October 28, 2007
The Enlightenment, a Christian heresy?
A few snippets from an interesting essay by Philip Trower: (Thanks to Argent)
... To begin with then, there are two facts about the Enlightenment which I believe it is essential to grasp if we are to understand its true historical significance. The first is that, regardless of how it began, the Enlightenment became far more than just another movement in the history of ideas like the Romantic movement. What happened in the drawing-rooms, libraries, and coffeehouses of 18th-century Europe resembled in at least one crucial respect what happened in the deserts of Arabia in the seventh century A.D. A new world religion was born...
[...]
Stepping back a minute then and surveying our new world religion as a whole, we can see it as made up of two components: what I will call the humanist or humanistic project, which within limits we can all bless, onto which has been grafted a missionary atheism bent on sidelining or completely eliminating religion.
By the humanist project I mean the idea of bettering human life in this world in every possible way and developing as many of natures' potentialities as possible. Rightly understood this is not incompatible with Christian and Catholic belief. Indeed it is part of it. What is in conflict with Christian belief, as well, I believe, as with reason and common sense, is the idea that all this can be achieved without God's help and that a state of perfection — which would involve the disappearance of sin — can be overcome this side of the last day.
The second of the two facts which I said it is necessary to grasp if we are to understand the full historical significance of the Enlightenment is, namely, that in its deepest roots and many of its practical objectives, this new "world religion" is — and I hope this won't startle you too much — a Christian heresy.
Taken individually its teachings either have their origins in Christianity, like the idea of raising up of the poor and lowly, or have always had a prominent place in the Christian scheme of things, like the notion of human brotherhood. Collectively, they are the product of 2,000 years of a Christian way of looking at the world. It is impossible to imagine them occurring in the form they do in any civilization or culture so far known to history other than a Judeo-Christian one. Nor have they in fact done so. They can be accurately described as "secularized Christianity."....
[...]
....This is what makes the whole Enlightenment "package" so singularly difficult for most of us to handle. It is not something totally alien as paganism was. As a result, we tend to assume that, except about God and Christ and the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, our liberal or secularist neighbors are on the same wavelength in regard to more or less everything else.
What we often fail to notice is that, when wrenched from their Christian context and raised to the status of absolutes, notions like liberty and equality no matter how good in themselves, can receive a quite different significance and even become appallingly destructive...
...Then with the First World War, and the Russian Revolution, classical 19th-century liberalism meets its Götterdämmerung. Its cultural influence and intellectual prestige pass to collectivist theories of government and social life and collectivist political parties, which for the best part of a century have been living a largely underground life, erupting from time to time in revolutionary outbursts that are quickly suppressed. After the Russian Revolution, however, they can live openly in the daylight with Marxism rapidly occupying first place.Posted by John Weidner at October 28, 2007 07:24 AM
From the late 1920s on, the reaction of many Western liberals to this new situation and this newly empowered rival is not unlike that of moths to a flame or rabbits to a cobra. Some are attracted, others repelled. But the common roots and underlying unity of purpose linking all the offshoots of the original Enlightenment corpus of ideas produces that curious notion "No enemy to the left" — the left is always right and the right is always wrong — and that even more curious phenomenon, people who call themselves "liberals" admiring or making excuses for perhaps the longest lasting and socially and psychologically most devastating tyranny known to history....
Time to drag out the broken record.....
:)
This is why I keep harping on the notion of political Taylorism, John. The Marxists, socialists, collectivists, and the rest were losers, and were seen to be losers, up until about 1900 because there was no credible way to put what they preached into practice, and what they prescribed was unpalatable.
With the arrival of Frederick Taylor and his ideas of industrial organization, and the miracles they wrought in industrial productivity, all of a sudden the collectivists had play-book to use. They applied Taylor's ideas to the organization of whole societies, and the collectivists' goals now seemed laudable because they now had what seemed to be an effective and humane way to bring about their material paradise on Earth.
This is not intended to make Taylor look bad. The poor guy went to his grave aware that his methods, ultimately beneficial to our material well-being, had made his name a curse-word in the mouths of the trade-unionists. Rather, I'm trying to point out how poorly educated the average Joe is in our nation's (and the world's) economic history as well as its political history. Economics and politics go hand-in-hand much of the time, and once you know how the nation's economy changed from 1875 to 1925 and why, a lot of other things become clear-- like this business of how the Enlightenment went very badly wrong about the turn of the century.
Posted by: Hale Adams at October 28, 2007 05:05 PMThe way that evil had prevailed in 20th century has something diabolical in it. Lenin's troops were marginalized right up to 1917. I read about in the the Red Wheel II (I wonder when will Red Wheel III will appear in English).
Bisaal,
Well, I'd agree that there was something diabolical about the near-victory of totalitarianism in the 20th Century. But it has nothing to do with the Devil. Call it Pride, if you like, but there's enough evil in human nature to explain the awful things in this world with out invoking an agent outside of ourselves to explain that evil. I guess it has to do with my dislike of cop-outs.
:)
As I understand it, two things gave Lenin and his Bolsheviks a boost.
First, Tsar Nicholas II insisted on being his own Minister of War, which undermined that old crutch of the monarchy, "Good Tsar, evil counselors", which allowed Tsars to blame bad results on incompetent ministers. When the war continued to be so awful, there was no one for the public to blame but the Tsar himself.
Second, when Kerensky and his colleagues deposed the Tsar and instituted a provisional government, they kept Russia in the war out of a sense of honor. If they'd taken Russia out of the war, chances are that Lenin and his crew would have never been able to carry out their coup de etat, being deprived of their best slogans like "Land, Peace, Bread!" and things like appalling casualty-lists.
We'd still be wrestling with the socialists, but the communists would have been marginal players in the world's political games, and the several hundred million people who died in the Second World War and at the hands of the communists would have lived.
It's one of those tragedies of life-- men like Tsar Nicholas II and Kerensky, who tried to do what seemed to them to be honorable, wound up unleashing unspeakable horrors on the world.
Posted by: Hale Adams at October 29, 2007 11:08 AM
