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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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PART 1: Argument
1. In Which the Narrator Positions Himself In moments of great passion, the mind tends to be flooded with a warm vision of the person in our arms. We are unlikely, at that point, to be analyzing their flaws, real or hypothetical. Even less likely if lying in darkness. As for the possible product of our intercourse, only the most peculiar lover would be fretting, while in the act, over whether such a child might or might not be an appropriate and worthy creation. Voltaire and the other thinkers of the eighteenth century could be criticized, with the facility of hindsight, for the passion with which they embraced reason. But they lived in societies still ruled by the demeaning vagaries of court life. All of them had been thrown in jail or risked it simply for expressing their opinions. In most countries justice still used torture as an official method of interrogation and the condemned faced a variety of brutal punishments; being broken on the wheel, for example. This and other tools of arbitrary power constituted a social form of darkness. The philosophers of Europe, England arid America threw themselves into the arms of reason, convinced that birth would be given to new rational elites capable of building a new civilization. This love affair was fertile to the point of being miraculous and society was subsequently reformed for the better beyond what any of these thinkers had imagined. And yet the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, rapidly became the religion of these new elites. And their reforms included an unparalleled and permanent institutionalization of state violence. This was accompanied by a growing struggle between democratic and rational methods, with the rational increasingly at an advantage. Were Voltaire to reappear today, he would be outraged by the new structures, which somehow deformed the changes for which he struggled. As for his descendants -- our ruling elites -- he would deny all legal responsibility and set about fighting them, as he once fought the courtiers and priests of eighteenth-century Europe. It is difficult now to reconstruct the impact that Voltaire had on his times. He was the single most famous individual of the eighteenth century. In spite of neither being a philosopher nor having an integrated philosophy, he set the Western agenda for much of the nineteenth century. His life was filled with contradictions. On the negative side, he was consumed by social and financial ambition. A product of the middle class, he wasted a good part of his life trying to win acceptance from the aristocracy and attempting to succeed as a courtier. The son of a provincial businessman, he made a fortune out of farming, manufacturing and the money market, but in the process was involved in endless ugly scandals and lawsuits. On the other hand, he was driven by an uncontrollable belief in social reform. And he alone of the eighteenth-century Western writers knew how to carry that argument into the public place. Two unforeseen catastrophes forced him to favour the positive side of his character. In 1726 he was thirty- two years old and imprisoned in the Bastille for the second time. The authorities offered him freedom if he would go into exile. He went to England for two and a half years and was thus exposed to the country "where men think free and noble thoughts." In fact, he returned to France exaggerating the virtues of England as a way of encouraging change at home. The most important part of his exile may have been the three months spent with Jonathan Swift in the house of Lord Peterborough. The pamphlets and novels he subsequently wrote were built upon the irony and ridicule which Swift had first perfected, but which Voltaire turned into unbeatable populist weapons." All styles," as he said, "are good, except the boring." His Philosophical Letters in 1733 was one of the first great blows against the established powers. His book The Century of Louis XIV was the beginning of modern historical method. He carried out exhaustive research and wrote not about a king, but about Society. The second catastrophe came with his failure as a courtier, first at Versailles and then at the court of Frederick the Great. He was already the leading playwright in Europe and most-talked-about man. Then abruptly Voltaire was fleeing the Prussian court and welcome nowhere else. He settled at Ferney, an estate just inside France but for safety just across the Swiss border. There, far from capitals and courts, he was forced to rely on the written word. Having failed to influence the monarchs and men of power to whom he had access, Voltaire turned towards the citizenry and became the leading defender of human rights and the most ingenious advocate of practical reforms. "Our dominant passion must be for the public weal" sums up the last two decades of his life. He inundated Europe with pamphlets, novels, poems, letters, all of them political. Professional philosophers, now as then, criticized the absence of grand and integrated ideas in his writing. But grand, integrated ideas don't necessarily change societies. Voltaire concentrated on six basic freedoms -- of the person (no slavery), of speech and the press, of conscience, civil liberty, security of private property and the right to work. By addressing himself to the citizenry and not to the rulers and other thinkers, he invented modern public opinion. By successfully establishing the new "acceptable" vocabulary for all civilized men, he forced even those in power to fight on his terms. He was a one-man guerrilla army and, as he put it, "God is not on the side of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots." [1] In the last year of his life, 1778, Voltaire came back to Paris in triumph. For months on end he was lionized, courted and cheered by all classes of the population. They seemed to be using the reappearance of the old man in the greatest city of Europe as an excuse to demonstrate that they had been converted to the idea of government by a new philosophical