On Enlightenment

David Stove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351502238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The idea of enlightenment entails liberty, equality, rationalism, secularism, and the connection between knowledge and well being. In spite of the setbacks of revolutionary violence, mass murder, and two world wars, the spread of enlightenment values is still the yardstick by which moral, political, and scientific advances are measured. In On Enlightenment, David Stove attacks the roots of enlightenment thought to define its successes, limitations, and areas of likely failures.

Stove champions the use of reason and recognizes the falsity of religious claims as well as the importance of individual liberty. He rejects the enlightenment's uncritical optimism regarding social progress and its willingness to embrace revolutionary change. What evidence is there that the elimination of superstition will lead to happiness? Or that it is possible to accept Darwinism without Social Darwinism? Or that the enlightenment's liberal, rationalistic outlook will lead to the social progress envisioned by its advocates?

Despite best intentions, says Stove, social reformers who attempt to improve the world inevitably make things worse. He advocates a conservative approach to change, pointing out that social structures are so large and complex that any widespread social reform will have innumerable unforeseen consequences. Writing in the tradition of Edmund Burke with the same passion for clarity and intellectual honesty as George Orwell, David Stove was one of the most articulate and insightful philosophers of his day.

Part I
So You Think You’re an Egalitarian?

“It was always obvious enough what the main axioms of the Enlightenment were. They were secularism, egalitarianism, and the utilitarian axiom, that the test of morality is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”

—David Stove, “The Diabolical Place: A Secret of the Enlightenment” (1990)

1
Did Babeuf Deserve the Guillotine?

Are you an opponent of privilege? It is ten thousand to one you are. In that case you are, though you may not know it, an opponent of learning too. The reason is simple: leisure, quiet, and access to the learning of others are privileges, and they are also three things without which learning cannot exist.

No two of those three will do on their own. Leisure and quiet will not save learning if the learning of others is not also accessible to you—in short, if there are no libraries. If you have libraries and the leisure to use them, but every moment of waking life is filled with loud noise from Red Guards, rock music, or some other source, the libraries and leisure might as well not exist as far as learning is concerned. If you have the libraries and the quiet which learning requires, but no one has enough leisure to profit from them, then learning will be extinguished just as surely as if you simply shot every educated person in the head, Khmer-Rouge style.

So, if all privilege is abolished, learning is abolished with it. A society in which privilege exists may be a barbarously ignorant one; we all know many instances of that. But a society must be barbarously ignorant if there is no privilege in it at all, only equality all round.

Are you inclined to dismiss this proposition as belonging to the age of illuminated manuscripts? You should not, because it remains equally true in the age of word-processors. It is also true of every branch of learning indifferently: physics, history, philosophy, mathematics, or whatever. A life largely devoted to any of these things need not be privileged with respect to wealth or power, but it must be privileged with respect to leisure, libraries, and quiet. This is simply a fact about Homo sapiens. It may be otherwise with some other species on another planet; but it is not otherwise with us.

“The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labour for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be overestimated, as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work, material progress of all kinds depends, not to mention other and higher advantages.” That is true. The writer was Charles Darwin.¹

As I said a moment ago, learned people need not be economically privileged themselves. But Darwin’s words about “daily bread” may serve to remind us that the leisure needed for learning does depend upon someone’s being economically privileged. The someone might be, for example, the parents of the learned person, or some more distant relative. That is the most natural case, and historically has been the commonest one.

But there is, or at least there was for a thousand years before the present century, another way in which the wealth of other people could pay for the leisure which learning requires: patronage. A promising child of poor parents would be drawn to the attention of a neighboring gentleman, clergyman, or nobleman, who would provide the child with opportunities for education which his parents’ circumstances would never have permitted. The system of private patronage is by now long dead, of course; it is one of the countless victims of Enlightenment egalitarianism. Yet it is quite certain that it was infinitely less wasteful than the universal public patronage of education at the present day, as well as being far more accurate in selecting people capable of benefiting from education.

Intellectual culture depends for its existence, then, on economic privilege. Yet Marx said that in the coming classless society, where there would be no economic privilege, there would be no loss to culture, but in fact all gain. True culture, he said, (like true humanity), would exist for the first time when every privilege dividing one human being from another had at last been swept away. And then culture would flourish as never before: everyone would be a thinker, as well as an artist, a citizen and a worker.

This is ridiculous. It is entirely out of the question for everyone to be a thinker. (At least, it is, until there is a universal program of eugenics or of genetic engineering.) Most people do not have the capacity to be thinkers, even if they wanted to be; and, besides, they do not want to be. As to incapacity, ask anyone who has taught in a Western university in recent decades. (In some intellectually demanding area, I mean, not in sheltered workshops like feminism.) They will tell you that most of the undergraduates are simply out of their depth and ought not to be in university. Yet these students are drawn from the brightest ten percent of the population.

