The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (43 page)
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Authors: Anthony Esolen
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Enlightened Hobbes“The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions.”Thomas Hobbes
,
Leviathan
(ch. 13, 62)
Johnson saw into things, and through them. When Boswell asked him how he would refute Bishop Berkeley’s theory that all we see about us is the fabrication of the mind, that hulk of a man kicked a stone and cried out, “I refute it—THUS!” (
Life of Johnson
). It was, shall we say, a highly concentrated intellectual argument. It appealed to reason itself, past a reason that had taken leave of its senses. Or, when Boswell asked him about the freedom of the will—a question that troubled the Scotsman, as he tried to reconcile it with the predestination preached by Scottish Calvinists—Johnson replied that all theory was against it, but all experience for it.
32
That was another concentrated argument (for Johnson could write many pages elaborating upon it), based on his insight that theory comes halting behind the more complex and reliable, though sometimes inarticulate, intuitions of man. Asked his opinion of the American rebels, Johnson trenchantly observed that they talked a deal about freedom, but owned slaves.
33
There was a lot to that, too. Nor did Johnson blithely accept all feelings as valid. In his novel
Rasselas,
one of his characters, searching for the secret of happiness, lives for a while in a middle-class house among other girls of marrying age. Do people know their own hearts? Not according to the Princess Nekayah: “Many were in love with triflers like themselves, and many fancied that they were in love when in truth they were only idle” (ch. 25).
Life of Johnson
). It was, shall we say, a highly concentrated intellectual argument. It appealed to reason itself, past a reason that had taken leave of its senses. Or, when Boswell asked him about the freedom of the will—a question that troubled the Scotsman, as he tried to reconcile it with the predestination preached by Scottish Calvinists—Johnson replied that all theory was against it, but all experience for it.
32
That was another concentrated argument (for Johnson could write many pages elaborating upon it), based on his insight that theory comes halting behind the more complex and reliable, though sometimes inarticulate, intuitions of man. Asked his opinion of the American rebels, Johnson trenchantly observed that they talked a deal about freedom, but owned slaves.
33
There was a lot to that, too. Nor did Johnson blithely accept all feelings as valid. In his novel
Rasselas,
one of his characters, searching for the secret of happiness, lives for a while in a middle-class house among other girls of marrying age. Do people know their own hearts? Not according to the Princess Nekayah: “Many were in love with triflers like themselves, and many fancied that they were in love when in truth they were only idle” (ch. 25).
Johnson was never rich; but he held his head among princes. Others might theorize about equality and liberty. Johnson retained the services of Francis Barber, a black man from Jamaica, as his valet; he gave him a place to stay, paid him what he could, and educated him. When he died, Johnson bequeathed to Francis and his family a handsome sum. Johnson was a soft touch for people in suffering. He kept, at great inconvenience to himself, an old woman named Mrs. Williams in his apartment; he was careful of her welfare, though she was not always grateful for it. He married a woman much older than he was, not a “catch,” yet he was devoted to her, in a simple and manly fashion. He tolerated Roman Catholicism, when the fashionable attitude toward it—then as now—was to scoff at its “superstitious” appeal to the common person. He trusted the sense of that common person. Yet no one in Europe could match his breadth of reading and his acuity of thought.
He was the most enlightened man of the Enlightenment, and nobody but some Englishmen knew it. We will not see his like again. Our schools, our legislatures, and our entertainment will see to that.
Chapter 8
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: MAN IS A GOD; MAN IS A BEAST
W
hat a fascinating century the nineteenth is. If the measure of a culture lies in its machines and money, not the men and their thoughts, then that century saw progress unmatched by all the centuries before. Consider what life was like at the onset:
hat a fascinating century the nineteenth is. If the measure of a culture lies in its machines and money, not the men and their thoughts, then that century saw progress unmatched by all the centuries before. Consider what life was like at the onset:
America is a confederation of states hugging the shores of the Atlantic, wary of its old enemy England, and just as wary of its new friend France.
