Last week David Brooks wrote about the Enlightenment ("Two Theories of Change"), and how the different approaches of the French Enlightenment (which is what most people think of when they hear "Enlightenment") and the Scottish Enlightenment relate to our politics today. Let me comment on a few of the things Mr. Brooks said. (The quotations from Mr. Brooks’ article are indented.)
"When I was in college I took a course in the Enlightenment. In those days, when people spoke of the Enlightenment, they usually meant the French Enlightenment …. Their great model was Descartes. … What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.
But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, ‘The Roads to Modernity,’ if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits."
I would call it the Scottish (instead of the British) Enlightenment because so many of those who were part of it were located in Edinburgh.
"[Thomas] Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them."
Thomas Paine was wrong about our revolution. The American colonists believed in universal rights, but the colonists already had those rights, both because their governments were based on the British model and because they were so far away from the center of British power. In fact, being so far from London, new rights began to develop in America The colonists had rights; they revolting in order to keep them once Britain started, in their opinion, to take some of them away.
"Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have."
Instead of the wisdom of the ages "fill[ing] the gaps in our reason," I would say that what we do is merely to try to improve the wisdom of the ages around the edges.
"If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch."
Here is where I get confused. While Mr. Brooks seems to admire Burke, during the 2008 campaign, Mr. Brooks liked Barack Obama, who is an unreconstructed Paine-ian. Obama apparently talks about Reinhold Niebuhr, but Obama has, in Thomas Sowell’s terms, an "unconstrained" view of what man and government can do. President Obama may, from time to time, talk like, or claim, he is a Burkean, but he is not governing that way. People like Mr. Brooks get so excited about the way Barack Obama talks (after eight years of George W. Bush) that they miss what his actions say.
"We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one."
There is no question: We are children of the Scottish Enlightenment. Our founding was a "departure" only in the sense that we were departing from the English king. Abandoning a king had not been done before, at least not often, so it was radical. But it was a radical move to preserve rights the colonists already had, not to gain or create new ones.
"Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics."
The difference is that the "self-described conservative radicals" are just one part, a relatively small part, of the Republican Party, while the "self-confident Democratic technocrats" are in control of Democratic Party, the White House, and the Congress.
"The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance."
The children of the Scottish Enlightenment are in retreat, if that is what it is, only because Barack Obama and the others of the French Enlightenment won the last election. But there are many people, whether in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Tea Party or no party at all, who understand this truth. Where Mr. Brooks goes wrong, as he did with Barack Obama, is to look more at how some of these people talk instead of what their beliefs mean in practice.
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