Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  

Well, my friends, I have had a relatively action packed week, and the ole mailbag just got pushed lower and lower on the to-do list until it was seated precariously between “redo the drywall” and “tell the leprechauns to pipe down about their ‘lucky charms,'” so alas we have no proper mailbag this week. We here at the Bereans pride ourselves on excellence, so it simply not be fitting of me to deliver a half-baked product. I will indulge your forgiveness on the matter.

So, instead, I’ve decided to pull an old conversation I had with fellow Berean, Stan Schwartz, about the Enlightenment. Fair warning, you need to put your thinking caps on for this one. The good news is that Stanley is eminently talented, wickedly smart, and good-natured to boot. Thus, I happen to believe you’re all in for an intellectual banquet, which is certainly worth more than what you’ve paid for on this blog (side note: if you paid anything to ‘Bereans’ you probably got scammed because we don’t have any donation funding technically. I’d check your credit card statement if I were you). Anyway, that’s enough from me, so with that being the case:

Q: Hey Stan, tell us more about the differences between the French and English Enlightenments.

A: The separation between the two Enlightenment movements is meant to show that different ideas/schools of thought existed within the Enlightenment milieu. This is no doubt true. Of course, the difficulty with this is that the choice of geography as a division is cunningly deceptive. First, the French Enlightenment is a misnomer – the Enlightenment was ideologically consistent in France and across the German states – the Continental Enlightenment would be a better descriptor. Second, numerous figures in England were well-respected by and affiliated with figures in the Continental Enlightenment. Voltaire’s affection for John Locke is indicative. Similarly, Thomas Hobbes came a bit before the mainstream of the Enlightenment in time, and exercised a significant influence on thinkers such as Rousseau. Additionally, while the majority of English figures maintained religious sympathies at the very least, David Hume embraced skepticism much like numerous French Enlightenment thinkers. Nor did the relation only go one way – while very rare, Montesquieu was a thinker more in the English/Scottish Enlightenment than the Continental side of things. 

So where does this leave us? The Enlightenment period had a clear majority spirit and group of thinkers that shaped the tone of the historical moment and its influence on the future. As Immanuel Kant articulated it, the Enlightenment spirit was about liberating individual, human thought and reason. Thus, traditional authorities, ideas, and structures were devalued, as were communities and cooperation, in favor of a more atomistic view of society where the best and brightest would be more free to use their minds, absent the constraints of values, to attempt to bring material and intellectual improvement in the physical world of today. This meant the rejection of both the Classical (Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, etc.) and Christian traditions, which had been successfully reconciled by the Scholastic schools of the High Middle Ages. Finally, to oversee this society, a strong national state was required, lest the disrupting innovations and enterprises of the scholars should unsettle and harm those around them. Thus, this state, the Leviathan, would incorporate all the individuals in the community so that the newborn nation-state would not simply be a vehicle for the traditional authority groups – church, university, nobles, merchants – but would rather unleash the potential of every individual in open debate. Now, any conclusion could result from this unrestrained procedure, but since the Enlightenment rejected the overarching idea of the importance of the true, good, and beautiful as articulated by the feudal scholastic authorities, any conclusion could be warranted as long as it brought benefits to man physically today.

Now, no period is able to maintain absolute consensus, and there were some early dissenters, mostly found in the British Isles, or fond of the society and government found there. Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Reid were the most prominent political economist, politician, and pure philosopher of this group, respectively. These thinkers and others specifically repudiated the ideas of particular Enlightenment thinkers, with Burke rejecting Rousseau, Reid combating Hume, and Smith dissenting from Locke. However, there was plenty of disagreement among Enlightenment thinkers. What is important about these three and their allies was that they did so in ways that validated, while diverging from, the traditional wisdom. Smith attempted to build a system of morals for understanding man first, then applied it to reject the scientific, top-down economic action of the new nation-state. Reid argued for common-sense realism – accepting basic truths – in contrast to new skepticism. Burke appealed to the traditional English Constitution as the guide for government while admitting the rights of man. This is why modern “conservatism” is traced back to this school. Before the Enlightenment, everyone – basically the entire world throughout all of history – embraced basically conservative ideas. Bad ideas, such as Christian heresies and Greek Sophism, did generate, but only as departures from the accepted traditional wisdom, and were usually put down.

What Smith, Reid, Burke and others did was to adapt the general milieu of conservative tradition to the post-Enlightenment world, where democracy was the governing structure. In this world, high philosophical arguments, such as those used by Anselm, would not be most effective, nor would appeals to mercantile or aristocratic elites. Rather, these thinkers forged a new system of “conservatism” that gave more room for individual action and prioritization in politics, philosophy, and economics. This initially vague and fluctuating view was opposed to the majority egalitarian, democratic, rationalistic, atheistic view of the Enlightenment. However, as this view was bad, it disintegrated into the extreme and unprecedented violence, upheaval, and instability of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, the United Kingdom was able to separate itself from these trends and adopt many of the “new conservative” ideas which had already cropped up in America, Holland, and Switzerland as these were the destinations of many of the exiles from the UK and the Continental Enlightenment – naturally as these places were tough to conquer, a bit freewheeling politically due to recent liberation, and not large enough that they posed an existential political threat to the Enlightenment political monarchies in Prussia, France, Austria, and Russia. In these places, flourishing occurred! Therefore, in the 20th century, as war devastated various areas, thinkers from these “new conservative” holdouts were able to inculcate their teachings more broadly, and when America defeated the USSR, the new conservatism was one (of several) forces unleashed on the world. 

Nevertheless, the “new conservative” teachings never reigned sole and supreme. Thinkers like J.S. Mill continued to prioritize the Continental Enlightenment and pervert the “new conservatism” throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. These thinkers, such as John Dewey, for one reason or another, tended to dominate the field of education, which meant that the Continental Enlightenment was promoted. Now, it’s important to remember that “new conservatism” is a deeply flawed and totally inferior version of the traditional conservatism that inspired it and is responsible for most of the world’s flourishing. However, new conservatism is a vehicle tailored to the modern, post-Enlightenment philosophical, political, and economic context, and is useful for that reason, and has produced some very excellent and praiseworthy thinkers.

There you have it folks. We’ll have a true mailbag next week, but I think Stan did a bang-up job filling in for me (probably outdid me actually, but don’t let him know that). Until next week, keep your questions burning and your minds ever inquisitive.