem to the present day. Before the philosophes, few individuals dreamed of such things, and even fewer considered putting them into action.

Of course, French ideas are by no means the only source of our current problems. Himmelfarb quotes the Earl of Shaftesbury's critique of Locke:

"'Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world. . . . Virtue according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will. . . . And thus neither right nor wrong, virtue nor vice are any thing in themselves."

Regardless of whether that is a fair characterization of Locke's position, it was a plausible understanding that a good many people took from Locke, and it sounds remarkably like current-day moral and philosophical relativism.

Similarly, Himmelfarb notes that Bernard Mandeville argued, in the notes to his Fable of the Bees, that "what was generally called pity or compassion--the 'fellow-feeling and condolence for the misfortunes and calamities of others'--was an entirely spurious passion, which unfortunately affected the weakest minds the most." The echoes of Nietzsche and Peter Singer in that description are obvious.

Such statements were not the main thrust of British Enlightenment thinking, however, and Himmelfarb explicitly declares her intent to "reclaim the Enlightenment" from "the French who have dominated and usurped it." She proposes to "restore it, in good part, to the British who helped create it."

The author concedes that the term "Enlightenment" was not used at all in English until late in the 19th century and was not commonly used in Britain and America until the 20th century. In addition, she acknowledges the cross-pollination between thinkers in England, Scotland and the Continent, noting, for example, that French luminaries such as Voltaire and Montesquieu lived in England for significant periods and openly professed their admiration for the British, a fondness that was widely reciprocated. Similarly, she notes that numerous British celebrities crossed the Channel in the other direction, and British authors such as Smith, Paine and Priestly were widely feted in the French salons. In addition, "books and ideas circulated even more readily than their authors." She notes, for example, that "[Adam] Smith borrowed the famous pin-factory illustration in the Wealth of Nations from the article 'Epingle' in the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie."

Nonetheless, Himmelfarb argues, the relationship could only go so far, because of the profound difference "in the spirit and substance of their respective Enlightenments." In France, she observes, "the essence of the Enlightenment--literally, its raison d'Ötre--was reason." Reason "defined and permeated the [French] Enlightenment as no other idea did. In a sense, the French Enlightenment was a belated Reformation, a Reformation fought in the cause not of a higher or purer religion but of a still higher and purer authority, reason."

The attitude across the English Channel could not have been more different. Himmelfarb notes that David Hume considered it "a fallacy of philosophy, ancient as well as modern, . . . to regard reason as the main motive or principle of human behavior, for reason alone could never prevail over the will and passions or provide an incentive for virtue." She quotes Adam Smith as noting that it was "altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from reason." Likewise, Edmund Burke, in A Vindication of Natural Society, wrote, "What would become of the world if the practice of all moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual?"

Instead of a pursuit of clear reasons for all human action--and a necessary transformation of the world to make it conform to reason--the British philosophers posited that human beings possess an innate moral sense. Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, wrote, "It appears that a tendency to public good, and to the promoting of peace, harmony and order in society does, always, by affecting the benevolent principles of our frame, engage us on the side of the social virtues." The opening sentence of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is similarly powerful: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

The political implications of the conflicting French and British views of human nature are momentous. Himmelfarb writes, "For the British philosophers, [the] social chasm [between classes] was bridged by the moral sense and common sense that were presumed to be innate in all people." But the philosophes, she notes, "allowing to the common people neither a moral sense nor a common sense that might approximate reason, consigned them, in effect, to a state of nature--a brutalized Hobbesian, not a benign Rousseauean, state of nature--where they could be controlled and pacified only by the sanctions and strictures of religion."

Or of government. With no recourse to any internal moral guide or common sense in which to locate rational behavior, and despising the Church--l'infême, as Voltaire famously called it--Diderot argued that an individual had no "right to decide about the nature of right and wrong." Instead, individuals had to base their actions on the "general will of the species and of the common desire." This conclusion was based entirely on reason, Diderot claimed, and therefore had the force of ultimate authority.

