The 18th Century | A Tale of Rot and Enlightenment.

Over the roughly 1600 years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, my civilization—the union of Roman and Germanic peoples—has experienced periods of waxing and waning; falsehood and veracity; virtue and dishonor. Yet few eras have been as rotten as the 18th century. But how could our most treasured lotus flower, the Enlightenment1, bloom out of festering muck? Because Enlightenment is always the rejection of forms for the sake of forms and an insistence that we engage with reality as it actually is. In their broad collective suicide of revolution and reform, the critics of the 18th century did their duty and declared that it was better to live in rubble than in a house of lies. Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Is this not the eternal battle of Humanity? On one side stand the forces of progress—those willing to confront reality in its unblinking eye and admit that it is as it appears, a God’s fact, not a performance in which our role is knowingly a lie. On the other side stand the forces of stagecraft and quackery, who insist that first the forms must be obeyed; then, and only then, can we discuss what alterations are needed, let alone what alterations are possible.

Whatever honor there was to be had in that era was to be found in deconstruction. Adam Smith, Kant, and Gibbon were all critics and observers of fact beyond reproach. This is not to speak of Voltaire, the living symbol of his era, whose clear mind cut through every word he wrote. Having slain his enemies so utterly, he seems to fight only their ghosts—an illusion born of victories so complete that he is now largely forgotten2. Yet he remains the banyan tree of our culture, the single origin from which the entire forest of our thought grows.

The 18th century was an era of unsurpassed cynicism, in which, with few exceptions, everyone knew that the play in which they were engaged was a lie. In politics, economics, and religion alike, the entire edifice of society and culture rested upon a foundation of untruths and shams. In England and France, it was the era of George III and Louis XV—monarchs whose rule was nothing more than theatre. At one point, nobility had meant something; “duke” comes from “dux,” the Latin for “leader”3. But by that century, it was no longer the nobility’s role to lead their nation in war or even in peace; instead, their job was to collect rents so that they could gossip and dance with unspeakable grace. Chivalry had been pawned off at the dearest price possible.

Religion was even more bankrupt. A careful examination of classical history had shown that, in many ways, the world of Caesar or of Plato was more virtuous and more honest than their own—all without any Christian morality. Perhaps, as Gibbon seemed to indicate, Christianity might even be worse than useless?

To the people of that time, the depths of truth that had inspired men like Luther and Calvin were obscured by the static skyline of two centuries of fog and hypocrisy. Much like standing on the plains and looking up at the Rockies near Denver, one cannot see the gold and rich soil of California.

Even to the priest, all that could now be seen were the heights of deception—the truth that gunpowder and pikes, not theology or veracity, determined which god was true. Had not, in both France and England, a Henry changed religion as one would change a crown? God had been reduced to a coronation ritual and a convenient lie—what a poor God that is! Not a God worth dying for if Truth is to exist at all.

The chaotic, post-religious wars Europe that Hobbes once knew no longer existed. Hierarchy must always be draped in truth and necessity to be tolerable, and by the 18th century, it was not. If, at one time, the Puritans had been able to stand on their simple pews with nothing but the Bible in their hands, Rousseau and Adam Smith could now stand with one simple fact—that what stood between man and utopia was the state. “We actually don’t need someone to burn incense and sing liturgy in Latin, or throw orgies at great public expense.” The plebeians are more than capable of managing on their own with nothing but a fair court of justice, an army, and a light system of taxation and regulation.

“The sovereign has only three duties to attend to: three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understanding: first, the duty of protecting society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; second, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of society from the injustice or oppression of every other member, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and third, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and public institutions, which it can never be in the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain, because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.” – The Wealth of Nations (1776)

The 18th century was the very dawn of what we can call the “written” age, when for the first time the great masses of society were able to engage with the flowering of human knowledge. In Gaul and among the wide-flung Anglo-Saxons—through different methods and at different speeds—the plebeian class was given a voice. With this new voice, they declared that the hierarchies of their ancestors were false and could do nothing better than to do away with themselves. This common bourgeois knowledge—the intuition of stone breakers and farmhands—has always existed among all people who earn their living: that rents are evil, that work is virtuous, and that the only hierarchy which should exist is the hierarchy of merit, where each man is given his lot and serves his purpose.

No other age before this had seen craftsmen with such ferocity. When news came that Louis XVI’s army was gathering around Paris, the workmen of the city set about organizing themselves. They channeled their indigent anger not into chaos, as so many peasant rebellions had at other times in history, but into forging pikes and securing gunpowder. The world merchants of the Channel would not be put down like mad dogs, and for this, they carved their own bloody chapter of sansculottism into history.

Is it the lightning or the dry brush that causes a forest fire? Once the volcanic eruption of postponed reform ceased and the spiraling whirlwind of revolution lost its steam, life began to be pieced back together. New systems of honorable living took root in the freshly laid volcanic soil. The 19th century—a period of intense earnestness—required that the forest be cleared so new sprouts could shoot up. Napoleon, Marx, Goethe, and Spencer all necessitated the removal of the dead wood of the past, one way or another.

We must feel nothing but sympathy for the men of the 18th century. They paid a high price for their lies, as all men do in such times—as we all pay today.