The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Voltaire’s extravagant praise of Locke (“never, perhaps, has a wiser, more methodical mind existed than Mr Locke”) pales in comparison with his praise of Newton. Here was a genius, Voltaire wrote, “the like of which has scarcely appeared in ten centuries.”27 Isaac Newton had demonstrated to Voltaire’s satisfaction that human reason alone can discover the true inner workings of nature and the universe. Indeed, the human mind could achieve almost any goal it set for itself, as long as it remained grounded in experience and truth.

  Newton’s greatest fortune, however, was to be born in a free and tolerant country “at a time when, scholastic extravagances being banished, reason alone was cultivated and society could only be his pupil and not his enemy.” Voltaire was well aware of Shaftesbury’s dictum that “all politeness is owing to liberty.” If commerce and property were the fruits (as well as the causes) of modern liberty, so were science and the arts. Galileo had spent his last days under house arrest; Descartes died in exile in Sweden. The most noble-born Englishmen had vied to be pallbearers of Newton’s bier. Voltaire noted that the English reserved tombs at Westminster Abbey not just for their kings, but for great poets like Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson.28

  Voltaire urged his fellow Frenchmen to consider “which the more useful to a nation, a well-powdered nobleman who knows at exactly what time the king gets up and goes to bed … or a businessman who enriches his country, issues orders from his office in Surat or Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.”29 What led Alexis de Tocqueville to praise America as a cultural and political model, Voltaire did one hundred years earlier with England. I have seen the future in England, he said in effect, and it works.

  The burning question was whether the past would allow that to happen.

  After all, not everything was politeness and sophistication in the eighteenth-century metropolis. In most places, the old medieval core of the city still stood, dark and rotting. A visitor to eighteenth-century Hamburg said the city’s most characteristic smell was that of an open sewer. Most would have said the same about the poorest areas of London.

  Still, the point was the people began to notice that things smelled, that their streets were dirty and their alleyways unhealthy. They were demanding things like working plumbing, streetlights (starting in London in 1694), and urban renewal projects that would create a physical environment to match a new “polite and commercial” culture.30 The transformation of Europe’s cultural frame demanded a material transformation, as well.

  The most famous of these urban renewal projects still looks pretty much as it did when it was completed in 1775: the New Town in Scotland’s Edinburgh. Its gardens, squares, and gracious town houses were consciously designed to be the setting for a refined urban community. It was not just aristocrats who bought houses there, it was businessmen and lawyers, shopkeepers and master artisans. For Edinburgh was also one of Britain’s fastest-growing commercial centers, which in turn spawned a lively arts scene. Its university drew some of the most open and enlightened minds in Europe and students from every class of society. As much as London or Paris, and certainly more than Berlin or Madrid, Edinburgh was the epicenter of Aristotle’s Enlightenment.

  Small wonder, then, that it dubbed itself the Athens of the North. On any given day, you could find philosopher David Hume exchanging a glass of port with historian William Robertson, or scientist James Hutton speaking at the prestigious Oyster Club on his startling theory of the geological evolution of the earth (it’s the one we still hold today). One could also find Professor Adam Smith hurriedly alighting from the daily coach from Glasgow where he taught to attend a meeting of the Select Society, Edinburgh’s most influential circle of literati, scientists, and enlightened clergymen.

  And all the while, hanging over them was the shadow of the Scottish Highlands.

  For the purple-gray mountains that rose up to the north of Edinburgh were inhabited by fearsome men in kilts: beings who seemed more like beasts than men. In the early 1700s, the Highlands were a law unto themselves, where scattered clans lived a life almost unchanged since the days of Braveheart William Wallace. It was a world by Enlightenment standards of boundless superstition and unrelieved poverty—and mindless violence.

  In 1745, during the revolt of Bonnie Prince Charlie, those Highland clans suddenly swept down on Edinburgh and Glasgow. The clansmen with their bagpipes, claymores, and incomprehensible Gaelic held the terrified citizens for ransom and then marched to within two hundred miles of London before they were finally defeated. The revolt of the clans was followed by a savage repression, traces of which are still visible in the barren, unpopulated landscape of the Scottish Highlands.

  Still, the 1745 revolt left behind a sobering question for the Enlightenment to ponder. Why do some societies like England and France and cities like Edinburgh become polite and commercial, while so many others do not—even when they are right next door?