The streets of Paris run with blood. They call it democracy.
Italy is a checkerboard of dukedoms, most of them owing allegiance to foreign powers. The pope is the temporal ruler in the region around Rome.
Guess What?Nineteenth-century “science” spawned twentieth-century genocide.
Romantics’ worship of nature turned into a dangerous worship of man.
Marx held the working man in scorn.
Most Europeans and Americans live on or near farms.
Nails are made at the blacksmith’s shop, by hand.
Mary Wollstonecraft is one of a few people to argue for the full educational and political equality of women.
The sun never sets on the British Empire, yet for most people in Europe and America such things as oranges and pineapples are still exotic, to be purchased for holidays.
If you get sick, your doctor may bleed you to drain off the excess sanguine “humour.” George Washington, in 1799, fell ill of what was probably strep throat. His doctor bled him. He died.
The intelligentsia believe in the perfectibility of man. This is to come about through proper education, and art.
You ride a horse to get from Philadelphia to New York. It takes two days.
People in Vienna are listening to Mozart.
At its close:
America stretches from the Florida Keys to the Bering Strait, with territories from Cuba to the Philippines. She is about to become the most powerful nation the world has seen.
France has muddled through the century, cast off her imperial government, and become a republic. Europeans more and more assume that democracy can work, and is just. The vote becomes more than a tool to secure justice; it becomes
the desired object in itself,
regardless of how it is used. Monarchs lose almost all authority.
the desired object in itself,
regardless of how it is used. Monarchs lose almost all authority.
Italy is (or pretends to be) a united nation. So are Greece, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Poland, carved up by Prussia and Russia, recalls her heroic past—when she alone defended Europe from the Turks—with pride and longing. We are on the brink of nationalist fervor, and horror.
New York is a city of over four million people. Farms produce more food than ever, thanks to technological innovations: the harvester, the reaper, the thresher. So people move to the cities, black with the smoke of factories and their wondrous array of electric-powered machines.
Women vote in many local and some state elections in America. The first age of feminism is in full swing. It already shows signs of enmity against the family and traditional morality, and of favoring the collective hive over local and individual liberty.
Britain is an aging tiger. Everyone’s had an orange.
Louis Pasteur has revolutionized medicine, proving that disease-causing “germs” (the word means “seeds”) thrive in certain conditions, and can be eliminated chemically. He establishes the connection between disease and fermentation, or the spoiling of food; it’s a tremendous breakthrough for the farmer, the brewer, the vintner, the grocer, and the people who now can enjoy clean food shipped from a distance. Joseph Lister has discovered the principles of antisepsis, and European hospitals, once death traps run by the “scientists,” now actually save lives.
The intelligentsia still believe in the perfectibility of man, but, ominously, it is now to come about through economic and political revolution. Marx and Engels have rewritten history to prove it. Thankfully, there are some sober exceptions to this attitude: Twain, Melville, Dostoyevsky.
You ride a train from Philadelphia to New York. It takes a couple of hours. You might even drive your automobile, powered by gasoline or steam.
People (in America anyway) are listening to Scott Joplin. In their own homes, too, on the phonograph, in a room lit by an electric bulb—until the telephone rings. Now begins the strange development, unique in the history of man, by which we conquer space and are separated from our neighbors by a vast indifference.
We think we’re the first generation to feel that the world is changing fast, but the people of the nineteenth century saw it coming on. And because they hadn’t jettisoned their classical and modern education (for them, “modern” meant the Renaissance and later), they had the intellectual resources to ask searching questions about it. They asked better questions about technology and its place in human life, about men and women, about the franchise, and about the dignity of work. They asked better questions about the glory and the shame of cultures from the East: India, Arabia, China, Japan. We are the inheritors of their victories. Many of these are easy enough to see: we drive in them, sleep in them, write letters with them, and talk to distant close relations on them. The troubles are harder to see, because they too are ours, and we prefer to look the other way.
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