coalition of reason balanced with humanism. The arbitrary powers of church and state appeared suddenly quite fragile, in place only until some appropriate crisis brought change. In the meantime, Voltaire himself gave in to the pleasures of being adored. The adulation gradually wore him out and he died. When the crisis came, it spread immediately throughout Europe. By 1800 all the negatives of the new methods were as obvious as their positives. Looking back on this disorder, our eyes tend to be drawn by the particular political battles of the day. But with the advantage of distance we can also see that the central assumption of Voltaire -- of his friends throughout Europe and of the English and the Americans -- had been wrong. Humanism was proving itself unable to balance reason. The two seemed, in fact, to be enemies. *** A civilization unable to differentiate between illusion and reality is usually believed to be at the tail end of its existence. Our reality is dominated by elites who have spent much of the last two centuries, indeed of the last four, organizing society around answers and around structures designed to produce answers. These structures have fed upon expertise and that expertise upon complexity. The effect has been to render universal understanding as difficult as possible." What we cannot speak about," Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "we must pass over in silence." [2] The writer's most effective weapons against such silence have always been simplicity and common sense. But never have the custodians of the word been so cut off from the realities of power. Never, for that matter, have people so adept at manipulating the word held the levers of power. Western culture, as a result, has become less and less a critical reflection of its own society. Ours is a civilization astonishing in the degree to which it seems to see and to know. Never before in history have there been such enormous elites carrying such burdens of knowledge. This success story dominates our lives. Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated. The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme -- the theme song of their expertise. However, their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use. Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized, expertise. The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. The illusion is that we have created the most sophisticated society in the history of man. The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted. When we look around at the influence and strength of money, of armies, of legal officials, or indeed at the ease with which writers are silenced through censorship, violence and imprisonment, it seems that the word is a fragile blossom. But one step back from this immediacy is enough to reveal the power of language. Nothing frightens those in authority so much as criticism. Whether democrats or dictators, they are unable to accept that criticism is the most constructive tool available to any society because it is the best way to prevent error. The weakness of rationally based power can be seen in the way it views criticism as an even more negative force than a medieval king might have done. After all, even the fool has been banished from the castles of modern power. What is it which so frightens these elites? Language -- not money or force -- provides legitimacy. So long as military, political, religious or financial systems do not control language, the public's imagination can move about freely With its own ideas. Uncontrolled words are consistently more dangerous to established authority than armed forces. Even coercive laws of censorship are rarely effective for more than short periods in limited areas. There is nothing particularly original about breaking down the intellectual, political, social and emotional walls behind which language has been imprisoned, freeing it, then watching while the poor thing is recaptured and locked up again. That process has been repeated endlessly throughout history. The wordsmiths who serve our imagination are always devoted to communication. Clarity is always their method. Universality is their aim. The wordsmiths who serve established power, on the other hand, are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim. The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it. If reason is an idea and rational society an abstraction, then the whole age has turned and continues to turn upon language. Just as the unleashing of ideas and myths in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cleared the way for endless changes in state and social structures. so the subsequent pinning down and splitting up of language into feudal states has now made it impossible for the citizen to participate seriously in society. The inviting humanist irony of the early days has given way to the off-putting rational cynicism and sloganeering of our time. And if there was something fatally flawed in those original changes -- a sort of grave misunderstanding at the heart of reason -- then that flaw must still be there, locked up inside the byzantine and inaccessible structures of our society. The idea of universal understanding still survives in our memory. Stephane Mallarme, who was later echoed by T. S. Eliot. said that we should "purify the dialect of the tribe." What follows here is a mere purification rite; a stripping away of byzantine structures in search of our historical outline and our contemporary reality. This is not an attempt to realign ideas, merely a demonstration of their common sense alignment. Here, in a few pages, four hundred years are rushed through without due process. Philosophical stop signs and one-way streets are more or less ignored. Here the principal fields of modern expertise are jumbled together as if they were one and not, as they present themselves, autonomous territories of self-contained power. And here. the proclaimed justifications of nations are obscured by the sameness of our modern elites, of our structures and of the form which power has taken in this, the dotage of the Age of Reason.
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