|
March 9, 2005
This book review by Keth Windshuttle of Gertrude Himmelfarb's 'The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments' highlights two kinds of Enlightenment. Windshuttle says:
"Most historians have accepted for several years now that the Enlightenment, once popularly characterized as the Age of Reason, came in two versions, the radical and the skeptical. The former is now generally identified with France, the latter with Scotland. It has also been acknowledged that the anti-clericalism that obsessed the French philosophes was not reciprocated in Britain or America. Indeed, in both these countries many Enlightenment concepts ---human rights, liberty, equality, tolerance, science, progress —--complemented rather than opposed church thinking."
Windshuttle says that Himmelfarb's historical account states that:
"..unlike the French who elevated reason to the primary role in human affairs, British thinkers gave reason a secondary, instrumental role. In Britain it was virtue that trumped all other qualities. This was not personal virtue but the "social virtues"----compassion, benevolence, sympathy----which the British philosophers believed naturally, instinctively, and habitually bound people to one another."
I suspect that Windshuttle is saying that the Australian Enlightenment would follow the British one, and so it would also stand in opposition to the French one. This is suggested by Windshuttle saying that we have inherited the differences between the two Enlightenment's.
Windshuttle says:
"...have remained to this day, and over much the same issues. On the one hand, in France, the ideology of reason challenged not only religion and the church but all the institutions dependent upon them. Reason was inherently subversive. On the other hand, British moral philosophy was reformist rather than radical, respectful of both the past and present, even while looking forward to a more enlightened future. It was optimistic and had no quarrel with religion, which was why, in both Britain and the United States, the church itself could become a principal source for the spread of enlightened ideas."
On Windshuttle's reading Australia takes the pathway of the social virtues (sympathy and benevolence as moral virtues) and not reason. He concludes his review by saying that these ideas and practices were born they still firmly mold the moral sense and common sense of the English-speaking world today.
I'm not convinced by this revisionism for two reasons. First, reform in Britain came from the Benthamite utilitarians who take the reason and utility, not the social virtues (sympathy and benevolence). Australia followed suit. It is a nation-state ruled by a reformist Benthamite utilitarianism.
Secondly, Windshuttle downplays the anti-modernist Catholicism that stood in opposition to political liberalism. In Australia this anti-modernism was represented by Santamaria and Archbishop Mannix that resulted in the 'Split' in the ALP in the 1950s and by Cardinal Pell today. Pell wages the fight against liberal modernity within the Catholic Church.
|
I think the review ignores an undercurrent of anti-clericism that runs through American history, especially the anti-Catholicism that was omnipresent well into the twentieth century (remember, for example, J.F. Kennedy's candidacy in 1960 and the issue of Catholic allegiance). Also, most American Protestant churches give clerics almost no say in how churches are organized and run. This is no accident.
Although there were a couple of anti-catholic riots in the Nineteenth century (I think mainly the result of immigration stresses), there certainly was never any anti-religious movement akin to the French Revolution. At the same time, we didn't have the issue of churches owning vast amounts of the countryside for generations either. However, the decentralized hierarchy of Protestant churches (and the wide variety of sects) has a lot to do with disempowering clerics. Those early Americans were very aware of the history of religious oppression and took steps to mitigate it early on. It also accounts for the insignificance of the Catholic Church (except for Rhode Island, I think) in the US until massive Irish immigration began.
The anxieties over clerical authority is present in a lot of the Founders' writings. I think John Adams (supposedly one of the most pious Founders) in particular had some nasty things to say.
For the Revolutionary generation, it wasn't so much an issue of religious sentiment in general, but a hostility to religious authority in particular. The enlightenment values of early Americans were not anti-religious by any means. However, most of them were either deist in outlook, and all were hostile to the idea that the Bible was the root of political authority/legitimacy. Rather, the natural rights of man were bestowed by the "great legislator" and were self-evident from nature, not scripture and revelation.
It wasn't until the 2nd Great Awakening, when revivalism and evangelicism swept the country, that these elitist ideas became subsumed. There is a qualitative difference between the religious values of the American Revolution and its Founders from what emerged from the later revivalism. Windshuttle's failure to make it merely perpetuates the myth that the "religious mores" inherently central to American liberty and political life are the faith-based, Bible-thumping supplications of post-Enlightenment revivalism.
It is in this respect that Americans who claim persecution-by-secularism (the subtext of the review) ignore the idea that political secularism and religious belief are not innately hostile to each other. Instead, they serve to complement each other. However, this is problematic for the argument that American liberty is inherently religious (i.e., Biblical), and that "religion" (i.e., the Bible) is consequently the source of American political legitimacy. That is pure revisionism.