But the other reason I gave is equally important: the weakness or absence, in most people, of any passion for thought and learning. Most people find their own lives quite interesting enough, in fact painfully interesting, without putting themselves to the pains which are inseparable from getting entrée into physics or philosophy or philology. To sit quietly alone for hours, thinking about some difficult question, in which you yourself have nothing to gain or lose— this is how some of us spend much of our lives, but to most people it is a purgatorial prospect. Noise, company, joint occupation, the excitements of war or power or money or sex or sport: these are the things which make up most people’s idea of time well spent.

But in most people there is not merely an absence of studious inclinations: there is a positive aversion to studious people. This aversion is at some periods overt, at other periods covert, but it never dies out entirely. Its roots undoubtedly lie, as Hazlitt said in his essay on “The Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority” (1822), in fear: the immemorial fear of “cunning men.” It is painful to recall that when Socrates was still interested in astronomy and meteorology, even his friend Aristophanes could not resist currying favor with the Athenian voters by ridiculing such inquiries. Jack Cade, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, has a clerk put to death for associating with people who use such disgusting words as “noun” and “verb.” The revolutionary judge who sent Lavoisier to the guillotine in 1794 remarked with satisfaction that “The Republic has no need of chemists.” Pol Pot was even more thorough than his teachers, Lenin, Marx, and Ho Chi Minh; under him, even an educated accent, or merely wearing spectacles, was a sufficient death-warrant.

History is full of scenes of studious people feeling the effects of this aversion which the non-studious have towards them. The mathematician-theologian Hypatia was butchered by a mob of Christian monks in fourth-century Alexandria; famous monastic libraries in England were burnt by Danish raiders in the ninth century; professors were hounded to death by Red Guards during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”; in our own universities twenty years ago, learning and teaching were disrupted, and professors intimidated, by chanting mobs of “anti-Vietnam” demonstrators; and so on. Now ask yourself: in all such cases, which side is more representative of ordinary humanity? Which side, the studious or their tormentors, stands for inclinations that are widespread, strong and steady in human beings, and which stands for inclinations that are rare or weak or intermittent? The question will answer itself.

To make matters worse, the passion for equality has a curious feature which de Tocqueville pointed out: that the more it is fed, the less it is satisfied. As more and more inequalities are removed, the more galling are any remaining ones felt to be. A tiny inequality, at a time when privilege has almost entirely vanished, excites more indignation than far greater inequalities had done at any earlier stage. This is evidently a morbid kind of passion: healthy passions do not work like that at all. A starving man, if he is given a good meal, is not more interested in breadcrumbs at the end of it, than he was in the steak at the start. But that is how it is with the hunger for equality.

The result, as far as learning is concerned, is that the privileges of the learned become more obnoxious to egalitarian sentiment as they become fewer and smaller; and since the learned are not exempt from egalitarian fever, but on the contrary are often its most active fomenters, those privileges become more obnoxious even to the learned themselves.

Take, for example, the matter of private libraries. In 1789 there were splendid private libraries all over Europe, and popular indignation against anyone who possessed such a thing was only in its embryonic stage. By 1889 almost every one of these libraries had been dispersed by taxation: taxation, the direction and the severity of which had the approval of almost every voter. By 1989 there was no such thing, in private hands, as a library worth mentioning.

Men who are rich enough never to need paid employment, and who devote their lives to learning—men like Charles Darwin, the physicist Henry Cavendish, or the chemist Robert Boyle—simply do not exist now. Re-distributive taxation has wiped them out. There are plenty of rich men still, but no learned ones: they may collect nineteenth-century buttons, or twentieth-century paintings, or something else equally valuable, but they do not collect books. Learning is now confined to the salaried employees of universities and similar institutions, and these people have only tiny libraries of their own.

Even if, per impossible, a present-day professor did come into possession of a large library, he could not afford to house it or preserve it. But even more importantly than that, it would be sure to weigh on his conscience like an Alp, as being an affront to “the starving millions,” “the underprivileged,” “the wretched of the earth,” or whatever the current catch-phrase of egalitarian rhetoric is. A large private library, in short, is now psychologically, as well as economically, impossible.

* * *

So far I have spoken only of learning and equality; yet there is obviously more to culture than learning. Not all culture is intellectual culture, by a long way. Good music, or a poem, or a painting, is a very different kind of thing from a contribution to science, philosophy, or history. Such things appeal to widely different parts of our minds. Indeed when you listen to music, for example, you seem to be almost a different person from the one you are when, say, you read some science. As a result, we easily come to think that art and knowledge are entirely unrelated things, or even antagonistic ones.

But they are not so, and the mistake comes from considering the different branches of culture only from the receiver’s or consumer’s end. To dispel the mistake, it is sufficient to consider culture from the giver’s or producer’s end instead. There we find that knowledge and art are as closely and solidly connected with each other as the trunk of a tree is with its flowers and fruit. Of course, knowledge will never make a good poet, or composer, or painter, any more than the trunk of a tree will itself bear flowers and fruit. But it is equally out of the question for a good poet, composer, or painter to be a very ignorant person, or even a stupid one.

