We Need to Do Better Than Another Enlightenment
We won’t throw off our new and different shackles by romanticizing the oppressive societies in which these masterpieces were born.
BY DAVID BELL
View original article at Brownstone.org.
One advantage of growing up in Australia is being unencumbered by intellectual pursuits. Seminal works such as Henry Lawson’s The Loaded Dog defined my literary development, and that was only because I was taught to read. Grammar was essentially full stops and commas, and there were three tenses in English (until a Russian told me there were 16). So, in discussing the Enlightenment here, I will stick to basics and let more learned people who grew up with the advantages of being foreign correct as they will.
Further, being a country founded (refounded) by convicts and guards through the purloining of others’ land-forced displacement or killing, Australia does not have much of a classic enlightened era to reflect on, just harsh realities of humanness, interspersed nonetheless with some good melancholy art and poetry. But reflecting on that reveals that someone from elsewhere did the colonizing, exhibiting all the trappings of one group abusing another. So, they were not having much of an Enlightenment either, even though the 18th century, when this happened, was supposedly the Enlightenment’s peak.
When you follow this path further, the whole concept of a historic period more noble than now starts to look thin. Is there really a basis for claims that a previous period centuries ago was the high point of intellectual achievement and something of a lost paradise, that we should mourn and strive to resurrect? We are now, the narrative goes, re-entering a Dark Age, and things have perhaps ‘never been worse in history,’ as I read recently. Some perhaps have not suffered enough.
There was indeed a period in Europe a few hundred years ago when thought-based stuff seemed to take off. Visual art flourished through the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer. John Harrison built clocks that revolutionized long-haul navigation, while Thomas Smith figured out how the ground was laid down. Handel wrote his Water Music, and Beethoven rounded things off with some pretty good symphonies. Thomas Paine wrote books about building more decent societies, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau opined, “I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.” They were, indeed, like many others of their time, inspired.
These enlightened people lived and worked in societies that owned slaves and routinely used torture as a way of establishing truth. Much of the population was illiterate and lived short lives of hard labor under the yoke of others, living in hovels and washing in cesspools. Those gaining wealth from such practices frequently enabled the talented to pursue their dreams. They worked in an environment built through theft from, and oppression of, others.
In turn, they romanticized the ‘enlightened’ times of their own past, such as the flourishing of the Venetian Republic with its art and palaces. The Venetians had built their wealth and their magical city on a particularly brutal industry of mutilating and trading in Slavic slaves, when not sacking the equally beautiful cities of their trading rivals. This is not underplaying the worth of what was produced, just recognizing the context within which things are created, and the shallowness that the human conscience often exhibits.
The average person of the Enlightenment era, it seems to me, was not sitting around in salons sharing the free flow of ideas, but being oppressed and kicked around by their enlightened compatriots or invaders. There were some good ideas and far better art and music than much of the soulless fare of today– but this arose not from a flourishing paradise but closer to, for many, a living hell. Perhaps it was poverty and harsh reality that opened Handel’s mind and inspired Rembrandt’s brush, and we now miss something that this makes us see. But this better be by choice.
Looking back to former times is a good way to learn and understand, and a person ignorant of history is like a scrap of paper blown in the wind. But history was written by the literate elite and should not be confused with a destination.
For the ordinary person, which is in some ways all of us, we have recently been freer than ever before. We are currently losing privileges and rights, but this is pushing us back to the Enlightenment more than driving us from it.
We should not pine for slavery, indentured labor, and peasantry, or the fruits thereof. We are trapped in our own societal mess that promotes modern ugliness, but we can now all listen to works of Handel and Beethoven, and marvel at the beauty of a landscape or the expression painted into an elderly peasant’s eyes. When these works were originally produced, few had that privilege.
We won’t throw off our new and different shackles by romanticizing the oppressive societies in which these masterpieces were born. Where I grew up, the best Australian literature was written while waterholes were poisoned and men and women were shot to clear land for farming. It was no different in the lands where my country’s colonizers came from, whatever label is applied to those years. We had better aim for something far more noble than the past.
When I was a teenager, I read novelists who struggled through wars and oppression and were censored and ridiculed. They got the PEN awards. I wished that I lived in a time when I could write novels like that.
I got my wish.
But now PEN is taking part in the censorship.