  Unlocking that mystery became the next great goal for the Enlightenment, and the Scottish Enlightenment in particular. It was an Edinburgh judge, jurist, and student of natural law, Lord Kames, who first pointed the way. In his library, he had gathered material about societies ranging from the Americas to the Hottentots of the South African Cape; China and Persia and India; and the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world. Here was data that could be used to create the first true comparative anthropology, something Aristotle had set out to do with his Politics but with far more limited materials: namely, a genuine science of the human community.

  Kames was the first on this track, with his Historical Law Tracts, published in 1761. He soon had company, including William Robertson, David Hume, and most famously Adam Smith. Their goal was a science of man akin to Newton’s natural science, in which the empirical data would be assembled and analyzed in order to construct a theoretical model that explained how all the parts fit together—not simply at any given moment, but as human society changes over time.31 Because unlike the universe, human communities and the laws governing them do change over time; and, the Scottish enlightened mind concluded, they change for the better.

  The result was the first full-blown theory of human progress. It divided human history into four distinct stages of growth, based on how human beings make their living (what later Marx would call “the means of production”). “Hunting and fishing,” Lord Kames wrote, “were the original occupations of man,” when the notion of human society hardly existed. The second stage of human evolution came when humans learned to follow animal herds and later domesticate them. This pastoral nomadic stage was the world of Scottish Highlanders as well as the Laplanders of northern Europe and historically the Germanic tribes who had invaded the Roman Empire.

  The pastoral nomadic society is built around the extended family ties of tribe and clan. “If that may be called a society,” Kames added, perhaps with a uneasy glance toward the Highlands outside his window, “which hath scarce any other than a local connection” and lacks any awareness of a larger world outside itself.32

  Instead, for Kames “the true spirit of society” was one that Aristotle would recognize. It “consists of mutual benefits and making the industry of individuals profitable to themselves as well as others.” This must wait until the third stage, the agrarian stage, when the need to bring in an annual harvest “connects individuals in an intimate society of support.” The community ceases to be mobile and becomes fixed in the village, farm, and field. New crafts arise—plowman, blacksmith, carpenter—and new relationships: lord and tenant, master and slave.

  This was the medieval Europe of the Domesday Book and the Crusades—but also the Magna Carta. Civil society in its agrarian stage supplies new forms of cooperation, but also new conflicts. With it comes the first sense of natural right as well, Aquinas’s and Locke’s individual claims and obligations, which in Lord Kames’s words, “earlier custom cannot control.” Resolving them requires for the first time written law and permanent government. The law code, the circuit judge, and th
e royal palace gradually replace the patriarch of the clan or elders of the tribe. For those who depend on their authority, this is a marked advance. However, they owe this advance not to the benevolent character of their rulers or divine sanction, as rulers themselves try to pretend, but to the changing nature of society itself. “In every society,” Kames concluded, “the advances of government toward perfection are strictly proportioned to the advance of society” toward mutual cooperation and improvement. The better we all get along, in other words, the more benign our rulers can afford to be.

  However, the progress of civil society is still not done. There is a fourth, commercial stage to come: the world of the businessman and tradesman. The scene of the action shifts from the village to the town and seaport, from farming and cultivating the land to trade and cultivating the exchange of goods and services. A new kind of community springs up, the polished urban world Voltaire and Shaftesbury praised. It is a community with a new complexity, but also with a new unprecedented dynamism.

  Commercial society, wrote Kames’s friend William Robertson, is “a society of human beings bound together by one of the strongest of all ties, the desire of supplying their mutual wants.” Cleric as well as historian, and famed provost of the University of Edinburgh, Robertson is not as well known a name as Adam Smith or even David Hume.

  Yet Robertson’s crucial contribution was overlaying Kames’s dynamic four-stage theory onto the history of Europe. The result was something of a surprise, especially to those writers like Voltaire used to celebrating the Renaissance as the “rebirth of letters” and the start of the modern spirit. What Robertson discovered was that the crucial start of Europe’s commercial stage came in the Middle Ages, that despised epoch that Voltaire, Shaftesbury, and many others dismissed as an age of Gothic barbarism. (That term, “Gothic,” would stick for describing its architecture.) The reason was the Middle Ages had also witnessed a brisk revival of trade, especially after the Crusades, which brought a spirit of freedom and independence to its cities that gradually spread across western Europe. “A great body of the people were released from servitude,” Robertson wrote. “Towns became so many little republics, governed by known and equal laws, and liberty was deemed such an essential and characteristic part in the constitution” that any escaped slave living there a year and a day was instantly declared free.33 In short, what had made the Florence of 1402 free wasn’t Divine Providence or even its laws, but how it made its money through trade and industry—which in turn made men change the laws to accommodate their new sense of freedom.

