Discreditable
As a rule, I hate long blockquotes, but Terry Eagleton's almost insanely dystopian assessment of Enlightenment civilization does not appear on Harper's Web site; nor can it be cut.
Contrast this, then, with the second form of society, in which men and women are solitary creatures locked fearfully within their own private spheres. All they can know with any certainty is their own immediate experience, and even that is alarmingly unreliable. They cannot know enough of other people even to be sure that they exist, or that they have minds like their own. Communication is sickeningly precarious, and friendship, community, and solidarity are less genuine bonds than an interlocking of private interests. In fact, it is self-interest that drives this social order, in which others are seen either as potential predators or as pale replicas of oneself.
Reason still plays a major role in this culture, but only in a withered, anemic sense of the term. It no longer provides a foundation to social life. Instead, having scornfully dismissed metaphysical first principles, this society is left hanging in a void. It is a cacaphony of colliding values, and reason cannot adjudicate between them. Reason is just a set of mechanical procedures for calculating which means will most effectively secure your self-interested ends. Those ends are not in themselves rational: like the instinct for self-preservation, they are set by appetites that are built into our nature and, as such, are beyond all criticism. Reason becomes a blunt instrument for promoting one's own gratification, rather as science and technology are ways of mastering and dominating Nature (which includes other people and other cultures) so as to press it into the service of one's desires. Torn loose from feeling, custom, and the senses, reason runs riot; in fact, it ends up replicating the despotism of earlier regimes with a tyranny all its own, from which no particle of human life is permitted to escape.
Nature is no longer valuable or meaningful in itself; it is just an inert lump of matter to be cuffed into whatever shape takes our fancy. A bleak utility now reigns sovereign in social life, expelling all of those dimensions of existence - art, feeling, humor, imagination, sensuous fulfillment, doing things just for the hell of it - which have a value but no price. A wedge is driven between humanity and Nature, as subjects are ripped from objects, bodies from souls, and values from facts. God is killed off in all but name, and human beings are hoisted into His place at the apex of creation. But exactly because they have the absolute freedom to do what they like, whatever they actually do seems futile and arbitrary.
In previous paragraphs, Mr Eagleton offered a standard rosy account of the Enlightenment's benefits; here he flips the coin and shows us a much less pleasant world. Outside of Mr Eagleton's imagination as he wrote this, however - and the theatre of alienation that seemed so daring when Mr Eagleton was a youth - does it exist? I don't think so. As a summary of the Enlightenment's consequences, it is not only unimaginative but anti-imaginative. Lazily post-Marxian, it targets not the Enlightenment itself but the Enlightenment's patrons and principal beneficiaries, the bourgeoisie. Mr Eagleton presents The Ice Storm as a universal template.
(The three paragraphs come from a review, appearing in the March 2005 issue of Harper's of two recent books on the Enlightenment, one by Louis Dupré and the other by Francis Wheen. Neither these books nor anything else in the review concern us now, but such is the background.)
Even on your worst day, have you been genuinely beset by doubt that other people really exist? Assuming that you don't believe in God, whatever that word means to you, do you feel that you have been asked to take his place? Do you feel that your day is spent navigating a cacaphony of colliding values? Seriously? I understand that we can all step back, squint, and persuade ourselves that things are not going very well for humanity. But people whose immediate lives are infected by such perceptions are likely to be very seriously depressed, incapable, perhaps, of getting out of bed except for strict necessities.
Behind almost every sentence, moreover, lies the implication that things used to be better once upon a time, even if they seemed worse. This was until very recently the Roman Catholic Church's view of the Enlightenment, and its thinking still informs many conservative minds: better to do nothing than to suppress a tradition for the sake of helping someone out. But I seem to recall that the wedge between humanity and nature makes a very early appearance in Genesis, and from the dawn of Western thought the concept of the human soul has been exploited to set mankind apart from the rest of creation. The beef seems to be that, with his "Godlike" technological powers, modern man would do better to honor the traditional cosmology, according to which we are all condemned to live in the sublunary zone of corruption.
I don't suggest that everybody's life is peachy keen. No indeed. But Mr Eagleton is wrong to propose his dark summary as a vision of the Enlightenment at its ideal best. The Enlightenment program is an outline for helping humanity make a better world for itself. It is not a full-fledged plan, and certainly not a timetable. We have learned to be rather more patient than the men of two centuries ago - than even the men of 1900. We have learned that an equation of power with justification is a route to extinction in an radioactive miasma. We have learned that the men of the Enlightenment were a tad optimistic about the force of reason within the human mind, but their overestimation does not diminish the importance of trying to be reasonable about things and to seek compromise wherever we can find it. We have learned that reason does indeed have its bad side, rationalism, and we are learning to check the kind of pipe dreams that rendered LeCorbusier's architectural fantasies into slummy housing projects or Henry Ford's River Rouge plant into Auschwitz. And some of us have learned that talk like Mr Eagleton's has frightened many people into giving up on learning. We are still learning.
We are worth the effort, and, what's more, that instinct is built into our nature. So are all our weaknesses, but so also is the desire, always there but unbound by the Enlightenment's insistence upon equality, to make something of ourselves.
