Voltaire, Rousseau
Wednesday
Looking through my files, I came across a New Yorker article from a few months back on books that investigate if “liberals are on the wrong side of history.” It’s by the always smart Adam Gopnik, who examines whether history’s arc bending inexorably toward justice is just a naïve Enlightenment dream. Much of the article looks at the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire and Rousseau. As is customary with this blog, I focus here on Gopnik’s mentions of literary fiction.
Gopnik begins the piece by warning against “presentism,” which assumes that where we are now is where we will be in the future. It’s easy, with Donald Trump, Brexit, and the rise of European pre-fascism, to conclude that liberal democracy is failing and to look around for culprits. If these books had been written during the Obama era, however, we would be looking at a very different history.
Thinking not only of Trumpism but of Hindu nationalism and other “blood and soil” movements, Pankaj Mishra in The Age of Anger accuses liberal elites of failing to address “the perpetual problem of identity, the truth that men and women want to be members of a clan or country with values and continuities that stretch beyond merely material opportunity.” Mishra believes Voltaire and Rousseau are ultimately to blame:
Mishra’s thesis is that our contemporary misery and revanchist nationalism can be traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic reaction to Voltaire’s Enlightenment—with the Enlightenment itself entirely to blame in letting high-minded disdain for actual human experience leave it open to a romantic reaction. In Mishra’s view, Voltaire—whose long life stretched from 1694 to 1778—was the hyper-rationalist philosophe who brought hostility to religion out into the open in eighteenth-century France, and practiced a callow élitist progressivism that produced Rousseau’s romantic search for old-fashioned community. Rousseau, who, though eighteen years younger, died in that same fateful year of 1778, was the father of the Romantic movement, of both the intimate nature-loving side and the more sinister political side, with its mystification of a “general will” that dictators could vibrate to, independent of mere elections. The back-and-forth of cold Utopianism and hot Volk-worship continues to this day. The Davos men are Voltaire’s children, a transnational and fatuously progressive élite; Trump and Brexit voters are Rousseau’s new peasant hordes, terrified of losing cultural continuity and clan comfort.
In other words, Rousseau felt dissed by Voltaire so eventually we had Nazis.
It’s useful for me, as a liberal, to be challenged in this way. With Karl Marx and Percy Shelley, I believe that human beings, at their core, want to freely explore and express their full potential. I also believe great authors, from the very beginning, have pushed against social boundaries to expand expressive freedom.
Is this “callow elitist progressivism,” a disregard for the way that identity actually operates in the world? Am I so fixated on liberal pluralism that I insensitively override age-old views of African Americans, women, LBGTQ persons, the lower classes, and others? And when I do so, am I guilty of setting the stage for reactionary blowback that makes the world worse for everyone?
Certainly there are spectacular examples of idealistic revolutions that resulted in catastrophic outcomes. Think of how overthrowing Louis XIV led to the reign of terror and Napoleon; how overthrowing the Tsar led to Stalin; how overthrowing the Shah led to the mullahs; how overthrowing Prince Sihanouk led to the Khmer Rouge. “The iron fist crushed the tyrant’s head and became a tyrant in his stead,” Blake writes. If Voltaire (along with current day progressives) was only a cold Utopianist and Rousseau (along with current day reactionaries) only a hot Volk-worshipper, then maybe Mishra would have a point.
But he caricatures both men. Gopnik notes that Misra offers
a comically partial picture of [Voltaire], neglecting his brave championing of the fight against torture and religious persecution…Casting Voltaire as the apostle of fatuous utopian progressivism, Mishra curiously fails to note that he also wrote what remains the most famous of all attacks on fatuous utopian progressivism, Candide.
