Positive Liberty

Jon Rowe quotes Prof. Barry Shain as follows:

So those who are viewed by many as authentic conservative voices, for example Charles Kessler, regularly lecture and describe America as an enlightened nation. I am sorry to disagree, but America, in the eighteenth century and still today, is a Christian country. If you are dubious and would prefer to travel in space rather than in time, take a quick trip to Europe so that you can see and feel what post-Christian enlightened nations actually feel and look like.

This seems a strange assertion to make. To me it’s rather like saying “Jason is described as right-handed. I am sorry to disagree, but Jason likes to drink beer. If you are dubious about this, then attend a convention of teetotalers. You will see that most of them, too, are right-handed.”

Which proves absolutely nothing, since it is perfectly possible to be right-handed and drink beer either regularly or not at all. And it is possible to be a Christian and either be influenced by the Enlightenment or not. Indeed, virtually every Christian now living is strongly influenced by the Enlightenment. Think democracy is a reasonable idea? Think that all people are equal before God, and that none are ordained by God to rule? Think that women should get the same legal treatment as men? Or that no one should be tortured because of their faith? Or that bookburnings, and all that they stand for, are repulsive? Or that learning to accept all of these things is a part of a vital, ongoing process, one that is transforming all of humanity for the better?

Then welcome to the Enlightenment. You’re a part of it too, and you may of course be both Christian and Enlightened.

It’s been a constant theme of my blogging: The eighteenth century may have ended chronologically, but it’s never really gone away. And as the controversies of the nineteenth and twentieth fade into the background (Free silver anyone? Or Marxism?), those of the eighteenth come back with a vengeance: Religion and atheism. Religion and public life. The nature-nurture and mind-body debates. Free will and determinism. Politicized sex scandals and sexualized politics. And the great enemy — again — is religious intolerance, which has no place in civilized life.

Read Voltaire, or Diderot, or Hume. It’s all there. Every bit of it. Alexis de Tocqueville may still be interesting and valuable — but unlike Tocqueville, La Mettrie could easily top today’s bestseller lists — as one of the “new” atheists. Everything old is new again. That’s why it’s so important that we get the Enlightenment right.

One of the very most important aspects of the Enlightenment was that it presented a wide spectrum of religious beliefs. It was not particular to any belief system — and certainly not to atheism or deism. Let’s have a quick review.

Hobbes was merely a Protestant with exceedingly weird ideas about government. Locke and Newton were (Straussian esoteric claims aside) practicing and entirely devoted Protestants, even if each was unorthodox. Berkeley was a Protestant — and a bishop. Gibbon was deeply critical of religion yet nominally religious. Pascal was a Catholic of the ascetic Jansenist sect. Descartes was a Catholic whose metaphysics unsettled the Church but ultimately won strong partisans. Montesquieu was a Catholic of the live-and-let-live variety. Rousseau went through various faiths and beliefs, all of them I think with sincerity, and he never denied the existence of God. Spinoza was a heretic Jew; Mendelssohn, an observant yet unconventional one. Diderot, Hume, and La Mettrie were atheists. Voltaire and Paine were deists in the strictly philosophical sense: They believed in a God who did not interfere with the workings of the universe; in the former’s view, God may even have been perfectly indifferent to man. Voltaire once likened God to a sultan, who does not care about the rats in the ship’s hold when he sends the ship across the sea. Kant thought he had proven the existence of God through the existence of morality, which for him was the only possible way.

The American founders were cagey about their religious beliefs, as successful politicians tend to be. Yet it seems that they fell somewhere in the middle of all of this. Like nearly all Enlightenment figures, they were often unorthodox to an extent, but they were neither all hostile toward all religion nor all militantly secular. A very few were. All, however, believed that religion and government had made a very bad partnership in the past, and they were resolved to change all that.

The point of all of this is simple: Enlightenment comes in many different flavors. It’s not exclusive to atheists or deists. It’s all around us, and a world without the Enlightenment would be unrecognizable — and unlivable — to all but the most conservative among us today.

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