Review of The End of Enlightenment, by Richard Whatmore, pub. Penguin 2023
book cover
In 1776, David Hume, near the end of his life, speculated on excuses he might give to Charon when invited to step into his ferryboat: “If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition”. But Charon would then reply, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant.”
Hume belonged to a generation of thinkers who “tended to see themselves as postwar generations. Between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries Europe rarely saw a year of peace. The Enlightenment began when these religious wars ceased.” To his mind, fanaticism and bigotry had been replaced by tolerance and calm, with opposing parties able to argue rationally instead of attempting to outlaw or kill each other. What concerned him as he awaited the ferryman was the fear that old times might be coming around again, but in a different guise.
Hume had once thought that increasing commerce between nations would of itself make war less likely - trade flourishes best in peacetime, and states which may heartily dislike each other’s politics and religion will nevertheless maintain at least polite relations for the sake of their mutual profits. But in fact trade wars had replaced religious ones, and states were empire-building through war to protect and expand their trade, and to satisfy the appetite for luxury goods that this trade created in the populace. The mutual dependence of governments and merchant companies worried philosophers and political economists like Adam Smith; “Merchant companies made their own interests sovereign, he argued, to the detriment of indigenous peoples who became only a source of profit, and to domestic governments, who became their fools”.
Nor had fanaticism vanished; it had simply moved from the realm of religion to that of politics. Hume “believed that British politics had become increasingly polarized between camps that portrayed those with different views as beyond the pale, as supporters of despotism or anarchy”, and it is hard to disagree with him when one reads rhetoric like Burke’s on the “wicked principles and black hearts” of men like Richard Price and Lord Shelburne, who, however much they may have disagreed with him, were demonstrably neither unprincipled nor black-hearted. They would have classed themselves as moderates, as indeed Burke classed himself; it is remarkable how politicians and thinkers on all sides of the argument saw themselves as moderates and their opponents as fanatical zealots. Politicians, particularly the Whigs who had been in power for most of George II’s reign, also tended to confuse their own interest with that of the nation; when they lamented that the country was going to the dogs, what they generally meant was that they personally were out of office.
Almost none of them, indeed, had any faith in the ability of the general public to elect the right men, manage affairs, or cope with any kind of power. Shelburne, an amiable sort who genuinely desired the “Happiness of Mankind”, also confessed to being ‘sorry to say upon an experience of forty years, that the public is incapable of embracing two objects at a time, or of extending their views beyond the object immediately before them’. He, and others, felt that democracy led to the public being bamboozled by jingoistic demagogues (and if they were alive today, they might well feel vindicated in that view). Wollstonecraft, who had once thought people were naturally virtuous or could soon become so, wrote in 1796 that she had ‘almost learnt to hate mankind’. Obviously some of this was owing to disillusion following the chaos into which the French Revolution had descended; it does not seem to have occurred to many that the excesses of the previous monarchy had in large part caused this violent swing. Burke, fulminating about ““a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and famished people”, gives no hint that this had been exactly the case under the old regime as well. It might have been supposed that regimes elsewhere would learn not to imitate Bourbon intransigence, but in fact they became ever more illiberal out of fear for their own privilege and landed interests. Gibbon was convinced that any concession to political reform would be fatal - “if you do not resist the spirit of innovation in the first attempt, if you admit the smallest and most specious change in our parliamentary system, you are lost”. He “shuddered” at the plans of Charles Grey, who would go on to steer the 1832 Reform Bill to success.
This study, which would take an essay to review in detail, records and analyses the reactions of thinkers including Hume, Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Gibbon, Shelburne and Brissot to the end of the Enlightenment years and the American and French revolutions. It also sees this period as analogous in some ways to our own, in that now too, political discourse and much else seems to be polarizing, fanaticism and intolerance to be on the rise and a spell of relative peace coming to an end. In many ways it is less a history book than a book about theories of history, which could easily have been unreadably dull; fortunately it is written with great clarity and allows the characters of its fiercely intellectual protagonists to come across, often via their own words. Even Wikipedia, that fount of knowledge-substitute, gives no hint that the phrase “the silent majority” did not originate with Nixon or Coolidge, nor yet as a humorous Victorian description of the dead, but may be found in Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of the poor of Britain as “a silent majority of misery”.