The Tedious Enlightenment

For each of the last fifteen years, I’ve spent about a month with, at first, Will Durant and then later with Will and his wife Ariel and their work-of-a-lifetime history of “western” civilization (mostly European, with some notable passages on ways Asian cultures and religions, especially Islam, affected Europe, and with surprisingly little on the Americas). And, as I’ve often reported in these posts, I’ve loved every page of the experience.

Last year, things changed just a little. I got into the volume called The Age of Voltaire and found out who the Durants’ hero was. Of all the countries in Europe, the book concentrated on France (with sidetrips to other countries, to be sure), and of all the people in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, the volume focused on Voltaire. Very few personages in history receive more than one dedicated chapter in this bookshelf full of chapters: only Jesus and Mohammed come to mind. But in this volume, all of the history of the era is treated as an extension of a biography of this one man.

This year, I finished up that volume and opened up the next, covering the second half of the eighteenth century. Called Rousseau and Revolution, it fittingly begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau: two biographical chapters, in fact, and the story hadn’t even reached his most famous written works. “Another extended biography?” I thought. And then who should show up again with one more dedicated chapter but Voltaire! In fact, here in the volume whose title refers to Voltaire’s philosophical rival, the Durants make their best case yet for the importance of Voltaire. I know he and Rousseau were influential, but more influential than Jesus and Mohammed? Do two billion people roam this earth claiming to live their lives according to the pattern set by either Voltaire or Rousseau? Do two hundred?

I get it. The Durants were humanists who wanted to celebrate in their history the “freeing of the mind” in the last, say, four hundred years. They were very, very respectful of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (maybe only a little more than either Voltaire or Rousseau were), but they rejoice to look back and see the control of these religions on science, philosophy, law, government, and education broken. And to an extent, I’m with them. I’ve read in their books and others about the abuses of the medieval Church. I sympathize to a great extent with the Protestant renunciation of those abuses and cringe when I see Protestantism’s own abuses. I love freedom of the press and freedom of speech; I believe people should be able to express their views without fear that a state run by a church will imprison or kill them. I am in awe at the discoveries of science and don’t think any researcher should have to alter any words to please any institution with its own interpretation of its own religious scripture. (I’m trying to be brief here. Of course these freedoms have limits: crowded theaters, human experimentation, etc.)

But, really, do I need to be happy that Rousseau, in his Confessions, could write with legal impunity about wanting to go to an alley, pull down his pants, and hope that some woman would come along and spank him? Is this really why we should be happy with freedom of expression?

I like Voltaire and Rousseau, and the Durants have made me like them even more. What I admire about them most was their stand against wrongs. They wanted to rid the Church and the government of corruption and immorality. (Their definitions of morality aren’t exactly mine, but close enough for my sympathy.) But they didn’t have much to replace it with. Rousseau sent all his infants to a foundling hospital and then wrote a book on how to raise children!

The French philosophers of the period called their movement éclaircissement: enlightenment. That label suggests to me that they were promising to show civilization the way out of a dark place, but in fact what they did best was only to put a light on some dark corners in that place. They shone the light on a door or two that they claimed opened onto paths toward a better life. But let’s face it: all their hopes led to the Reign of Terror and then to Napoleon’s tyranny. So the Durants' raising golden monuments to Voltaire and Rousseau and then asking me to make long, polite bows towards them got uncomfortable. This year for the first time, I found my yearly conversation with the historians tedious.