I assume that Gopnik has in mind Professor Pangloss, who dogmatically asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Or as Pope puts it in his Essay on Man, “whatever is is right.” Perhaps Voltaire once held Pangloss’s ideas, which reflect deist beliefs in a clockmaker god, but he is too complex an author to hold mindlessly to a narrow ideology. In Candide, he subjects Pangloss to worse and worse conditions, including syphilis and slavery, so see how far a detached idealist will go. Pangloss never wavers but, unlike Voltaire, he’s obviously an idiot.
Misra also caricatures Rousseau, whose wildly popular novel La Nouvelle Heloise got people to explore their feelings as never before. Gopnik writes,
Mishra’s Rousseau, infatuated with a dream of ancient Spartan order and inflamed with resentment at the condescension of the Enlightenment élite, is more recognizable [in today’s reactionary movements]. But one wonders if an irascible Swiss pastoralist is really responsible for the temper of nineteenth-century anti-rationalism, which Mishra ably presents as it develops over the next two centuries, with a love of apocalyptic violence for its own sake. (Mishra rightly finds the obsession summed up in Bakunin’s phrase about destruction as a creative passion.) There are lots of romantic anti-rationalisms to play with; Rousseau’s was largely soft and sentimental in tone, rather than apocalyptic and violent.
I believe the books Gopnik reviews have been written by liberals, who have always had a penchant for self-critique. (The term “political correctness” has liberal origins.) It’s therefore not surprising that liberals today would be questioning the Enlightenment. Gopnik points out, however, that the Enlightenment had led us to a pretty good place:
We live, certainly, in societies that are in many ways inequitable, unfair, capriciously oppressive, occasionally murderous, frequently imperial—but, by historical standards, much less so than any other societies known in the history of mankind. We may angrily debate the threat to transgender bathroom access, but no other society in our long, sad history has ever attempted to enshrine the civil rights of the gender nonconforming.
Liberalism has problems touting its successes, Gopnik says, because it’s not as dramatic as liberalism’s enemies. “The middle way,” he says, “is not the way of melodrama,” which is why “long novels are the classic liberal medium.” Accentuating the “middle” in Middlemarch, he sees it as the world’s greatest novel, perhaps because of the way it examines the fate of progressive ideals in a conservative society.
Rather than seeing the Enlightenment and its reaction as having steered us wrong, Gopnik turns to philosopher Karl Popper’s explanation for the rise of reactionary movements:
The alternative to Mishra’s view might be that the dynamic of cosmopolitanism and nostalgic reaction is permanent and recursive. The divide that he sees seems far older than his two French anti-heroes. Karl Popper, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, traced exactly the same cycle back to Plato’s preference for regimented Sparta over freewheeling Athens (which is where Rousseau got the idea) and to a permanent cycle of history in which open societies, in their pluralism, create an anxiety that brings about a reaction toward a fixed organic state, which, then as now, serves both the interests of an oligarchy and those of a frightened, insecure population looking to arrest change.
Looking just at the United States, we have experienced outbursts of anti-immigrant fervor throughout our history. Versions of “Build that wall” resonated in the past and will resonate again in the future.
I believe that liberals’ response should be a principled sensitivity. We should listen to the anxieties of those who disagree with us but not abandon our principles. Persuasion is preferable to force and we should strive for that, even if it is slower. Evolution leads to better outcomes than revolution, and while we cannot prevent hysterical reactions to pluralism (as Obama’s presidency revealed), we can work to blunt them.
At the end of his article, Gopnik says that Candide shows how to respond to today’s fraught world.
The argument of Candide is neither that the world gets better nor that it’s all for naught; it’s that happiness is where you find it, and you find it first by making it yourself. The famous injunction to “cultivate our garden” means just that: make something happen, often with your hands. It remains, as it was meant to, a reproach to all ham-fisted intellects and deskbound brooders. Getting out to make good things happen beats sitting down and thinking big things up. The wind blows every which way in the world, and Voltaire’s last word to the windblown remains the right one. There are a lot of babies yet to comfort, and gardens still to grow.
There’s nothing detached or elitist about that advice. Many liberals, and not a few conservatives, are already following it.
