Walking in Circles

The Enlightenment, that flowering of faith in reason and individual liberty was largely a reaction to the Renaissance which had looked to the past for answers.  Rather, the Enlightenment looked forward with a firm believe that man, armed with reason (largely without God) was the source of progress.  Kant defined the spirit of these times in his epoch defining essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment with its challenge to Sapere aude (Dare to Know).

In many ways this faith was well placed. The scientific method, based on induction rather than deduction (much favored by the Scholastics) has extended our life spans, improved the quality and comfort of our lives piling up one achievement in process.  When a man was put on the moon even the sky didn't seem to be the limit.

Most enlightenment thinkers thought the realm of human affairs would follow the same happy upward slope fostering systems such as the French thinker August Comte's Positivism (1798-1857) which labored to replace traditional forms of religion with a "Religion of Humanity" based on rationalist principles.  

Comte had no lack of confidence in his intellectual gifts, even passing judgement on God's creative abilities when he said, "It is evident, the solar system is badly designed".  Comte believed humanity was passing through three stages, first the theological, then the metaphysical and ending with, of course, the "Positive" where reason and the scientific method would lift mankind to its glorious destiny.  

Many were caught up in the movement, with societies forming on Positivist principles across the globe (a Positivist Temple still stands in Porto Allegro), but as harbinger of the fate of other soon to come man made utopias, idea trumped implementation and sadly that Temple is about all that is left of the movement. Comte and those that would follow him into the 20th century found that humans weren't as "reasonable" as once thought.

There is a strong whiff of Hegel in Comte (as there is throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries) with its faith in the historical development of the world spirit over time.  In fact, one could consider Comte an operationalization of Hegelian ideas.  

Marx then arrives, sure that Hegel has the right idea, but as he famously quipped, he needed to turn Hegel on his head. By this Marx meant that Hegel was right that mankind would develop historically over time but that it was not an ideological development (Hegel is thrown in with the Idealists) but rather the correct reordering of material solutions (economics and capital structures) that would lead us to "heaven" or in Marx's terms, the workers' paradise. 

For Marx, our thinking bubbles up from our material circumstances (rather than the other way around as Hegel thought) and there is much truth in this. Private property would be abolished, the means of production would be controlled/managed by the workers themselves. Reason and altruism would drive the engines of progress. All aboard for the Workers' Paradise!

In the early 20th century, with European capitalist democracies collapsing into World War I (known ironically as "the War to end War") it looked like Marx's ideas might get some purchase.  Lenin and the Bolsheviks welcomed WWI, certain in their belief that the oppressed working class, united by class rather than national ties would sit out the war prepared to take control of the levers of power once decaying Europe had fought itself to exhaustion.  Hence the slogan of the Communist Party, "Workers of the World Unite!  They were confident this charge would be led by Germany, the most advanced industrial state (the Russians were far to "undeveloped" to pull it off).  Here we have another "swing and a miss" as workers and even many communist leaders in developed nations signed up to support their nations effort to prosecute the war.

What next?  Lenin decided that, since they had power, they might as well consolidate it. The path to the Workers' Paradise would have to wait. Lenin led to Stalin who killed at least 9 million of his own people (low end of the estimates that I could find) through enforced collectivization, industrialization and famine.  In human terms a very brute force way of turning the means of production over to the workers.  Mao, another classically trained Marxist racked up even worse human casualties. 

These human rights abuses are viewed by some commentators as a key weakness of any implementation of Hegel and Marx. That is, the idea that human history is fated to end in a certain happy way (the world spirit realizing itself or in the Workers' Paradise) creates an opening for the idea that whatever happens even if it's as brutal as forced collectivization or locking up citizens in the gulags was fated to happen. We are all just riding the wave of history and therefore omelets require broken eggs. 

Of course, we can't be too smug in the west where our record of colonialization and imperial expansion built our societies on genocide and the plundering of native peoples here in the America's, Nazi Germany and Tojo's Japan. At least in the west it is legal to debate these matters and to pass laws barring their recurrence.

After two world wars, Walter Benjamin's very different vision of history's trajectory seems more apt than the pollyannish enlightenment view.  Benjamin, a German (Jewish) intellectual of the early 20th century, who is only now getting his due, had this to say about our prospects:

 
“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' (see above) shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

One can't blame Benjamin for this view.  He was chased out of Nazi Germany to Spain, where, cornered and waiting for an exit visa, and fearing imminent capture committed suicide.  In one of history's tragic and ironic tragedies, his visa was granted the day following his suicide.

With all of that, the 20th century seems to close the enlightenment project as a decidedly mixed bag, with huge scientific/material advances juxtaposed against mass murder and mayhem organized and executed on a scale that would not have been allowed even if it could have been achieved in the supposed benighted centuries preceding. 

It feels like we're walking in circles, not on a straight path to a happy future.  History can be read as one effort to save himself after another. The story of the Tower of Babel certainly can be read as one of those.  And so, one is reminded of the quote often attributed to Twain that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. This is certainly what Auden was thinking about when writing his "September 1st" memorializing the day Hitler invaded Poland which include the lines:

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief:

We must suffer them all again.

While we languish in what is termed post-modernism which by definition reads that we don't know where we are, I'm in full agreement that mankind, without the horizon of Jesus Christ to walk towards, will continue to walk in circles.  

In a First Presidency Message from 2013 President Uctdorf quotes two studies that show that when left in an area where they can't see the horizon people will walk in circles.  A perfect metaphor for mans continued (and failing) effort of going it alone surely brings the Savior's words into bold relief that: I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life" (John 8:12).

Walking in Circles (churchofjesuschrist.org)