The British philosophers looked elsewhere for moral authority. Smith, Himmelfarb notes, observed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, "Religion, even in its rudest form, gave a sanction to the rules of morality, long before the age of artificial reasoning and philosophy." Even British skeptics and deists approved of religion for its social utility. Gibbon, "a thoroughgoing skeptic [though] not an atheist", in Himmelfarb's estimation, dismissed the philosophes, who he said "preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt." Himmelfarb writes that in Britain "there was a conspicuous absence of the kind of animus to religion--certainly nothing like the warfare between reason and religion--that played so large a part in the French Enlightenment."

Today, by contrast, Britain is far less religious than it was then. Christie Davies, in The Strange Death of Moral Britain, observes, "Britain in the twenty-first century is a thoroughly secular society in marked contrast to what it had been a hundred years earlier. . . . What is left is not an amoral or an immoral society but one that can make only limited moral demands on its members." Like Himmelfarb, Davies argues that the Enlightenment did not purge religion from Britain. In fact, he claims, "in some areas it led to an intensification of religious life", citing the "increasing levels of church adherence and membership in relation to population rising to a peak in England and Wales in 1904 and in Scotland in 1905."

Davies observes that Britain changed radically during the 20th century, citing a long litany of statistics demonstrating that Britain today is a moral disaster area with previously unrecorded heights of criminality and social disorder. He identifies the philosophy that he calls (rather awkwardly) "causalism" as the instigator of the changes. "Whereas the moralists assume that individuals are autonomous persons making free choices", he writes, "the causalist sees their actions, to a substantial extent, as 'caused' by external pressures." Assigning personal responsibility is thus impossible, and the goal of government becomes an open-ended one of lessening harm and suffering throughout the realm. Like the continental approach to governance, causalism opens the door to endless government regulation of individuals' lives.

But where does this philosophy come from? Davies believes that the rise of large institutions made it possible, because they are better at deciding who is to pay if something goes wrong than at figuring out who is wrong and therefore responsible. Davies writes, "once this had become the predominant way of thinking about laws and regulations in general, it was almost inevitable that it should be extended into the area of the regulation of personal morality." However, he quotes Frances Power Cobbe, who wrote in 1902 that "the present disastrous state of things" in British moral discourse was attributable to "the rise of utilitarian, dependent morality--duty regarded as dependent on expediency, conscience no longer recognized as the voice of God or as revealing an eternal or immutable moral law." Davies praises this statement and calls it "prophetic."

Hence, the onset of causalism preceded the rise of large institutions in Britain (which Davies correctly states was a phenomenon of the 20th century) and was a result of declining adherence to Christian doctrines (which would soon become apparent in falling church attendance). Davies exhaustively traces the decline of religious observance in Britain during the past century and connects it to the nation's changing moral attitudes.

Indeed, Davies notes the refusal of persistently religious Ulster to accede to the death of moralism, which was overcome only when the British government implemented EU edicts in recent years. He also observes that the decline of moral Ireland has been delayed by the strength of the Irish Catholic Church. He cites "the weakness of religious and moral fervor in Britain relative to the United States or Ireland in the latter part of the twentieth century."

Arthur Herman, in How the Scots Invented the Modern World, likewise sees religion as the central social variable in civilizational change. Unfortunately, he posits yet another Enlightenment--a Scottish one. Like the French revolutionists two centuries later, the 16th-century Scottish preacher and writer John Knox and his followers scoured away all manifestations of Catholicism in their nation. Unlike the French firebrands, however, Knox and his followers were intent on replacing Catholicism with a different form of Christianity, not a secular rationalism. They believed that "political power was ordained by God, but that that power was not vested in kings or in nobles or even in the clergy, but in the people", Herman notes. This idea provided an essential foundation stone for modern political democracy and the market economy. Likewise, people were to be judged by their accomplishments instead of birth rank, thanks to the Protestant emphasis on equality before God.

