The accidental Enlightenment

Here's a depressing thought from Oliver Kamm:

I make no confident predictions of the resilience of Enlightenment values, largely because the Enlightenment itself is so recent and contingent a development. Its spread in the 17th and 18th centuries was to a large extent bound up with the fortunes of Protestantism. The Enlightenment's advocates in England, Scotland and America were rightly perceived to be the opponents of Papist superstition, but they were also (and much less widely recognised as) deriders of the notion of the inerrancy of Scripture. Unfortunately the attractions of religion and nationalism commonly press against the notions of a common humanity, and religious and political liberty.

Enlightenment values were advanced by elites rather than through popular agitation. Those elites gained influence and office in spite of, rather than because of, their wider views. In England, the prominence of the Whigs in the Glorious Revolution derived from their wish for a Protestant succession. The Declaration of Rights and the Bill of Rights of 1689 are great achievements in the pursuit of a constitutional order, but it is a stretch to see them as precursors of secularism. It is partly because the Enlightenment is so recent a phenomenon but also because it's an unlikely one that I am not especially hopeful for its future.

These two paragraphs (actually the first is Kamm quoting himself) paint a grim view of the prospects for liberalism. Francis Fukuyama once made a name for himself by proclaiming that the victory of liberal democracy represented the "end of history". Kamm's remarks suggest rather that the liberal ascendancy of the past two hundred years or so is more of a historical dead end. Could it be that the emergence of modern liberal democracy is an accidental outgrowth of 17th Century Protestantism? And if so, what does that mean for us?

The good news is that Enlightenment values and the societies they have guided seem to be a good deal more robust than the totalitarian and authoritarian systems with which they have competed. The United States of America is now well into its third century. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lasted about seventy years. Hitler's thousand-year Reich lasted merely twelve. The Christian world, and especially Protestant Christianity, has tended to dominate, whereas other religions and cultures, even Islam, have not so far managed to compete. In other words, those systems and cultures which offer security at the expense of freedom ultimately offer neither. They cannot compete with a free society.

The bad news, however, is that the intellectual elites in the West which spawned the Enlightenment and sustained it, have now to a large extent turned against it. Although socialism itself has been largely discredited, the mindset which it has instilled in generations of our people continues to undermine Western society. Freedom of speech and expression was once a keystone of liberal society. Indeed, it is enshrined as such as the First Amendment of the American Constitution. Yet now, it has to take second place to a spurious agenda of "respect". Liberal democracies such as Israel are held to be the equal, or even the inferior, of the criminal and terrorist gangs such as Hamas and Hezbollah which seek to destroy them. So-called progressives denounce the so-called "war crimes" of Blair and Bush while overlooking the atrocities of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

It is indeed true that Enlightenment values are threatened today as never before. But the external enemies of the Enlightenment can never defeat it. Ultimately a free society can only be destroyed from within. The struggle for Enlightenment values begins at home.