ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment can mean many things. Generally, it means a realisation of something. To the Buddhist, it is a removal from the world into a perfect mind state where inner knowledge is achieved. But to European history, it means the intellectual quest centred in the 18th century, designed to perfect the estate of man and understand the natural world. Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity was essential to this train of thought. Newton’s success was in showing that man could understand God’s world by himself. And in doing so, devise laws in which further understanding could be had. Before Newton, the universe was enigmatic and supernatural. After Newton, it appeared to be a well-oiled and predictable machine. But what if man’s intellect could do the same with human society? Could that, too, be a well-oiled machine answerable to rationality? A contemporary and friend of Newton thought it could. This was the philosopher John Locke. He looked at the world and decided it could only be understood by man’s experience of it. Such sensory experiences of the world led to impressions in the mind, which themselves led to mentation, knowledge and understanding. Such an idea locked man’s experience in the material world, and in doing so, validated scientific theory, which he then applied to man’s society. From his experience he decided that man was, in his natural state, a social being. Hence, with the right social systems, he could live in a utopian-like society. Locke went on to devise the idea of government for the people. He gave the people inalienable rights such as freedom of speech, religion and association. And he devised the separation of powers between the legislature and executive, guaranteeing no one was above the law. We came to know this social system as liberal democracy. A whole host philosophers followed Locke, devising Enlightenment, convinced that their ideas could think mankind to a better world. European monarchies embraced the ideal, becoming known as Enlightened Despots, such as Peter the Great in Russia. In Britain, such ideas led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, where Parliamentary powers began to gain more prominence over monarchy. And in France and the fledgling United States of America, Enlightenment ideals led to revolution, based on the idea of a ‘social contract’ between government and governed. The Enlightenment proper did, however, seem to fall about the intellectuals ears during the French Revolution, which, rather than bringing peace and freedom, brought the Terror and the despotic Napoleon Bonaparte. But the simple fact is, Enlightened thinking such as this could not bring peace and freedom in the form they used. Rather than being Enlightened thinking per se, what the Age of Enlightenment really represented was an exercise in social engineering. At the centre of the project was the empowerment of the middleclass, as they rose to ascendancy in many European countries and the United States of America. Fuelled by scientific law that had led to the technology for the Industrial Revolution, the middleclass seized the intellectual initiative and became the powerhouse of enterprise and flair. This can be particularly seen in the social institutions set up to assist society to work, such as hospitals, prisons and benevolent societies. What these seemingly philanthropic initiatives did was to re-organise the working class to become the workforce of middleclass wealth, crowned with the ultimate institution of the time, the factory. The social engineering project of the Enlightenment died equally in the squalor of the poor, as it did on the bloody streets of revolutionary Paris. Central to this almost unconscious urge behind the Age Enlightenment was the need to re-organise society towards middleclass ideals, and the central way of doing this was to use man’s laws to usurp God’s laws. This death of the popular God was essential, for power before the Enlightenment was centred in Rome with the pope, and locally in the Divine Right of Kings to rule. The whole aristocratic structure would fall if this absolute right to power was to be whittled away. Obvious hints of this truth can be found as early as Locke, who guaranteed freedom of religion, except, that is, to Catholics. But the problem with the entire project was the idea that man could rule for himself. Man could be his own God, devising a society without God’s assistance. In doing so, the Enlightenment took away any form of prime motive or meaning from any society infected with the Enlightened social engineering project. But men need a purpose to be motivated. The creation of the United States of America was an obvious purpose, as, initially, was the French Revolution. But it lost its way and ended up with a dictator to provide that purpose – to replace God. Because any society needs a God-like power to glue people together, or everything becomes pointless. Hence, without such a power, Peter the Great’s Russia became despotic; even in Britain, the new direction had to come with intense industrialisation and then empire. And even later, new demi-gods arose to be the centre of society and purpose with the creation of communism and fascism. The Enlightenment was the great intellectual quest of Europe for perfection. Fuelled by the magnificence of man’s thinking mind, the Enlightenment philosophers thought they could create a society to live forever. But at heart it was all about power and cheap social engineering, and led to most of the problems of the last two hundred years. Today, our answer to this intellectual disaster is not to think. But maybe the real answer is to think all the time, creating new ways of intellectualising ourselves out of the malaise. But when we think, we should think better than the Enlightenment philosophers. We should think not only about our greatness to solve our problems, but also about the pitfalls that could strike the project down. (c) Anthony North, December 2003

This post comes from North’s Encyclopedia