Herman observes that the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, unlike their European counterparts, "saw the doctrines of Christianity as the very heart of what it meant to be modern" and "resolutely believed that a free and open sophisticated culture was compatible with, even predicated on, a solid moral and religious foundation." Noting that Scotland had declined into a backwater by the end of the 19th century, Herman characterizes this as a direct outcome of modernity but does not say why it came to pass. Given the central role that he sees religion having played in the origins of Scotland's flowering, it would have made sense to consider it as a factor in the society's decline.

The seeds of this decline in religious faith, in both Scotland and England, were sown during the Enlightenment. There was, Himmelfarb acknowledges, an "alternative Enlightenment" in Britain, consisting of radical thinkers such as Paine, Godwin and Priestley, all of whom identified with France and America and shared an antipathy toward trinitarian Christianity.

This British undercurrent accentuates the difficulties in characterizing the Enlightenment in geographical terms as Himmelfarb does. In addition to the similarities between many Enlightenment thinkers in Britain and France, there were great differences among philosophers within each of the three nations. Montesquieu and Rousseau, for example, were very different from the rest of the French Enlightenment in their thinking. Himmelfarb notes, "Unlike his confreres, Montesquieu did not appeal to reason as the fundamental principle of politics and society." Even Rousseau criticized him for that.

Similarly, Himmelfarb points out that Adam Smith's influence "was undermined within a decade after his death" by Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, and that Britain today evidences little respect for Smith's ideas in either theory or practice. "If America is now exceptional", she astutely observes, "it is because it has inherited and preserved aspects of the British Enlightenment that the British themselves have discarded and that other countries (France, most notably) have never adopted." But Himmelfarb does not explain why the British discarded so much of their patrimony. She observes: "The United States is far more religious today--religious in observance and in conviction--than any European country." But, again, why?

Indeed, the least convincing aspect of The Roads to Modernity is Himmelfarb's claim for a separate American Enlightenment. Brilliant as they were, the ideas the American Founders were discussing had been in the air for quite some time. It is thus dubious to presume that America became more enlightened during this period, given all the evidence Himmelfarb adduces to show the intellectual glories of the early colonial period. Finally, there is a distinct lack of major works outside the political realm that would establish a case for a broad intellectual expansion. There are no American books from the period on the order of The Wealth of Nations, The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nor was there an impressive flourishing of the arts, as there was in Britain.

In the end, the differing outcomes in Britain, America and the Continent do seem to derive from the nations' historical circumstances rather than separate Enlightenments. Which route a nation took during the period depended on its previous experience with political, social, economic and religious freedom, however limited. The English, Americans and Scots had some, as did the Dutch, Swiss, Swedes and Germans. Even the Italians had a significant merchant class that could challenge the powers that reigned during the Renaissance.

This, in turn, was itself an outcome of historical circumstances. It had benefited the interests of the English, Dutch, Swiss, Swedish and German ruling classes, at various times during the Renaissance and earlier, to challenge the power of the Catholic Church. As a largely unintended consequence, those nations liberalized politically to some degree. Over the years, they gained experience developing the institutions of civil society, the realm between the individual and the state, consisting of private relationships among individuals. This was especially true in Britain, as Himmelfarb points out: "there were a plenitude of such associations and a very lively civil society in Britain throughout the eighteenth century. . . . [S]ocieties existed for every kind of worthy purpose."

The French, by contrast, had few strong institutions besides the state and the Church. Like Spain, France was able to resist the Reformation, and the French system stayed in place. Burke identified the difference between the French and British traditions when he noted that whereas the English enjoyed rights of liberty as "a patrimony derived from their forefathers", the French did not have that fortunate "pedigree of liberties." Thus, as Himmelfarb notes, instead of repairing "the dilapidated walls and foundations of an old edifice, . . . the revolutionaries chose to tear them all down and build anew."

