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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 10, 2002
Enlightenment
The last two weeks I have tried to make a couple of very big and very obvious points about the world we are now sharing with the "Islamist" fanatics. I have made them not as ends in themselves but as correctives to the very big and very partial ideas I find in circulation all around me. Today for round three and final I want to make my biggest point of all qualifying the last two. In fact the subject is so large I will give it only in crude outline for I think any intelligent reader can work out the implications for him or herself. We in the West passed through an extraordinary experience in the 18th century one with implications for the whole planet. From different angles it is referred to as the "Industrial Revolution" or the "Enlightenment" or even the "Age of Revolutions" -- French and American. We tend to focus only on the material consequences of that experience the "technological" and "economic" aspects of a sudden explosion in human self-understanding -- how we got rich when others stayed poor -- rather than on the spiritual aspects. For as my good friend the American thinker Lee Harris has been reminding me lately the core of that Enlightenment -- the wick of the candle -- was moral not practical. It is important to remember that in the course of inventing or discovering or achieving the full "modernity" the French and Scottish philosophes of the 18th century did not only create the steam engine. They also perfected the first-person narrative creating such things as daily journalism and the modern prose novel. Out of an essentially Christian tradition they discovered or enlarged upon the mechanism of "sympathy" in human nature. For the first time large numbers of people including women and those belonging to the lower classes were able to read about "how the other side lives". And vice versa the rich "discovered" the poor masters discovered the horrors of slavery the English discovered the French the Europeans discovered the world -- no longer as things entirely external to themselves but as subjects into which they could now be imaginatively projected. There is a down-side to every moral progression; for instance I think one of the consequences was to replace the robust old capacity for "righteous indignation" with something more like "self-righteousness". And it would be wrong to assign only to the 18th century something which had been brewing for a long time and which is itself prefigured in Augustine and in the Gospels. But for the present purpose I'm not going to go into all that. The important thing to note is that this revolution happened and made everyone it touched -- ultimately everyone in the West -- as different from our own ancestors as we remained different from people in other parts of the world. The revolution spread quickly to the limits of Christendom but only partially beyond. And what we have today is the technological and economic ramifications of that revolution continuing to spread but not necessarily its inner spiritual core. One sees the consequences of this every minute when trying to make sense of Arab and Muslim media or in trying to debate across the cultural frontier. The world they paint is black and white us versus them quite strictly. There are no bridges only ferries that never return. The attitude towards the United States and Europe is a stark simple righteous one which we confuse with "self-righteous". Either America is the Great Satan or else it is the fount of every good thing; there's no room in the middle. Either you hate the West or you join it by getting on the ferry. These are still today cultures of the "pre-Enlightenment"; people not incapable of sympathy for their own but not yet versed in the imaginative projection of that sympathy into people who are not their own. And it is not Islam but the Enlightenment that stands between East and West in these matters. For we have largely lost the category of an "infidel" and they still have it. On this side the endless effort to understand "where those people are coming from" mostly missing the main point that they "do not think as we do". On that side no effort at all and it is taken for granted that we are "infidels" simply living "beyond the pale" even when there is no desire to harm us. For us there can be both Israeli and Palestinian victims; for them only Palestinians feel pain. I would like to call this an over-simplification -- being a child of the Enlightenment myself -- but I'm afraid it is not much over-simplified. The gap between us yawns very wide. For the sad truth is that the only people to whom we can appeal for "mutual understanding" from the other side are the people who have themselves been Westernized or "Enlightened". * * * * * I've been rather ill this last week which left me without the chance to comment on the U.S. mid-term elections which I will now do even more briefly. I am surrounded not on the Citizen particularly but in "Canada and the West" by pundits who are loath to admit their numerous mistakes and I was rather relishing admitting one of my own. For the first time since 9/11/01 I was convinced President Bush had made a stupid major mistake putting his whole prestige on the line to get a few specific Congressmen elected. And in the clear light of hindsight I was wrong; totally wrong. What Mr. Bush did as became clear the morning after was trade 10 points in his own personal approval rating in the polls (which I had my eye on) for Republican control of the Senate. He was "investing his political capital" as they say; always a risky operation. But it is done for a return on the equity and that next morning he began to recover his 10 points with America and its government united behind him and his Republican party -- for war tax cuts tort reform and several other propositions. To be fair a lot of Democrats and pundits have since been writing in their shock: "It's time we stopped saying Bush is stupid." Fortunately for Mr. Bush they'll only remember for a few more days. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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