The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Nearly every one of these principles flowed directly from the most influential book of the age, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Completed in 1686 while he was still in exile in Holland but not published until 1690, the work was a full frontal assault on the theory of knowledge stretching back to Plato, that human beings come into the world with the most valuable things they know already programmed in their minds. Mathematical truths, the rules of logic, the existence of God: All we had to do, René Descartes and other Plato-influenced thinkers had argued, was reflect deeply in order to bring them into our consciousness.9

  Locke argued that we are not born with any innate ideas or knowledge about anything. Everything we know, we have to learn from outside ourselves. The mind is (in Locke’s most famous metaphor) a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which our experiences are written by our sense perception of the world. Perception of the world, Locke wrote, is “the first step and degree towards knowledge, and the inlet of all the materials of it.”10

  What Plato had treated as the basest form of knowledge, our sensory grasp of objects, or eikasia, Locke now argued was the only path to knowledge.§ What we see (or touch or hear or smell) is what we get, and the only thing we get. The rest, in a very formal sense, is up to us.

  Because what we sense are either the primary qualities of objects themselves, like their size, volume, mass, velocity, length, and width; or their secondary qualities, like taste, loudness, and color. We then have to figure out how they all fit together. Our reason, Locke said, sorts the disparate sense impressions into coherent patterns on the tabula rasa, which in turn become our ideas: the one true objects of knowledge.

  This was a radical step.11 When we say, “This is a cow and this is beef stew,” or, “That’s a star, but that is a planet,” Locke insisted we are actually saying “it is my impression that this jumble of qualities must be x”—nothing more and nothing less. So how do we know that what we think and say about the world is actually true? By drawing on our past experience, Locke says, and comparing our notes with others. We say, “Did you see what I saw?” or, “Looks like a cow to me. Do you agree?” When everything fits together—our own perception and judgment and the perception and judgment of others—we can be reasonably certain that we are on the right track.

  “Reasonable” is the operative word for Locke. We can never be completely certain that our idea of reality, and how things really are, exactly fit. All we know is that our perceptions lead us to think so because of their “conformity with our own experience, or the testimony of others’ experience.”12

  Someone might ask Locke how we know there really are cows and planets out there. How can we be sure we’re not just living an endless dream (or a nightmare, as in the movie The Matrix)? As a professing Christian, it would have been easy for Locke to respond: Would a beneficent Creator, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, leave men so confused and uncertain as to not know what’s real and what’s not?‖

  Locke did not. He was content to assume that our mind’s picture of the world represents that world, because he knew that the assumption works. When I try to lift a 250-pound boulder with a fork instead of a forklift, I soon discover whether my ideas conform to reality or not. I’m free to doubt whether the cow I see is really there. When she gives me a quart of milk, however, my doubts are over—or should be.

  In other words, we know we can trust our ideas when they bear practical fruit. Locke puts us firmly in the real world, just as Aristotle did. He had no patience with metaphysical speculations of the Neoplatonist kind. “You and I,” Locke once wrote to a philosopher friend, “have had enough of that fiddling.”13

  This marked an irrevocable shift in Western thinking. The old celestial spheres and hierarchies left over from the Middle Ages had already been done in by Newton’s infinite universe with its mathematical laws. As the eighteenth century wore on and Locke’s influence grew, the rest of the traditional Neoplatonist frame fell away as well. The World Soul and its divine emanations dissipated into thin air. So did the Great Chain of Being. What was left was a world of “real time” and absolute spatial dimensions. It was a world without angels or demons or ideal Forms; a world with no unseen forces except those we can measure and calculate, predict and control.

  Later, some regretted this loss of belief in the supernatural.14 Enlightenment men and women judged it a net gain. They gave up looking to angels for guidance—but they also gave up looking for witches to punish. Instead of waiting for divine radiance to transform their inner selves, they confidently relied on their reason and their five senses in order to explore their world—and to discover the laws of nature. Alexander Pope put it in verse:

  Take Nature’s path, and mad Opinions leave;

  All States can reach it, and all heads conceive;

  Obvious her goods, in no extreme they dwell;

  There needs but thinking right, and meaning well.15

  What that exploration of the world revealed to the Enlightenment (since by 1780 it included not only America and Asia but the Pacific and Australia) was a systematic natural order governing not only the physical world, but the social and political realms as well. Just as Newton had applied observation and analysis to reveal the laws of the world system, so the eighteenth century applied itself to find the laws that would allow our social and political systems to run at their optimal level.16

  No one assumed that the answers would be as precise or mathematical as Newton’s had been. The social scientist’s passion for number crunching would come later. In the end, what the Enlightenment wanted was knowledge it could work with; the knowledge it needed on Locke’s terms, in order to be happy. “What is that which moves desire?” Locke wrote. “I answer, happiness, and that alone.”17 “The pursuit of happiness” became not just an American but the main Enlightenment enterprise for nearly one hundred years after Locke’s death.

