Obsessions: Confessions of a Well-Mannered Urbanist
A New Enlightenment?
Throughout human history the great philosophers have returned to three questions in the search for ‘general truths’ : what can I know (ontology), how can I know it (epistemology) and how then should I act (ethics). To these the moderns would add questions of political economy and morality, and ‘the self’. The Marxists and their followers – originating with Rousseau in fact – retreated from these old ideas in order to supplant them with class conflict, historical materialism and violent struggle. The result was communism, fascism and national socialism. However, rather than returning to the old philosophies of life and the wisdom of ages, the 1960s saw a further decline into post-modernism, moral relativism and narcissism led by such ‘thinkers’ as Derrida, Foucault and Marcuse, leading to the shallow aimlessness of identity politics and ‘inclusion’. These latter are not philosophies at all, but once-fashionable posturing. It is time for a New Enlightenment .
The Enlightenment of the early and mid 18th century was a secular movement based on rational and humane views of mankind. As such, it was a reaction to theological obscurantism and religious intolerance. It was notable for the works of Voltaire, Hume and Smith, the towering genius that was Sir Isaac Newton, the astonishing Henry Cavendish, and the notable development of historical research by Gibbon and Montenesquieu who would also write a major treatise on manners. Its greatest achievement was the American Constitution, although it would also help set the conditions for the Terror in France. The academic John Carroll has argued that the major flaw with humanism is that it rejects cheerfulness and gratitude for all that is beautiful, and degenerates instead into narcissism and rancour – the cult of the ‘I’ . He asserts that there are eternal laws, both moral and metaphysical, and that at its deepest level …’the human conscience is born understanding them’. Because of this ‘the great markers of the central way of …our culture survive, and are there for each new generation to read, if it will’. A new Enlightenment would achieve this, but this time it need not be exclusively secular, for under enlightened self-interest religious and secular beliefs can exist side-by-side as long as each respects the others’ rights to believe whatever they believe. The problem arises where fundamentalists try to gain ascendancy over others.
The building blocks for such an Enlightenment are already with us. These are:
1. Economics – the ascendancy of capitalism and free trade as a dynamic system for producing, distributing and consuming goods and services, and for wealth creation. There is no prospect of an alternative economic system coming into being in the next 200 years at least, probably much longer. Capitalism will continue to create wealth, alongside new cultural forms. Everyone gets wealthier as a consequence, certainly in material goods, although the entrepreneurs, the already rich and the new rich will continue to accumulate more wealth than the average person. This is not a question of ‘the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer’ as the left argues, but simply the outcome of a system which values risk and investment. The ‘poor’ will have greater opportunities than ever before to increase their own wealth and that of their families. They will in any event continue to become wealthier. Countries such as Britain and Australia should trade globally, provide low-tax business environments, have highly skilled and well-educated workforces, remove barriers to employment, reform the public services, tackle crime head-on in the cities, extend choice into the health, pensions and education sectors.
2. Politics – liberal democracy is, as Churchill is reputed to have said, far from perfect but it is better than any other system of governance. With the collapse of communism and the end of ‘cradle to grave’ socialism, the option would appear to be the corrupt dictatorships of Africa or the regressive feudalism of most of the Middle East. The dangers to western democracy come from within: the widespread disdain for professional politicians and the main political parties, falling voting rates and the prospect of extremist groups seeking to overthrow western society. By 2050, between a third and half of the people living in Europe will be non-European, and at present these show little sign of assimilating with the host cultures or indeed respecting western democracy. The dangers of the coming period will be heightened religious and racial conflict caused by too rapid an influx of migrants and the rise of Islamic militantism. This is already happening in the race riots of Birmingham, Sydney and Antwerp. There are serious questions over whether the demands of radical Islam are reconcilable with Western civilisation, market economies and democracy.
3. Culture – the convergence of cultural products with new technologies means that to a large degree we will see an ever-closer relationship between culture and economics, as well as with traditions, the high arts and local identities. Societies will need to retain their historical cultural identities, but also be open to the new. This will include learning from other cultural traditions as in the past: the Renaissance was in part a rediscovery of antiquity, Debussy was greatly influenced by Japanese art and Indonesian music, early jazz was a fusion of African rthymns, French classical music and Scottish and Irish sets, modern jazz borrowed much from Debussy, Ravel and ‘Les Six’. Nash was influenced by Adam, so too the American architects of the late 19th century, Scott was inspired by the German Romantic Poets, Philip Glass and the Minimalists by eastern music, Handel by the opera seria of the Italian courts, Bertholt Brecht by the Beggars Opera, Hollywood by the German, French and Russian film-makers of the early 20th century. This ‘borrowing’ of ideas and motifs from previous generations and ages has always been a feature of art, music and literature. This will no doubt continue and new movements will emerge, possibly combining traditional forms with a revisiting of modernism. This is already true of interior design, for example, or the digital landscape movement. This is an opening up of culture rather than the dead hand of post-modernism and its rejection of progress. In turn this implies a return to genuine forms of historical research and criticism, based on much better knowledge and a respect for the past. There may be no absolute certainties any more, but there are known facts that can be learned and built upon. Every so often, prior assumptions will be challenged by new evidence, and this is entirely consistent with logical positivism. As Camille Paglia puts it, ‘ If there were no facts, buildings would fall down, there would be no internet, no medical advances and no technology…The fashionable post-modernist posturing that ‘there are no facts’ has got to stop” .
In limine
