Monk

I can appreciate a good argument for atheism, chiding Christianity for being too other-worldly, but who would think that going through the French Revolution would be a good way to do it? But I’ve come across a book review in “The Economist” magazine that apparently thinks so. The book is Philipp Blom’s “A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment“, and here is a snappy excerpt from the book review:

A philosophy grew up around the baron’s [Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach's] generously stocked table that denied religious revelation and shunned Christian morality, embracing instead the primal passions (the fundamental motives, said the philosophes, for human behaviour) and cool reason (which could direct the passions, but never stand against them). They dreamt of a Utopia built on pleasure-seeking, rationality and empathy. Their ideal nation would leave no room for what they saw as the twisted ethical code of Christianity, which they argued prized suffering and destructive self-repression.

...

Even today, and even in secular western Europe, the bald and confident atheism and materialism of Diderot and Holbach seems mildly shocking. We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine. For Mr Blom, the modern, supposedly secular world has merely dressed up the “perverse” morality of Christianity in new and better camouflaged ways. We still hate our bodies, he says, still venerate suffering and distrust pleasure.

This is the message of Mr Blom’s book, hinted at but left unstated until the closing chapters. He believes the Enlightenment is incomplete, betrayed by its self-appointed guardians. Despite all the scientific advances of the past two centuries, magical thinking and the cultural inheritance of Christianity remain endemic.

My sense of the French Revolution is that it was such an atrocious failure that an atheist would rather ignore it, but I suppose someone would want to trot out the argument that the revolution was simply derailed. However, I don’t think I care to spend the money and the time to pursue that trail. As far as I am concerned, the French Revolution gave both atheism and egalitarianism a bad name, and the problem was deeper than just a little misfocusing.

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The King is backing off.... He is always afraid of making a mistake. Once the first impulse is passed, he is no longer tormented by anything but the fear of having done an injustice... it seems to me that in government as in education one should not say "I will it" until one is sure of being right. But once having said it, never slack off from what you have ordered.

-- Madame Elisabeth, King Louis XVI's sister

Hindsight is 20-20. The tide of democracy was rising, and the French just may not have had as good a ground work of democratic institutions to make that transition more smoothly, in the way the English and the Americans did, relatively speaking. If Louis XVI was vacillating between paternalistic repression and idealistic cooperation with the rebellious masses and lesser aristocrats, it may be because there was just no easy way out of that historical jam, though it is also true that this king was no Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt - and certainly not the Sun King.

After finishing the "Suicides" chapter this morning, Monk is content to put aside Schama's "Citizens" for the weekend, and to finish off the rather frenchier "Spike Trap" this afternoon. All work and no play make the primate-protagonist a dull reader.

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