The Pursuit of Truth
By J. H. PLUMB
I T is a pity. This book,* so profoundly impor- tant, will not be read by LBJ nor McNamara nor Dean Rusk. Not that they will be singular. It will not find its way to de Gaulle' s table or Wilson's bedside. It is an even greater pity that Baldwin, and Mailer and Capote will pass it by : too thick, too learned, too remote for them. And yet they need to read it, almost more than anyone, for its critical attitude to thinking in myths. But worst of all, my own colleagues will read it, certainly praise it, but, alas, never comprehend fqr one moment the message which it carries, a message which should sear their intellects. I know such claims may seem absurd. A long and learned book on the Enlightenment makes an improbable bombshell.
We are trained now to look for our intellectual dynamite in information, economic, sociological, sexual. The dramatic fact, seized on by all modern methods of communication, is the drop in the Gallup poll, the statistical extent of homosexu- ality, the prevalence of bugging. Factual detail is news but reasoned criticism of the Prime Minister's political philosophy, a discussion of man's bisexual nature or an argument distinguish- ing political from civil liberty will scarcely bring a call from the Sunday Times for exclusive rights. For a generation or more now, the intellectual has been in retreat, particularly the historian. As he has grown mountainous in scholarship, he has shrunk as a man. He has ceased to be a combatant in the battle for truth. Aping a non-existent Providence, his cult of objectivity has been nothing more than a treason to the intellect. By squeezing morality out of history, he is commit- ting professional suicide, leaving the biting social and intellectual criticism which should be his milieu to the rare satirist or philosopher, the Orviells and the Russells. Where is Tacitus? Where is Plutarch? And most grievous of all, where is Voltaire?
The former may be admired as primitives so long as they are forgotten as moralists. But Voltaire? He is dismissed as shallow, petty, a witty charlatan. We no longer pursue infamy. We avert our eyes from the monstrous myths that have captivated men's emotions and shackled their minds, leading them to greed, intolerance and brutality. We no longer permit ourselves a passing sneer at the ritual dottiness of church or synagogue, although, of all men, historians are aware of the follies perpetrated in the name of God. No. We edit mountains of papers, con- centrate on the growth and decay of estates, reconstruct with precision and care the ideology of an age with antiseptic indifference to what was perpetrated in its name. All of these things are done with the minimum of consideration for the pain and suffering of humanity, or of its blind- ness, stupidity and addiction to cant. To historians all things have become equal. Forgetting the philosophers we have come to accept Ranke's terrible dictum that all things are equidistant from God.
* THE ENLIGHTENMENT AN INTERPRETAWN. THE RiEE OF MODERN PAGANISM. By Peter Gay. (Knopf, New York, $8.95.)
What historians have forgotten is that facts, either human or social, become inescapably moral facts. No historian of the Enlightenment forgot this simple truth. Then no historian of the En- lightenment pretended to be Providence. God was not to be imitated, but attacked. Diderot's ideal philosopher was one 'who tramples underfoot prejudices, tradition, antiquity, uni- versal assent, authority, in a word, every- thing that overawes the mass of minds.' A man, indeed, committed to criticism wherever it might take him. Commitment to criticism, and its history, this is the theme of Peter Gay's erudite, witty, beautifully written book. Within the realm of ideas he perceives a duality—the critical mind that acquires the habit of truth, opposed to the myth-accepting mind that acquires the habit of faith. One doubts, the other believes.
Of course, no dichotomies are clear-cut: be- lievers have doubts, doubters retain beliefs. In that great age of faith, of mythopoeic culture, the Middle Ages, the critical spirit was never wholly buried—Abelard wrote his Sic et Non, Roger Bacon experimented, but the intellectual climate of Christianity, by its very nature, is allergic to the critical approach. Christians re- quire at least one miracle, one prophecy: sceptics none. By and large the myth-makers have had the best of history. In Greece, more con- fidently in Rome, again during the Renaissance, the critical philosophic spirit secured a number of intellectual triumphs, if few social ones. But the scientific revolution gave an impetus to criticism that seemed to open up limitless vistas; for what was experiment but a critical examination of nature. Newton, Boyle and Boerhaave justified this philosophical attitude by their experiments. Gay's dichotomy is, perhaps, too simple; for the savage mind observes, correlates and achieves even in the complexities of myth. But it remains a valuable tool of analysis for modern times.
