necessity of a sense of the numinous, The

AFTER PROGRESS:

FINDING THE OLD WAY FORWARD

by Anthony O'Hear

Bloomsbury, L14.99, pp. 270 duke of Cambridge from the last century once blustered that he was on principle opposed to change, even change for the better. His piece of self-consciously reactionary rhetoric, even though it has given succour to generations of monoclesporting fogeys, reflects badly on that cantankerous aristocrat.

Anthony O'Hear's lively polemic, how ever, may make one feel better disposed towards the old duffer's proposition. After 200 years of pursuing reason and belief in human progress, Professor O'Hear asks, what benefits do we have? Yes, the West is much more prosperous and pacific, physically healthier and liberal-minded but at what price? It has been at the cost of spiritual and aesthetic decline.

Philosophy, religion and art are degraded, education is in tatters, politics has become debased and intrusive, and virtue has been displaced by self-fulfilment. The brute fact is we have become a banal society that much prefers kidney dialysis machines to symphony orchestras. As befits the man who earned a personal condemnation from Tony Blair for his remarks about the sentimentalisation of Britain in the wake of Princess Diana's death, O'Hear's style is pungent and his conclusions are provocative.

His theme is loss and progress. He traces back the idea of progress - a youthful concept, unknown to the ancients - to Francis Bacon. Bacon was one of the first to dismiss mediaeval science as hokum and illusion and assert a recognisably modem approach in which that discipline was to be directed to the 'relief of man's estate'.

Newton's conception of the universe as a rationally ordered machine was another step in disenchanting the world of old myths and wisdom. It allowed the French mathematician Laplace to expel God from the universe - what possible role could He play in this perfectly balanced mechanism? This new universe, where everything, even colour and taste, could be explained by the movement of atoms, was profoundly deterministic, leaving little room for chance or freedom.

Confidence in scientific rationality was the hallmark of the Enlightenment (there's a presumptuous name). Human improvement and a fairer and freer world were possible, if only people could be liberated from superstition and ignorance, and follow reason. The philosophes' understanding of the world, borrowed from the British scientific revolution, was materialist and mechanistic. So, despite Voltaire's cry of 'Ecrasez l'infame' - of removing those illusions that chained mankind - man was enslaved in a wider sense. As Bentham showed, 'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain.'

Professor O'Hear brings out with great clarity the terrible, self-defeating paradox at the heart of the Enlightenment Project. Darwin, Marx and Freud, all children of scientific rationalism, proved to be the project's nemesis. Their notion that we are either survival machines, or economic and class agents, or prisoners of deep, irrational psychological urges, painted human reason as a mere chimera. The Enlightenment Project collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Worse still, O'Hear argues that modem morality has not only drawn on the poisoned well of the Enlightenment, but the worst aspects of the CounterEnlightenment - Rousseau's veneration of feeling and 'naturalness' and Herder's 'historical relativism', the precursor to multiculturalism - whilst ignoring Burke. Burke warned against the stripping away of tradition and ritual, of 'the decent drapery of life' that hides man's 'naked, shivering nature'.

Enlightenment reason and sentimentality,.and the destruction of traditional wisdom and the sense of the sacred, have damaged us. As O'Hear puts it:

Thrown entirely, if undramatically, on our own resources, we realise, at least implicitly, how ill-equipped we are as a society to confront the fundamental enigmas of the human condition: not just death, sickness and unhappiness that are the lot of us all, but even more fundamentally what it is that elevates human life above the material and the animal, and gives life its worth, its dignity and its point.

Practising humility and endurance will help towards reconciling us to the human condition and rediscovering our nobility. However, O'Hear, despite or perhaps because, of a youthful calling to ordination with the Jesuits, while respecting the traditional Christian moral framework finds Christianity metaphysically wanting. Furthermore, he believes, much of the modem church is fatally compromised by a progressive cast of mind.

Engagement with traditional philosophy and appreciation of art, though natural and innate to the human personality, will never be enough to reverse the modern spiritual decline, certainly for those who happen not to be professors of philosophy. Philosophy and art cannot explain the mystery of our very existence and why we have implanted in us a sense of the numinous. A sense of the sacred, rather than a belief in its utility, is necessary. Only with eyes fixed heavenwards can mortals find a compelling reason to pursue truth, honour, nobility and beauty rather than breed and swarm - and, just as importantly, be able to claim it as the proper end of life rather than an example of eccentricity, or a lifestyle choice competing in the moral marketplace.

It is perhaps the final victory of the Enlightenment that the intellectual standard-bearers of the forces of conservatism, the latter-day Burkes such as Roger Scruton or O'Hear, are agnostics.

Copyright Spectator Dec 11, 1999
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