Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Elite taste in Europe changed under China’s spell. A fashion for Chinese-style decorative schemes started with Jean-Antoine Watteau’s designs for an apartment for Louis XIV. It spread through all the palaces of the Bourbon dynasty, where rooms encased in porcelain and smothered in Chinese motifs still abound. From Bourbon courts, the Chinese look spread throughout Europe. In England, King George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, sailed at his ease on a fake Chinese pleasure boat when not justifying his soubriquet of ‘Bloody Butcher’ by massacring political opponents. William Halfpenny’s Chinese and Gothic Architecture (1752) was the first of many books to treat Chinese art as equivalent to Europe’s. Sir William Chambers, the most fashionable British architect of the day, designed a pagoda for Kew Gardens in London and Chinese furniture for aristocratic homes, while ‘Chinese’ – as contemporaries nicknamed him – Thomas Chippendale, England’s leading cabinetmaker, popularized Chinese themes for furniture. By mid-century, engravings of Chinese scenes hung even in middle-class French and Dutch homes. In gardens and interiors, everyone of taste wanted to be surrounded by images of China.

  ‌Eurocentric Thought: The Idea of Europe

  By almost every measure of success – economic and demographic buoyancy, urban development, technical progress, industrial productivity – China had dwarfed Europe for perhaps a millennium and a half.9 But if the eighteenth was the Chinese century, it was also a time of opportunity and innovation in the West. In some respects Europe replaced China to become again, in the famous opening phrase of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – ‘the fairest part of the Earth’, housing ‘the most civilized portion of mankind’.10 In a sense, ‘Europe’ itself was a new or newly revived idea. It was a familiar geographical name among ancient Greeks for the vast hinterland they admired to their north and west. ‘I must begin with Europe’, wrote Strabo about half a century before the birth of Christ, anticipating the self-congratulation of later Europeans, ‘because it is both varied in form and admirably adapted by nature for the development of excellence in men and governments.’11 Near oblivion followed, however, over a long period when the Roman Empire waned while contacts within and across Europe weakened. People in different regions had too little to do with each other to foster or maintain common identity. The Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboards, which the Roman Empire had united, drew apart in obedience to the dictates of geography, for a vast watershed of mountains and marshes divides them, stretching from the Spanish tablelands across the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Alps, and the Carpathians to the Pripet Marshes. The breakwater has always been hard to cross. The Latin Church ensured that pilgrims, scholars, and clerics traversed much of the western end of the continent, and kept a single language of worship and learning alive; but to those who tried to cross them the frontiers between vernacular tongues were alienating. The Latin Church spread north and east only slowly. Scandinavia and Hungary remained beyond its reach until the eleventh century, Lithuania and the east shore of the Baltic until the fourteenth. It got no further.

  The name and idea of Europe revived between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, as European self-confidence recovered. The divisions of Europe did not heal (rather, they got worse, as the Reformation and fragmentation among mutually hostile or, at least, emulous sovereign states multiplied hatreds). Agreement about where the frontiers of the region lay was never achieved. Yet the sense of belonging to a European community and sharing a Europe-wide culture gradually became typical of elites, who got to know each other in person and print. The uniformity of enlightened taste in the eighteenth century made it possible to glide between widely separated frontiers with little more cultural dislocation than a modern traveller feels in a succession of airport lounges. Gibbon – Strabo’s devoted reader who made his stepmother send him his copy to study while he was at a militia training camp – was midway through his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he formulated a European idea: ‘It is the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest of his native country: but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views, and to consider Europe as one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost to the same level of politeness and cultivation.’12 A few years later, the British statesman Edmund Burke, whom we shall meet again shortly as an influential thinker on the relationship between liberty and order, echoed the thought. ‘No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.’13

  Like Strabo’s, Gibbon’s belief in common European culture was inseparable from a conviction of European superiority, ‘distinguished above the rest of mankind’. The re-emergence of the idea of Europe was fraught with menace for the rest of the world. Yet the overseas empires founded or extended from Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proved fragile; their moral records were not good enough to sustain the notion of European superiority. In the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of a single Europe dissolved in wars and subsided in the fissures of ideological quakes. It became commonplace to acknowledge the fact that ‘Europe’ is an elastic term, a mental construction that corresponds to no objective geographical reality and has no natural frontiers. Europe, said Paul Valéry, was merely ‘a promontory of Asia’. The form in which the idea was revived in the European Union movement of the late twentieth century would have been unrecognizable to Gibbon: its unifying principles were democracy and a free internal market, but its member states’ choice of how to define Europe and whom to exclude from its benefits remained as self-interested as ever.14

  ‌The Enlightenment: The Work of the Philosophes

  For understanding the context of new thinking, the Encyclopédie was the key work: the secular bible of the philosophes – as the enlightened intellectuals of France were called – who, for a while, mainly in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, dictated intellectual taste to the rest of Europe’s elite. Seventeen volumes of text and eleven of accompanying plates appeared over a period of twenty years from 1751. By 1779, twenty-five thousand copies had been sold. The number may seem small, but, by way of circulation and detailed report, it was big enough to reach the entire intelligentsia of Europe. Countless spinoff works, abstracts, reviews, and imitations made the Encyclopédie widely known, loftily respected, and, in conservative and clerical circles, deeply feared.

