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by Thomas E. Brewton |
December 5th, 2006
It has been said that the French love theories and care nothing about whether those theories work in practice; that the English, in contrast, wouldn't give a farthing for an abstract theory, preferring carefully and cautiously to make incremental changes over decades and centuries, aiming always to conserve traditions, which are the structural framework of society.
The Age of Enlightenment in France produced violent radicalism. In England and colonial America nothing of the sort ensued. Understanding the difference illuminates why today's college students have such warped understandings of our history.
Responding to the book review titled Nietzsche Was Wrong, Robert Curry emailed the following commentary:
You write of the Founders' "realistic view of human nature, as contrasted to the Enlightenment doctrine . . ." Your comments capture perfectly the French Enlightenment, the Enlightenment of Rousseau and the philosophes — but the Enlightenment took very different forms in the British Isles and here in the America of the Founding Fathers.
Two of the greatest classics of the Enlightenment in the English-speaking world are Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and The Federalist – and I offer to you that this is actually your own tradition.
Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments is probably the best treatment of this issue. The sections on the French and the American Enlightenments are brief and really excellent. The section on the British Enlightenment is about 3 times as long as the other 2 because she is, as she says, "engaged in a doubly revisionist exercise, making the Enlightenment more British and the British Enlightenment more inclusive." (p. 6, Knopf).
Distinguishing among these different Enlightenments actually offers powerful support to your very important argument. Neither the American nor the British Enlightenments were hostile to religion, and both were rooted, as you so correctly say, in a realistic view of human nature. Adam Smith saw how the free market could channel self-interest for the benefit of all; the Founders saw how the Constitutional separation of powers and the competition among "factions" could channel the struggle for power for the benefit of all.
By the 1960s, after nearly a century of infusion of French and German intellectuals' atheistic materialism, American colleges and universities had simply re-written history to obliterate the English and American colonial traditions that actually had shaped our nation.
A representative sample of this fictionalized version of the Enlightenment in America is Professor Staughton Lynd's, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Professor Lynd has impeccable left-wing liberal credentials: he was educated at Harvard and Columbia universities; taught at Yale University; visited North Vietnam in 1965 and 1966 and was one of the vocal academics condemning our participation in the Vietnam war. He wrote, in 1968:
Any critic of the American present must have profoundly mixed feelings about our country's past . . . he will feel shame and distrust toward Founding Fathers who tolerated slavery, exterminated Indians, and blandly assumed that a good society must be based on private property . . . the purpose of society is not the protection of property but the fulfillment of the needs of living human beings, that good citizens have the right and duty, not only to overthrow incurably oppressive governments, but before that point is reached to break particular oppressive laws; and that we owe our ultimate allegiance, not to this or that nation, but to the whole family of man.
I can only plead that the Declaration itself emerged in part from the polemics of Price and Priestly, Sharp, Cartwright, and Paine . . . This Anglo-American tradition was linked, in turn, both to Rousseau, who influenced America by way of England, and to Marx, whose concepts of alienation and fetishism can be paralleled in the pages of [Henry David Thoreau's] Walden.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, would not agree with Professor Lynd. Writing to Richard Henry Lee in 1825, Jefferson said of his authorship of the Declaration, the essential thing was,
Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject . . . it was intended to be an expression of the American mind . . . All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversations, in letters, printed essays, or the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.
With regard to private property rights, Samuel Adams, who was responsible for assembling the first Continental Congress, wrote in 1771, as friction between the colonies and England increased:
Mr. [John] Locke has often been quoted in the present dispute . . . and very much to our purpose. His reasoning is so forcible, that no one has ever attempted to confute it. He holds that “"the preservation of property is the end of government, and that for which men enter into society . . . says he, it is a mistake to think that the supreme power of any commonwealth can dispose of the estates of the subject arbitrarily, or take any part of them at pleasure. The prince or the senate can never have a power to take to themselves the whole or any part of the subject’s property without their own consent: for this would be in effect to have no property at all.” This is the reasoning of that great and good man. And is not our own case exactly described by him?