  John Locke had been a Protestant Dissenter and a Puritan at heart. His definition of happiness included a heavy dose of man’s duties to God. The eighteenth century was less particular. It found it easy to equate happiness with pleasure, although it never forgot that the latter included the pleasures of the mind. And when the Enlightenment wanted pleasure, it knew just where to look for it.

  That was the city.

  The spirit of Aristotle had always found a congenial home in large urban environments. The same was true in the eighteenth century. By 1700, Europe had a dozen with populations exceeding one hundred thousand or more. They were commercial cities with bustling streets and shops, plenty of foreign visitors and merchants, and a thriving business center. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Bordeaux, Venice, and Antwerp marked the confluence of trade, taste, and enlightenment. They were the centers of Europe’s new affluent lifestyle and the first consumer culture.

  After the grim years of the Thirty Years War and Louis XIV, Europe’s economy was thriving again. The age of plagues and famines was finally, definitively over. Long, harsh winters like that of 1708, when the wines of Burgundy froze in their bottles, faded as a bout of global warming swept over Europe. Meanwhile, ships bearing goods from remote parts of the globe, including China, India, and South America, filled Europe’s ports and harbors.

  Goods that had once been unattainable luxuries for the privileged few were becoming the standard possessions of Europe’s businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and prosperous shopkeepers. Their homes filled with porcelain from China and Japan, rugs from Persia and Turkey, and overstuffed furniture made from mahogany and brazilwood and teak. Their tables offered delicacies like chocolate from America and tea from Asia. Their closets overflowed with garments made from imported linen, cotton, and damask silk.

  Here was truly an “embarrassment of riches”—embarrassing, that is, from a traditional Christian moral perspective, which for centuries had taught that money was the root of all evil. Instead, as Europeans poured themselves a cup of tea from a pot made from Mexican or Bavarian silver, stirred in a lump of sugar fr
om the West Indies, and sat back in their plush armchairs, they felt compelled to conclude that wealth not only made life more comfortable, it also made people better.

  Today, we have long been conditioned to believe the opposite—not by Christianity, but by nineteenth-century Romanticism. The Romantics, however, were the stepchildren of Plato. It was Aristotle who first made private property the basis of the good life and the independent householder the basis of the free polis.18 The world of the Enlightenment took him firmly at his word.

  Aristotle thought of this property mostly in terms of land. Earlier thinkers who copied his analysis of freedom, including Machiavelli, had done the same. Now, in the new urban environment of 1700s Europe, it made sense to switch from talking about freehold land as the basis of men’s virtue and freedom to appreciating more commercial forms of property like ships, warehouses, stocks and bonds, and merchandise and commodities of all kinds.

  A sterner generation had seen the businessman as a prevaricating poltroon. The Enlightenment came to appreciate how doing business required important moral virtues: foresight, prudence, and frugality in saving in order to build capital and pay workers.19 Even more important, the exchange of goods also made both seller and customer more aware of the needs of others and more eager to work together in order to achieve a win-win result. Commerce not only made it possible to buy the good things in life, it also shaped a human personality geared to appreciate those good things and to recognize their value to others.

  This raises an important issue. If men really were improving, we ask, then why did they tolerate the African slave trade, which dramatically increased in volume in the eighteenth century? And wasn’t all that affluence that the Enlightenment celebrated the fruits of slave labor in the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean, the tobacco and cotton plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, and the coffee farms of Brazil? Those are the questions critics would ask.

  Jean-Antoine Watteau, L’Enseigne de Gersaint (Gersaint’s Shop Sign; 1720). Do commerce and capitalism make people better? Aristotle inspired the Enlightenment to say yes.

  In answering the critics then and later,a the Enlightenment stood on firm ground. It knew the overwhelming bulk of Europe’s growing affluence sprang from inter-European trade, not from its slaveholding colonies; indeed, those countries most dependent on those slave-holding colonies, Spain and Portugal, showed the slowest rates of growth. Some of the important beneficiaries of that affluence, like Austria and Germany, had no colonies at all. And money from the slave trade played almost no part in the economic development of countries like France and Britain, compared to other sources of capital.20

  Nor did slave labor play any part in what were the real drivers of Enlightenment Europe’s economic takeoff, commerce and manufacturing. The reason wasn’t moral but (as we might guess) practical: to a man counting his costs, unwilling labor was expensive compared to the willing kind. As Adam Smith pointed out in his Wealth of Nations, “the experience of all agents and nations … [is] that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” The reason is “the slave consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible,” while the free worker has a self-interested stake in making it more productive, or any other trade he is engaged in, even at the most menial level—and production was at the heart and soul of the new capitalist order.21

  Far from depending on slave labor and the slave trade, the age of commerce signaled their doom, just as the factory foretold the demise of the plantation. And it was Enlightenment Europe, and no one else, that did end slavery around the world. Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutcheson was the first Western philosopher to be an outspoken opponent of slavery, declaring, “Nothing can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all rights.” Slavery itself became illegal in Britain in 1772. The first bill to end the slave trade was introduced into Parliament in 1791 and finally passed in 1807. The French took the step of ending slavery altogether in 1789; and although Britain didn’t abolish slavery in its colonies until 1833, by then it existed largely as a holdover from an obsolescent past rather than a mainstay of Britain’s economy.