Literature is evidently an intermediate case between the most intellectual and the least intellectual branches of culture: between science, philosophy, history, etc., on the one side, and music and painting, etc., on the other. As a result we are constantly perplexed, if we think of literature only from the consumer’s point of view, by unclassifiable cases. Darwin’s Journal of the voyage of the Beagle, for example: is that literature, or science, or history, or what? Boswell’s Johnson: is that literature, or history? Pepys’ Diary? There are countless valuable books which lie in this region, between pure literature and some more severely intellectual discipline. But we need only consider these books from the producer’s end, to see that they all have at least this much in common with a work of good science or history: that it took a strong and well-furnished intellect to produce them.

Was Henry James, perhaps, an ignorant or stupid person? Was Tennyson, or George Eliot, or Coleridge, or Jane Austen, or Fielding, or Pope, or Milton, or Shakespeare, or Chaucer? To ask these questions is to answer them. All great writers are people of strong intellects and wide knowledge. But it would be absurd to set this down as mere historical fact: it is something which must be so. It is not merely false but impossible that, for example, Robert Burns should have been the “ignorant plough-man” that it has often been said he was. An ignorant plough-man could not even write in Burns’ time. And how many people, at any time, among those who can write, are capable of writing ten words, let alone ten pages, that other people find worth reading?

Musical composition and painting are, as I said, further removed than literature is from the more severely intellectual branches of culture. But even they can be produced only where a solid mass of knowledge is in place to support them. It is easier for a good composer or painter to be comparatively ignorant or stupid than it is for a good poet or novelist to be so, but there are two matters, each of them a large one in itself, which any good composer or painter must know a lot about. One of these is the materials—sounds and colors respectively—in which he works: what possibilities are inherent in them, and what their limitations are. The other is what has been done by others before him, in music or painting. And given the size and complexity of each of these matters, someone who knows a lot about both cannot possibly be very ignorant or stupid.

Until the present century, it was never necessary for anyone to say what I have said in the four preceding paragraphs. It had simply, and rightly, never occurred to anyone that a good poet, composer, or painter, could fail to belong to some species or other of the genus “learned person.” It has been left to our century to discover that a good poem, painting, or piece of music, might be the production of any ignoramus, child, madman, savage, ape, computer, or merely of spilt paint or ink. Previously, the education of a painter or composer was always recognized as being the important matter which it is. It is a very different thing now, of course, what the “education” of painters and composers is. It is a pleasure to be ignorant of the details of these gruesome farces. All we need to know about them, we can easily infer from their end-products.

In reality, then, art and knowledge are by no means such independent things, and still less are they antagonistic ones, as we are apt to suppose. All culture, at its roots in the minds of the people who make it, is to a greater or lesser extent intellectual culture. As a result, most of what I said above, about learning and equality, holds equally good for culture and equality.

Not quite all of it does. Composers or painters are not objects of suspicion ex officio, as a merely learned person is. No doubt the reason is that they give more pleasure to more people than he does, and pleasure of a more sensory kind. But all the rest of what I said does hold good for culture in general.

The leisure, quiet, and libraries which learning requires are equally required by composers and painters, though the latter need, in addition, access to musical performances, art galleries, and so on. Again, composers or painters need not be economically privileged themselves, but the leisure which they need is absolutely dependent on there being economic privilege somewhere in the society around them. Finally, it is as ridiculous to imagine everyone being a composer or painter, as it is to imagine everyone being a thinker. Most people are without any passion that inclines them that way, and also without the knowledge which, supposing they had the passion, would be needed to give it concrete expression.

* * *

The extinction of “bourgeois culture” which Marx looked forward to with relish, and which his followers have carried out to the best of their ability, is a more serious matter than the phrase suggests. The reason is that the extinction of bourgeois culture is the extinction of culture, for there is no other kind.

Take any branch of culture you like: literature, science, philosophy, history, music, or whatever. It comes neither from the most privileged part of society, nor from the least; neither from the blue-bloods, nor from the “people of the abyss” (as Jack London called them). It comes from the great broad band in between.

It is very obvious why the people of the abyss play no part in cul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction David Stove on Enlightenment
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: So You Think You’re an Egalitarian?
• 1 Did Babeuf Deserve the Guillotine?
• 2 A Promise Kept by Accident
• 3 The Bateson Fact, or One in a Million
• PART II: Why the World is the Way It Is
• 4 The Malthus Check
• 5 Population, Privilege, and Malthus’ Retreat
• 6 The Diabolical Place: A Secret of the Enlightenment
• 7 Glimpses of Pioneer Life
• 8 Altruism and Darwinism
• 9 Paralytic Epistemology, or the Soundless Scream
• PART III: Reclaiming the Jungle
• 10 The Columbus Argument
• 11 Bombs Away
• 12 Jobs for the Girls
• 13 Righting Wrongs
• 14 Why You should be a Conservative
• Index