It has been said, not altogether facetiously, that the French (and apparently American Liberals) love theories and care nothing about whether those theories work in practice; that the English, in contrast, wouldn't give a farthing for an abstract theory, preferring carefully and cautiously to make incremental changes over decades and centuries, aiming always to conserve traditions, which are the structural framework of society.
The French, after the 1789 Revolution, threw out everything; the baby along with the bath water. The monarchy and the aristocracy were scrapped, the Roman Catholic Church was essentially disenfranchised and its properties seized, and, when discontents arose, more than 70,000 French citizens were slaughtered in the Reign of Terror.
Ironically, most of the real philosophical and scientific progress had come, not from France, but from England and Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries. Isaac Newton conceptualized and developed the mathematics of planetary motion and the science of optics (the Wikipedia says, "Isaac Newton's discoveries were so numerous and varied that many consider him to be the father of modern science); John Locke had erected a framework for modern psychology, education, religious tolerance, and for constitutional government under which even the sovereign is subject to the higher powers of Divine moral law. Only in England and British North America were citizens free to speak their minds publicly and newspapers free to print their views on politics and religion.
The first comprehensive theory of economics appeared in Adam Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations. As Mr. Curry notes, it was a typically English document that placed the source of a nation's wealth, not in monarchial plunder, but in the imagination and industriousness of individuals, subject to the least possible government interference.
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Responses to "Which Enlightenment?"
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The author of this article, Thomas E. Brewton, seems obviously well steeped in history and the traditions of academia from which he no doubt received his first injection of many enchantments he has had about the era commonly known as the Enlightenment. The article has more than its share of narrowly focused bells and whistles for us. I was fascinated to read it, even though I prefer reading texts that are dated by at least fifty years, so that I am not fooled so easily by the common knowledge sets the author and I might share. There is little danger of that here though, so I did indeed enjoy reading the article.
For the author, Mr. Brewton, I must note you quote an old Jefferson (April 13, 1743 N.S. – July 4, 1826) as he wrote to Richard Henry Lee in 1825, a year before Jefferson died at the age of 83, not a particularly revolutionary age for any man who happens to live that long. I am fifty-six, and I have changed since my youth, so it is difficult for me to imagine how Jefferson had changed too. 1825 is well into a newer age as well, even after the Monroe Doctrine and the beginnings of American Empire.
This is not noted to contest Mr. Brewton's findings, but rather to have him make sure to point this out should he make use of this Jefferson quote again in another article, and, though he might have assumed his readers knew when Jeffereson died, he himself makes no reference to how this advanced age and likely ill health might have affected Jefferson's views. Not to worry.
The major thesis of this article is that the Enlightment came in three distinct, or at least separate flavors, this distinction being made because the author and others apparently feel some discomfort with the idea that the Enlightment could have been the same in Britain, the colonies, and France. It seems wholly an irrelevance what the American Indian might have thought about the Enlightenment that brought white men to his shores with enough diseases and more than enough weapons to effectively wipe out his redder race that had cared so lovingly for what the white man simply trashed before his eyes as his people disappeared from the face of the earth in alarming fashion, forever, now estimated to have numbered twenty-million, more than the white population thereafter until after the Civil War.
The approach given by the author is of an historical revision, speaking as is a fly on many important walls of notable white men. It's an interesting perspective, however, from the view of a philosopher, it seems there were as likely as many different Enlightments as there were humans alive on the planet then who were touched by it. That is a minor point concerning why I write.
What I found reading the article was that Mr. Brewton fails to give us his own perspective on the Enlightenment, though it surely is hinted at by the message between the lines or his article.
The Enlightenment was perhaps heralded in by the West's rediscovery of Aristotle the great categorizer of observation, and a far lesser philosopher who had the ignoble distinction of tutoring Alexander, who was himself a horrid, murderous brute of the first degree, one prone to far ranging gangs of thugs. It was upon Aristotle's methodological invention that the methodology of empirical science arose in the very broadest of measures of science, including the social sciences of Rousseau and his madder pseudo-philosophic twin, Voltaire, who togther gave themselves to the pseudo-sciences of the equality and rights of men, but only men, white men. the rest being aptly termed by JS Mill as "nonage". In this article they are still nonage, I see, in 2006 nonetheless.