In England, France, Germany and Italy a new intellectual era dawned from the 1690s onwards. Men subjected all belief—God, Christ, kingship —to criticism. And they used history as their major weapon. Hence institutions were analysed in human terms. God and Providence were banished from the historian's causation; and philosophers sought their intellectual heroes in men such as Lucretius or Machiavelli, who analysed humanity in terms of itself. The rev was not, as so many have believed, rapid grow t,. in uncritical optimism, in a belief that man's powers were commensurate with his destiny, that the corrupt and superstitious mythologies under which men had sheltered for so long would be exploded by the philosophers' satirical realism. The Enlightenment possessed its darker side, its pessimism, as any pagan attitude always will. Few could achieve the serenity of the dying David Hume, neither welcoming nor fearing oblivion, but meeting it with the stoicism of the humanist. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Condorcet, Wieland, and the rest of that wonderful galaxy of restless and realistic spirits were aware of man's corrupti- bility, his capacity to hide his evil nature in the
excuse of myth, or to shift the burden onto the shoulders of God or history.
They knew, as few since, both the necessity and the difficulty of living without belief but with hope. They longed for a world that would banish credulity, that would base its attitudes on a truth- ful evaluation of human necessities. The first stage in the struggle, they thought, was to combat myth. And, of course, for them, in their Christ. dominated societies, the arch-myth, whose de- struction was essential, was Christianity. That may now seem naive, crude, the response of a flat-footed atheism, but, before condemning, 'we should remember that we face a milk-and-water Christianity, whose tolerance has grown as-its social power has declined. In the days of the philosophes the blood was still fresh on Christian hands. And their attack on miracles and on ihe historical inanities of religious teaching was immensely valuable in helping to create an in- tellectually free society.
Of •course, the struggle against myth was harder, fiercer than they knew. We are still dominated by mythical explanation of the uni verse; myth still haunts social and sexua customs. A century that has suffered Hitler, to say nothing of Stalin and a host of other myth. makers, has need of a Voltaire; of an arch- priest whose wit and satire and burning indignations will cut through the specious sophistries by which we permit ourselves to accept evil, suffering, subjection.
But it is always easier to believe than to think, to accept than to resist, to keep silent than to speak out. And it is high time to stop de- crying these historians and philosophers of the Enlightenment. Theirs was a dangerous age for intellectuals, better far than the centuries which had gone before, but still full of hazard. They were brave men, dedicated to the pursuit of truth no matter how uncomfortable or destructive its capture proved. And they had no nonsense about the use of history. Its study was essential in order that the follies of belief might be revealed and the tyrannies of man towards man exposed. Like moles, modern historians burrow in silence making their lists of meaningless facts, spawning their blinkered offspring, and teaching nothing but repetition of their professional expertise Whereas they should be intent to communicate to mankind at large their moral indignation as well as their ironic criticism. It is their purpose to expose the follies, cruelties and disasters of life: not in order to ,preach a philosophy of hopeless ness, but to strengthen belief in the efficacy o criticism and reason.
As Mr Gay's admirable book shows, this tas of historians and philosophers has always bee exceptionally difficult to pursue. Periods of en lightetunent have been rare. They have bee strengthened by the growth of science, but les than Bacon and Diderot confidently ex for it has become very easy to separate scienc from social comment, strengthening obscurantis at the expense of criticism. And scientists, eve more than Christians, have been willing to rende unto Caesar the things that belong to him. Bu for scientists of all kinds and for historians th tide may be turning. Education is penetrating t social depths never before plumbed. The unive sity may become the womb of social dialectic an an intellectual revolution that will effectively criu cise and change the structure of industrial socie —its social and sexual morals as well as economic organisation may be blowing up. If it does, may this New Enlightenment secure, in th fullness of time, as wise, as elegant a historian as Peter Gay.
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