  In short, Aristotle had been right all along. Freedom and slavery were indeed mutually excusive states—although being a fourth-century-BCE Greek, he drew the boundary between them differently than we would today or in Enlightenment Europe. Because the truth was, with the new economic order, a new moral perspective was taking shape. The Enlightenment term for it was “politeness.”

  The term was coined by a John Locke pupil, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, in one of the most influential books of the early Enlightenment, his Characteristics (1711). It came from the word to polish, and Shaftesbury used it to describe the cumulative effect regular social interaction with others has on refining our personalities and smoothing out our basic manners. “We polish one another,” Shaftesbury wrote, “and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision”22 and we learn to act less like boors and more like ladies and gentlemen.

  No place generated more of these polishing collisions than commercial and urban society, out of which emerged the kind of person we see in the portraits of Watteau, Joshua Reynolds, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Evolved, sophisticated, in a word polite—the kind of person ready to appreciate the finer things in life and work with others in order to acquire them.

  Since Locke had been Shaftesbury’s personal tutor, we can even put the politeness issue in Locke’s terms. When we do a business deal in Rio de Janeiro or Calcutta, read a newspaper detailing market trends in Frankfurt or St. Petersburg, window-shop on Oxford Street or on the rue St.-Honoré, share a table with a stranger at a coffeehouse, or split a cab with a traveler on the way to the airport, we are steadily adding to our stock of experience of the world, which in turn gives us a better idea of how the world works and what our own priorities need to be. This forces us to be more practical and pragmatic. We grow more concerned with producing a beneficial result than standing on outdated or dogmatic principles.

  Far from creating a poltroon, the eighteenth century saw the world of commerce creating a person who might have stepped out from the pages of Aristotle’s Ethics. This was someone intellectually alert and morally centered, regardful of others by habit and therefore not inclined to extremes of behavior. His income gives him leisure to enjoy the finer things in life that the man working his sixty acres from dawn until twilight never could. He knows how to be moderate in his tastes, and (to put it in Aristotle’s exact words) “since he takes few things seriously, he is not excitable.” He accepts good and bad fortune as it comes, “because he estimates himself at his true worth.”23

  Above all, he is inclined to be tolerant of others, whether they are Christians or Muslims or Jews—if only to avoid missing a good business deal. This had been important to Locke as well. He despised religious bigotry as much as he despised metaphysics. Locke’s reasonable man knows the limits of his own knowledge. He holds his opinion, especially on controversial subjects like religion, with a certain tentativeness born of respect for the unverifiable and the unknown.24 When he is confronted by an opposite opinion, his first instinct is not to burn someone at the stake or tie him to the rack, but to listen with a little charity and forbearance—even when he is convinced that person is wrong.

  Taken together, these traits formed the virtues of a new urban type: the men and women of a polite and commercial age. The French will describe them as bourgeois; in German, they are bürgerlich; in English, the middle class. Later, the bourgeoisie will become figures of fun and contempt. They are mocked in Madame Bovary (not to mention Desperate Housewives) and excoriated in Marx’s Das Kapital. The Enlightenment, however, saw in middle-class man an up-to-date reflection of Aristotle’s political animal: a being designed by nature to work peaceably and constructively with others on the basis of free will—and to make a little money while he did it.

  Middle-class man scores low on Plato’s thymos meter. Some would
say low on the testosterone meter as well. He is no Martin Luther. Still, he is probably a more congenial neighbor, and he was to be the essential building block for what the eighteenth century treasured most after two centuries of religious war and upheaval: a little peace and quiet.

  No place seemed to exhibit the virtues of “a polite and commercial people” more than Locke’s England, and no one appreciated those virtues more than the French writer Voltaire. Born in 1694 with the most sophisticated mind of his age, he had grown up watching the dismal last years of Louis XIV’s reign. He had seen its pride and glory fizzle out in military defeat, famine, and bankruptcy. When the Sun King died in 1715, the crowds spat on his funeral cortege.

  Voltaire came to believe that the enlightened future lay with England, the land of Newton, Locke, and men of business. His trip to England in 1726 confirmed his view that “commerce, which has enriched English citizens, has [also] helped to make them free.”25

  Voltaire came back singing the praises of making money instead of war. He praised the Quaker businessmen he met who quietly went about their business but “never bow to anyone, having nothing in their hearts but charity and respect for the laws.”26 He pointed out that the Quakers had once been wild religious fanatics (hence the name, from their convulsions when in the grip of the Holy Spirit), but by devoting themselves to business, they had learned to be at peace with their neighbors; and by enriching themselves, they had also enriched their nation.

  In addition, “a commercial nation is always very alive to its interests and neglects none of the knowledge that can be useful in its business,” including science. So it was not surprising to him that the land of merchants and Lloyd’s of London was also the land of Newton and Locke.