The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
H.H. Chartrand
April 2002
Crimes
of reason
The Economist, March 16, 1996, pp. 85-87
The ideas that shaped
western thought on science, morality and politics sprang from the
Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which flourished in Europe in the 18th
century. Are these ideas mankind’s
finest intellectual achievement - or, as it is once again fashionable to argue,
a catastrophic error?
IMMANUEL KANT, perhaps the greatest philosopher the
world has known, was among those who responded when, in 1783, a German newspaper
asked its readers to write an essay on the question, “What is enlightenment?”
His reply included the words, much
quoted ever since, “Sapere aude, have
the courage to know: that is the motto of enlightenment.”
It is an injunction that, for all their differences,
other great thinkers of the 18th century would have endorsed. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Smith and
others were all, like Kant, engaged in a self-conscious effort to extend the
reach of reason. Their goal was not
mainly to gain a greater understanding of the physical world, but to bring
reason to bear on man’s place within it - that is, among other things, to bring
morality and politics wholly within the scope of rational inquiry. On the face of it, these ambitions were
realised. The ideas of the
Enlightenment changed the world. Their legacy is western
modernity.
On this last point, scholars today appear to agree.
Where they disagree is on whether
the legacy was for good or evil. The debate between these contending views
is of more than academic interest. The West’s inheritance from the
intellectual battles of the 18th century was liberalism and capitalism. These have made the West, for good or
ill, what it is. So modern critics
of the Enlightenment are not merely picking a fight with Kant about the rational
basis of morality, or with Adam Smith about the spontaneous order of the
marketplace. Implicitly and
explicitly, they are challenging rights (such as equality before the law) and
assumptions (such as progress through technology) that have come to be taken for
granted throughout the developed world.
Despite their being taken for granted, disaffection with
liberal capitalism is all around.
The proximate causes of this are clear - and, it may seem, have little to
do with 18th-century philosophy.
But it is useful to understand that this disaffection can be grounded in
deeper arguments - in a critique of Enlightenment thought - and to reflect on
where those arguments might lead.
Like any intellectual movement, the Enlightenment had
its own antecedents, notably in the Reformation, but more particularly in the
scientific breakthroughs of the 17th century. In fact the beginning of the
Enlightenment can plausibly be dated at 1687, when Newton published his
“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”.
Newton’s universal law of gravitation, the basis for a
comprehensive mathematical description of the universe, constituted an
intellectual revolution in its own right. But it did not serve directly, as you
might suppose, to undermine religious faith. Newton had not made God unnecessary.
Together with many contemporary
popularisers of his work, he regarded his discoveries as not merely consistent
with God’s existence, but tantamount to proof of it.
Rather, the power of Newton’s great work was that it
demonstrated (or appeared to demonstrate) the staggering power of science and
the susceptibility of the physical world to human understanding. In that way, Newton inspired later
thinkers to demand ever more of reason. If the intellect could comprehend the
universe, in its seemingly limitless complexity, then surely it could also
comprehend justice, authority, right and wrong. It was in the face of these new demands,
rather than in response to Newton’s discoveries in their own right, that faith
retreated.
The prevailing mode of Enlightenment thinking was
scepticism. All ideas must face
scrutiny. Only in this way could
man be liberated from superstition and irrational fear. Scrutiny in turn required dissent: bad
ideas must not be sheltered by intellectual tyranny, or by tyranny of any kind.
For much the same reason, the
Enlightenment frowned on zealotry, blind enthusiasm and other sorts of
closed-mindedness.
A second animating spirit was regard for the individual.
Like scepticism and tolerance,
individualism followed from the enthroning of reason - for reason is a faculty
exercised by the individual mind. Lastly, Enlightenment thought was
optimistic: though it might take centuries, the “Enlightenment project” would
succeed. Through reason, man would
master nature and himself; through reason, men everywhere, regardless of culture
or tradition, would discover the universal rules by which they should live their
lives.
Different Enlightenment thinkers mixed these ingredients
in differing proportions. They
argued fiercely with each other. The French Enlightenment itself had
several schools; it differed from the Scottish,
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and again from the German. Yet all these ideas formed a single,
albeit diffuse, body of thought. And from the beginning, they came under
attack
Broadly speaking, the assaults were (as they continue to
be) of two main kinds. One group of
critics argued that scientific inquiry (especially when applied to questions of
human conduct) was doomed to miss the point. The illustration at the head of this
article shows William Blake’s verdict on science. Newton fusses with protractors, measuring
this and bisecting that, blind to the majesty of Creation.
Blake was an artist, poet and mystic. Fervently anti-rationalist, he had no
interest in challenging rationalism analytically. But many philosophers, among them Hegel
(builder of intellectual systems par excellence), echoed his view. The Enlightenment challenged faith and
offered nothing in its place; it asserted individual autonomy; it had little
interest in the truth, as opposed to the social utility, of religious belief.
This was so not just of Voltaire
and the movement’s other staunch (mainly French) anti-clericals. Reason obliged even believers to explain
religion in terms that demeaned it. God and faith were beyond reason. By denying that, in Hegel’s view, the
Enlightenment betrayed mankind.