  It had perhaps the most helpful subtitle in the history of publishing: Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades. The phrase disclosed the authors’ priorities: the reference to a dictionary evokes the notion of arraying knowledge in order, while the list of topics encompasses abstract and useful knowledge in a single conspectus. According to the editor-in-chief, Denis Diderot, a Parisian radical who combined fame as a thinker, efficiency as a project-manager, mordancy as a satirist, and skill as a pornographer, the goal was to ‘start from and return to man’. He contrived, as he put it in the article on encyclopaedias in the homonymous work, ‘to assemble knowledge scattered across the face of the Earth, that we may not die without having deserved well of humanity’. The emphasis was practical – on commerce and technology, how things work and how they add value. ‘There is more intellect, wisdom and consequence’, Diderot declared, ‘in a machine for making stockings than in a system of metaphysics.’15 The idea of the machine was at the heart of the Enlightenment, not just because it delivered usefulness, but also because it was a metaphor for the cosmos – like the dramatically lit clockwork model in Joseph Wright’s painting of the early to mid-1760s, in which moons and planets, made of gleaming brass, revolve predictably according to a perfect, unvarying pattern.

  The authors of the Encyclopédie largely concurred on the primacy of the machine and the mechanical nature of the cosmos. They also shared a conviction that reason and science were allies. English and Scots philosophers of the previous two generations had convinced most of their fellow intellectuals in the rest of Europe that those twin means to truth were compatible. The Encyclopédie’s allegorical fronti
spiece depicted Reason plucking a veil from the eyes of Truth. The writers were united in their hostility, as in their enthusiasms: they were, on the whole, critical of monarchs, and aristocrats, drawing on the writings of an English apologist for revolution, John Locke, who, around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extolled the value of constitutional guarantees of freedom against the state. Exceptions vitiated Locke’s principles: he believed in freedom of religion, but not for Catholics; freedom of labour, but not for blacks; and rights of property, but not for Native Americans. Still, the philosophes adhered more to his principles than to his exceptions.

  More even than monarchs and aristocrats, the authors of the Encyclopédie distrusted the Church. Insisting on the average moral superiority of atheists and the superior beneficence of science over grace, Diderot proclaimed that ‘mankind will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest’.16 Voltaire, a persistent voice of anticlericalism, was the best-connected man of the eighteenth century. He corresponded with Catherine the Great, corrected the King of Prussia’s poetry, and influenced monarchs and statesmen all over Europe. His works were read in Sicily and Transylvania, plagiarized in Vienna, and translated into Swedish. Voltaire erected his own temple to ‘the architect of the universe, the great geometrician’, but regarded Christianity as an ‘infamous superstition to be eradicated – I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke, but among the civilized and those who wish to think.’17 The progress of the Enlightenment can be measured in anticlerical acts: the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759; the tsar’s secularization of a great portfolio of Church property in 1761; the abolition of the Jesuit order in most of the rest of the West between 1764 and 1773; the thirty-eight thousand victims forced out of religious houses into lay life in Europe in the 1780s. In 1790 the King of Prussia proclaimed absolute authority over clergy in his realm. In 1795 a Spanish minister proposed the forfeiture of most of the Church’s remaining land. Meanwhile, at the most rarefied levels of the European elite, the cult of reason took on the characteristics of an alternative religion. In the rites of Freemasonry, a profane hierarchy celebrated the purity of its own wisdom, which Mozart brilliantly evoked in The Magic Flute, first performed in 1791. In 1793 revolutionary committees banned Christian worship in some parts of France and erected signs proclaiming ‘Death Is an Eternal Sleep’ over cemetery gates. Briefly, in the summer of 1794, the government in Paris tried to replace Christianity with a new religion, the worship of a Supreme Being of supposed ‘social utility’.