This was especially true in the case of the Church. But the rebuilding of this institution could not possibly be made complete, as it had to be pushed out of the realm of politics in order to let reason ascend to full prominence. Although Catholicism remained strong in France, the political power of the Church declined radically, and ultimately its social authority subsided as well. Catholicism, once the soul of France, has now been almost entirely replaced by Enlightenment secularity. The American Catholic theologian George Wiegel described the current morality of the country in his 2003 William E. Simon Lecture, noting that "many of the French prefer[red] to continue their vacations rather than bury their parents when thousands of elderly Frenchmen and women died alone during the heat wave this past August--and were then left in overflowing refrigerated warehouses."

Weigel went on to characterize the outcome of a century and a half of increasing secularization across Europe: the Continent, he said, is "systematically depopulating itself" and "committing demographic suicide." He noted that "no Western European country ha[s] a replacement-level birth-rate." The loss of religion has created a continent-wide weakening of morale, Weigel said: "European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction . . . and its public consequences are at the root of Europe's contemporary crisis of civilizational morale."

As Weigel points out, Europe is increasingly losing its religion. A fact sheet released by the French embassy in Australia notes:

'During the last fifteen years, religious observance and beliefs [in France] have declined as regards christenings (which have fallen from 95 percent to 58 percent), weddings (which have fallen from 85 percent to 50 percent), belief that God exists (61 percent today, 66 percent fifteen years ago) and the resurrection of Jesus Christ (43 percent now do not believe in it, compared with the previous figure of 37 percent)."

The French, it is clear, have gone much farther toward the Enlightenment goal of removing religion from public life and replacing it with notions based solely on reason divorced from any "eternal or immutable moral law", as Cobbe put it.

Britain has gone a long way down that same road in the past century, as Christie Davies notes, and America certainly seems to have started down a similar path. If, however, there were three Enlightenments, as Himmelfarb suggests, and two of them were salubrious, it is puzzling that the one she sees as toxic should seem to be winning out after all, both in Europe and in the English-speaking nations, though more slowly in the latter. Herman's book unintentionally suggests an answer. The author observes Scotland at the end of the 17th century, "on the threshold of the modern world", and notes that it was "a cultural world that had come into being a little more than one hundred years before, with the Scottish Reformation." This nation "generate[d] the basic institutions, ideas, attitudes, and habits of mind that characterize the modern age", all as a result of the democratizing forces set loose by the Reformation. Legal subjugation of women was discarded, and slavery was abolished. This, Herman notes, was where the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson "created a new political and social vision, . . . the vision of a 'free society.'" This new type of society--in which a shared moral compass made orderly freedom possible--was a direct outcome of the Protestant Reformation.

However, by undermining the authority of the Catholic Church and breaking the bonds between church and state, the Reformation ultimately cut the ties between Christianity and Europe. Religious pluralism led to increased cultural and political diversity and a decline in authority of all institutions, including religious observance. As a result, Europe soon lost its attachment to the ideas that were feeding the creation of free societies in Scotland, England and America.

The French Enlightenment took root in a country that had successfully withstood the Protestant Reformation, and instead of establishing a new variant of Christianity, it replaced it with the only thing that remained credible: reason itself. It was a Reformation without religion.

Seen in this light, the so-called British, American and Scottish enlightenments were not a break from the previous world but were instead a continuation and intensification of the religiously inspired liberalization initiated during the Reformation. This liberalization depended on religion to sustain a people sufficiently moral and public-spirited that they did not require close governance. Based solely on reason, the French Enlightenment had no real use for religion, and in fact its purveyors strongly believed that the world would be much better off without it. Providing a new ideology for centralized power and opposition to religion, its ideas spread through Europe, Britain and the rest of the world as an alternative to Reformation liberalism.

Today we see these two worldviews still at odds. In America, where religious faith is still relatively strong, the type of free society the Protestant reformers set in motion is alive, if not perfectly well. In Europe, where "enlightened" indifference to religion increasingly prevails, a very different world is forming. Although Himmelfarb is not ultimately persuasive in positing three Enlightenments, she is certainly right on the most important question: our future will indeed be built on the ideas we hold.