The second kind of assault aimed to refute Enlightenment
thought in its own terms. For
critics of this sort, the Enlightenment’s defect was not (or not only) that it
missed the point, or asked bad questions, but that it got the answers to its
questions wrong. Among these
arguments, one of the most penetrating was put forward by Johann Gottfried
Herder. Beginning with “Another
Philosophy of History” in 1774,
Herder challenged the universalist, optimistic character of
Enlightenment thought. The movement
had
taken words for works, Enlightenment
for happiness, greater sophistication for virtue, and in this way invented the
fiction of the general amelioration of the world.
It was a mistake, in Herder’s view, to think of human
history as an advance to ever higher forms of moral thinking, to suppose that
intellectual harmony would one day be achieved without regard to local
differences in culture and custom. He regarded such differences as both
ineradicable and desirable. Because
of them, human nature expressed itself in widely differing systems of values.
Herder saw a great danger in
Enlightenment thinking: that, in order to hasten “progress” towards the
universal system, men would consider it their duty to eradicate supposedly
inferior specimens.
Modern counter-Enlightenment thinking has added little
to the substance, and has subtracted much from the clarity, of these earlier
arguments. Its chief contribution
has been to marry the two formerly separate lines of
attack.
In “Dialectic of the Enlightenment”, published shortly
after the second world war, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer asked why mankind,
far from advancing to an ever closer harmony, had sunk into an abyss of hitherto
unimaginable barbarism; why science, far from serving its Enlightenment purpose
of enlarging human understanding, had only served the cause of human cruelty.
Their answer was that the
Enlightenment had been doomed all along to serve totalitarian
goals.
The exaltation of rationality, they argued, could have
led nowhere else. Since the one,
true rationality does not exist, the Enlightenment project was futile - but,
tragically, not just futile. By
rejecting all authority but reason, the Enlightenment left wickedness unchecked.
By seeking to justify morality
exclusively in terms of reason, man divorced ethics from knowledge, and
subordinated the one to the other. He once sought to be wise, now he sought
only to know. He worshipped not God
but technology, and sacrificed his fellow man to it. Industrial dehumanisation, concentration
camps, atomic bombs: these were the fruits of knowledge without
morals.
In a similar spirit, many 19th-century writers had
regarded the Terror that fullowed the French Revolution as the culmination of
Enlightenment ideas. Modem critics
of the Enlightenment see Soviet totalitarianism in exactly the same light - as
one more manifestation of the corrupting Enlightenment
project.
In the name of reason, man sets himself not only against
other men, but also against the natural world. In the 18th century, Rousseau and others
had contrasted the “noble savage”, living free and in harmony with nature, with
“civilised” man - shackled by industry and commerce; dependent on technology,
which expands wants faster than it can meet them. Again, the argument echoes down the
years, this time much amplified: such ideas plainly anticipate modern
environmentalism. Many of today’s
counter-Enlightenment thinkers are distinctly green, just as many greens,
knowingly or otherwise, have joined the battle with Voltaire, Hume, Smith and
the others that has raged for the past 250
years.
The most influential works of the modern
counter-Enlightenment are by writers such as Alasdair Maclntyre, Michael Sandel,
Roberto Unger and Christopher Lasch - names most familiar in America. In Britain, John Gray is probably their
best-known ally: once a liberal in the Enlightenment tradition, lately born
again as the country’s most prolific and certainly most agitated
anti-Enlightenment thinker. One of
Mr Gray’s recent essays shows how the different strands of criticism are now
woven together:
the westernising project of
Enlightenment humanism has desolated traditional cultures in every part of the
globe and visited devastation on their natural environments. The Soviet experience, in which an
Enlightenment ideology wrecked the cultures of the Russian and many other
peoples and a western Promethean conception of human relations with the earth
wrought irreversible damage to the environment on a vast scale, will likely go
down - . . as merely a particularly dramatic episode in the world revolution of
westernisation.
Things are bad. Is there no hope? In Mr Gray’s view, there is. It lies in the fact that the
Enlightenment project is exhausted. As a result, alternatives to the
rapacious imperatives of liberal capitalism can at last be given serious
consideration.
The Soviet collapse is probably best
interpreted not as a victory for western capitalism, but instead as a decisive
moment in the global counter-movement against westernization. . . [The] prospect
of cultural recovery from the nihilism that the Enlightenment has spawned may
lie with non-Occidental peoples, whose task will then be that of protecting
themselves from the debris cast up by the western
shipwreck.
What is one to make of all this? For a start, the argument stretches
useful categories beyond breaking-point.
What is gained by regarding Stalinism or France’s post-Revolutionary
Terror as Enlightenment ideologies? It is possible, of course, to trace a
line of descent from the critique of the established order of the early i8th
century to the appearance of new forms of tyranny. So what? The mere passage of time always makes it
possible to establish such connections. The question is whether the principal
Enlightenment thinkers would hesitated to condemn these tyrannies -
and
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whether wishing to condemn them, they would have lacked
the arguments to do so.