  The enemies of Christianity did not prevail – at least, not exclusively or for long. In the second half of the eighteenth century, religious revivals saw off the threat. Churches survived and in many ways recovered, usually by appealing to ordinary people and affective emotions in, for instance, the stirring hymns of Charles Wesley in England, or the poignant cult of the Sacred Heart in Catholic Europe, or the tear-jerking charisma of revivalist preaching, or the therapeutic value of quiet prayer and of submission to God’s love. Elite anticlericalism, however, remained a feature of European politics. In particular, the claim that in order to be liberal and progressive a state must be secular has maintained an ineradicable hold – so much so that one cannot wear a veil in school in la France laïque or a crucifix over a nurse’s uniform in an NHS hospital, or say prayers in a US state school. On the other hand – if we continue to look ahead for a moment – we can see that modern attempts to rehabilitate Christianity in politics, such as Social Catholicism, the Social Gospel, and the Christian Democrat movement, have had some electoral success and have influenced political rhetoric without reversing the effects of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the country where Christian rhetoric is loudest in politics is the one with the most rigorously secular constitution and public institutions and the political tradition most closely representative of the Enlightenment: the United States of America.18

  ‌Confidence in Progress

  Back in the eighteenth century, a progressive outlook or habit of mind underpinned the philosophe temper. The encyclopédistes could proclaim radicalism in the face of the powers that be in state and Church, thanks to their underlying belief in progress. To challenge the status quo, you must believe that things will get better. Otherwise, you will cry, with the archconservative, ‘Reform? Reform? Aren’t things bad enough already?’

  It was easy for eighteenth-century observers to convince themselves that evidence of progress surrounded them. As global temperatures rose, plague retreated, and ecological exchange increased the amount and variety of available food, prosperity seemed to pile up. The rate of innovation, as we shall see, in science and technology unveiled lengthening vistas of knowledge and provided powerful new tools with which to exploit it. When the institution that more than any other embodied the Enlightenment in England was founded in 1754, it was called the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. The name captured the practical, useful, technical values of the age. James Barry painted a series of canvases entitled The Progress of Human Culture for the walls of the Society’s premises, starting with the invention of music, ascribed to Orpheus, and proceeding through ancient Greek agriculture. Scenes followed of the ascent of modern Great Britain to equivalence with ancient Greece, culminating in views of the London of Barry’s day and a final vision of a new Elysium, in which heroes of arts, manufactures, and commerce (most of them, as it happened, English) enjoy ethereal bliss.

  Yet the idea that in general, allowing for fluctuations, everything is always – and perhaps necessarily – getting better is contrary to common experience. For most of the past, people have stuck to the evidence and assumed they were living in times of decline or in a world of decay – or, at best, of indifferent change, where history is just one damned thing after another. Or, like ancient sages who thought change was illusory (see here), they have denied the evidence and asserted that reality is immutable. In the eighteenth century, even believers in progress feared that it might be merely a phase; their own times enjoyed it, but were exceptional by the standards of history in general. The Marquis de Condorcet, for instance, thought he could see ‘the human race … advancing with a sure step along the path of truth, virtue and happiness’ only because political and intellectual revolutions had subverted the crippling effects of religion and tyranny on the human spirit, ‘emancipated from its shackles’ and ‘released from the empire of fate’.19 Ironically, he wrote his endorsement of progress while under sentence of death from the French revolutionary authorities.

  Yet the idea of progress survived the guillotine. In the nineteenth century it strengthened and fed on the ‘march of improvement’ – the history of industrialization, the multiplication of wealth and muscle power, the insecure but encouraging victories of constitutionalism against tyranny. It became possible to believe that progress was irreversible, irrespective of human failings, because it was programmed into nature by evolution. It took the horrors of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a catalogue of famines, failures, inhumanities, and genocidal conflicts – to unpick the idea from most people’s minds.

  This does not mean that the idea of progress was just a mental image of the good times in which it prevailed. It had remote origins in two ancient ideas: of human goodness and of a providential deity who looks after creation. Both these ideas implied progress of a sort: confidence that, despite the periodic interventions of evil, goodness was bound to triumph in the end – perhaps literally in the end, in some millennial climax.20 But millenarianism was not enough on its own to make the idea of progress possible: after all, everything might (and in some prophets’ expectations would) get worse before the final redemption. Confidence in progress relied in turn on an even deeper property of the mind. Optimism was the key. You had to be an optimist to embark on a project as long, daunting, laborious, and dangerous as the Encyclopédie.

  Because it is hard to be an optimist
in confrontation with the woes of the world, someone had to think up a way of comprehending evil to make progress credible. Misery and disaster had somehow to seem for the best. Theologians shouldered the task, but never satisfied atheists with answers to the question, ‘If God is good, why is there evil?’ Possible answers (see here) include recognition that suffering is good (a proposition most people who experience it reject), or that God’s own nature is to suffer (which many feel is inadequate consolation), or that evil is needed to make good meaningful (in which case, dissenters say, we might be better off with a more favourable balance or a morally neutral world), or that freedom, which is the highest good, entails freedom for ill (but some people say they would rather forgo freedom). In the seventeenth century, the growth of atheism made the theologians’ task seem urgent. Secular philosophy was no better at discharging it, because a secular notion of progress is as hard to square with disasters and reversals as is providentialism. ‘To justify the ways of God to man’ was the objective Milton set himself in his great verse epic, Paradise Lost. But it is one thing to be poetically convincing, quite another to produce a reasoned argument.