One must wonder as the intellectual plague of the Enlightnement set men's mind afire with conquest of the world again, what effect it had on all those who were chased down and murdered for the sake of conquest and ignoring postumously how they viewed the Enlightenment. And, I wonder, was the Inquisition the Spanish/Moor variety and origin of some parts of the Enlightenment?
There is no problem reading between the lines here in what I write, is there? If there is, I view the often noted great progress of the Enlightenment as hardly progress at all, and that rather it should be viewed as a horrid blight upon humankind, and the beginning of the modern Empirical Wars that still plague us today.
Perhaps there is an Enlightenment yet to come.
Thanks for the opportunity to address this crowd.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
Limestone, Maine
An Illustrated Philosophy Primer for Young Readers
http://www.geocities.com/donaldwrobertson/index.html
Comment by Don Robertson | December 5, 2006
The author’s thesis of why today’s “intellectuals” or students have such a warped view of history merely hints at the dominant Germans influence from the 18th and 19th centuries. He also leaves out the theory that the Declaration, Constitution and Federalist papers were arguably the capstone on the enlightenment period, which as of yet man has not improved upon. Also, there is no mention of the accident of the New World at the precise time of the enlightenment.
The biggest problem is a lack of classically educated faculty, today. Most are briefed on the Germans and French post-enlightenment. What they learn is the drivel from Kant, Rousseau, Neitzche, Hegel, Marx- Freud then finally Dewey. This without the full rise of western philosophical training from Homer and Plato, and including the Bible and dark ages culminating in the enlightened thinkers challenging hereditary aristocracy and promoting the rights of the individual with limited government and including Luther and the Magna Carta at Runnymead in 1215.
Instead of learning from true classical intellectuals and the mistakes they made, and the depth and breadth of their thinking and writing, the 20th century education system awards Doctorates of Philosophy with very limited training. They study the dark despair of Kantian pessimism, immoral kooks like Rousseau; the depression and funereal fog of Nihilism and Existentialism, and the slavery of Hegelian Marxism leading to no understanding of history or mankind or self.
Allan Bloom was right. We have the entire 20th century studying lessons from the Germans, without fully understanding what came before. This was his closing of the American mind. That is why we have today more of a socialistic trend then a capitalist free market trend that would reward human excellence. Civilization is headed backwards and has been since about 1900.
Another reason enlightenment succeeded in the New World was the absence of an organized church and hereditary landed aristocracy. Just example the difference in the British and the English? Who was the aristocrat and who was the bourgeois? Still true today, look at Parliament. Also example the aristocrat De Tocqueville looking down his nose at our individual achievements and lack of lineage. We were also protected by 2 oceans; which was coincidentally at end of enlightenment period when ideas of independence from Church dogma and British sense of duty flourished.
The capstone on the entire rise of western civilization was our founding documents. Partially by accident our new nation needed a central government at the precise time the enlightenment had passed. Fortunately we had classically trained aristocrats ready to pledge their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor for the simple ideas learned from an entire history of the west. It is now all archaic.
Comment by WeThePeople | December 5, 2006
A fine introduction, Mr. Brewton! The rationalist nature of the continental Enlightenment with its roots in Descartes’ overly deductive emphasis starting from mental thought, to Kant’s final severing of consciousness with any contact with the objects of reality, is indeed in stark contrast to the spirit of the Anglo-American approach. While British empiricism did have its weak points (which Kant exploited in his critiques) the actual practice was reality-oriented with a high regard for the lessons of history and respect for the vast distinctness of each individual.
The Americans clearly distilled the thought of giants – as Jefferson writes “Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney.” And Jefferson’s appreciation of the classics is evident in his advice to a young man. Ah, how much we lost!
Comment by JasonPappas | December 12, 2006