Surely, it is impossible to doubt it: they would have
condemned without hesitation, using arguments readily to hand, and for reasons
that lay at the core of their world-view. The case against Stalinism follows
immediately from the Enlightenment’s regard for the individual and from its
insistence on dissent and tolerance.
Stalinism and other modern tyrannies are naturally and properly regarded
not as expressions of Enlightenment thinking but, at most, as gross corruptions
of it. To argue otherwise, to say
that what mattered most about liberalism and Soviet tyranny is what they had in
common, seems absurd for the simple reason that it is
absurd.
However, there is more to the counter-Enlightenment
attack on liberalism than slander by association. The two arguments put forward by earlier
critics remain to be addressed: first (after Herder), that different cultures
can support different systems of values; second (after Hegel), that
“rationality” (and its offspring, liberal capitalism) militates against human
flourishing. From the first it
follows that liberal values have no superior claim to legitimacy over the
“non-Occidental” ideologies in which Mr Gray sees the possibility of salvation;
from the second it follows that the West should urgently seek just such an
alternative.
In their responses to these arguments, the
Enlightenment’s followers divide into many different camps. Most followers of Kant, for instance,
would insist that reason does point to a universal moral code. They might further argue that differences
among the world’s moral systems are more apparent than real; that convergence
among systems is, in fact, happening; that, even if differences persist, there
is at least a universal minimum morality recognised wherever reason prevails;
that the foundations (and perhaps not just the foundations) of liberalism lie
inside that minimum; and that societies which deny this are objectively
wrong.
Others, following a different Enlightenment tradition,
might argue that the legitimacy of any morality rests ultimately on the extent
to which it enables humans to flourish. On this less rationalist view, different
moral systems might suit different cultural circumstances. But this moderate “relativism” need not
extend to regarding all moral systems as equally good, or to saying that it
makes no sense to judge one against another, as Herder’s intellectual
descendants sometimes appear to argue.
For instance, if the purpose of a system of values is to
promote fruitful interaction among humans, a liberal principle such as “the
greatest freedom consistent with the freedom of others” (or, if you prefer,
“live and let live”) has much to be said for it. All the more so, if humans disagree about
things that matter to them. Pre-liberal nostrums such as “treat
others as you would have them treat you” also make sense according to this
criterion. On the other hand, a
principle which said “people should kill people who disagree with them”, however
deeply rooted in local culture, is unlikely to serve the cause of human
welfare.
Needless to say, value-systems based on divine
revelation cut across such considerations. If God wants you to kill people with
certain beliefs, there is no more to be said. It is striking, however, that modern
counter-Enlightenment writers hardly ever make a direct appeal to religious
belief - even though some are religious and nearly all approve of religion in
the abstract. They appear to regard
religious belief as a personal matter: that is, as a matter of individual
conscience. This seems an
irresponsibly Enlightened attitude. Voltaire would have relished the fact
that today’s (western academic) enemies of the Enlightenment are, in this
crucial sense, its obedient children.
Be that as it may, how else might moderate relativists
reply to the two counter-Enlightenment arguments? On their view, it seems the points
collapse into a single test: whether a system of values is legitimate boils down
to (or is anyway closely connected to) whether it works. Clearly, anti-liberals think liberalism
doesn’t. In fact, as by now you may
have surmised, modern students of the Enlightenment can be divided with no
significant exceptions into admirers and detractors, according to whether they
regard western modernity as a marvel (despite its failings) or a disaster
(despite its superficial attractions).
At a guess, the Enlightenment philosophers would have
been pleased on the whole with how things have turned out. Western modernity has its horrors, to be
sure. Some of them—above all, the
nightmare of nuclear war - are of its own devising. Others, such as crime and poverty, are
hardly inventions of the modern age, though it maybe fair to criticise liberal
societies for failing to address them with sufficient urgency. There is good reason too for governments
to pay attention to environmental issues, local and international. All this may be admitted. But it does not come close to justifying
the unwaveringly apocalyptic tone of nearly all anti-liberal
writers.
It ought to be obvious but evidently it needs saying: to
the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people, western liberalism has
brought standards of material and emotional well-being unimagined in earlier
times. The daily portion of all but
the rich was once ignorance, injustice, fear, pain and want. On every dimension - health, education,
physical security, economic opportunity - conditions of life have been utterly
transformed, and for the better. As
catastrophic failures go, the Enlightenment has served mankind quite well. At a minimum, the burden of proof lies
with anti-liberals to propose a better alternative - something they have
conspicuously failed to do.
In recent years Isaiah Berlin has done more than anybody
else to test the ideas of the great liberal thinkers against the criticisms of
their most creative 18th- and 19th-century opponents. Always careful to give those critics
their due, he nonetheless offered this as his verdict on the champions of the
Enlightenment:
The intellectual power, honesty,
lucidity, courage and disinterested love of the most gifted thinkers of the 18th
century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most
hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.
That seems about right.
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