  It was a pathbreaking way of seeing man’s freedom, not as a divine gift but as a product of society itself. Not only did commerce and liberty go together, but they gave history an entirely new, hopeful direction. For Polybius, Saint Augustine, and the other heirs of Plato, human history had been an inevitable downward slide. Now thanks to Kames and Robertson, it turned into a steady upward climb. Robertson conceded some places in Europe had felt the progress of change more quickly than others, as in the Italy of Leonardo and Michelangelo and the Low Countries of Erasmus. Others never did, like the mountainous Balkan regions and the Highlands of Scotland.

  Nonetheless, “as soon as the commercial spirit gains an ascendant in any society,” Robertson declared, “we discover a new genius” in its government, its dealings with others, and its entire outlook on life.34

  “The mind acquires new vigor [and] enlarges its powers and faculties,” he noted, just as it “softens and polishes the manners of men.” It was commerce that prepared cities like Florence to rediscover the value of political freedom, and it was commerce that encouraged them to raise the fine arts to a new, more refined level.

  Robertson noted moreover that the commercial stage was also when European science came into its own, as men became systemically dissatisfied with a theological explanation of nature and demanded a more precise and empirical frame in order to get things done. Hence, it was little wonder that commercially minded Venice became Galileo’s most reliable patron, or that the maritime trading nations England and Holland became home to the finest scientific minds of the age, from Newton and Descartes to Locke and Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope.

  In sum, the growth of commerce triggered a sense of personal independence in people—it gave men and women the confidence to make up their own minds and resolve conflicts on their own, without the need of awe-inspiring kings or emperors—or witch doctors and priests. In commercial society, men no longer have to be terrified into obedience or being moral. The Golden Rule of morality as Aristotle originally formulated it in his Ethics, that “we should behave toward our friends as we would wish them to behave toward us,” becomes internalized and a mainspring of action. We cooperate—out of self-interest, of course, but we cooperate nonetheless. Our pocketbooks, but also society, benefit from our newfound liberty.

  Taken all together, William Robertson concluded, a community of free and active individuals takes shape, in which “industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain.” This was the Europe emerging in his own time. There was no reason to assume its polished and enlightened progress was not the face of its future, and the growth of liberty as well.

  “Liberty” is the key word. For Locke, man’s freedom was innate and inborn, unalienable in the proper sense, meaning never to be given away, even voluntarily. But the Enlightenment saw that liberty is also the result of a dynamic process, as well as a birthright. Indeed, this idea of the steady dynamic progress or evolution of civil society was the Scottish Enlightenment’s weightiest discovery. It soon found enthusiastic adherents in England and France, then across the Continent and the British Empire, including in America. Even its later critics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau never questioned the empirical process it described, only the values assigned to it.b In its broad strokes, it remains the Western view of history to this day.

  Yet in many respects, it is only an extension of Aristotle’s insight that the essence of life is the potential for growth. This turns out to apply to society as well as the individual, and includes the growth of political institutions. And here the eighteenth century reached its most shattering discovery, that the Greek polis, with its ancient ideal of liberty, was no liberty at all. The Enlightenment thoroughly studied its physical remains in Athens and Rome and Sparta. It read the histories of the ancient world with a new critical eye and began conducting the first archaeological excavations in places like Pompeii and Herculaneum. What it found were societies that were, in modern terms, repressive (as in the fate of Socrates), superstitious (all those temples dedicated to nonexistent gods), materially poor, and incredibly violent. The ancients “were extremely fond of liberty,” David Hume remarked, “but they did not understand it very well.” Above all, it noted that the Greeks and Romans had never developed a full-fledged notion of individual right. Their notion of politics consisted largely of massacres of one city’s faction by another, just as their notion of morality had encompassed infanticide and vendetta murder.35 With a sense of shock mingled with self-satisfaction, the Enlightenment had to conclude that the average Athenian or Spartan had more in common with Highland clansmen or Carpathian shepherds or Bedouin tribesmen than they did with the modern civilized citizen of London or Paris or Edinburgh.

  The Romans were even worse. For all their vaunted discipline, valor, and rule of law, they plundered their conquered provinces with brutal rapacity and degraded their inhabitants so that “they lost not only the habit but even the capacity of deciding for themselves, or of acting from the impulse of their own minds.” The Roman Empire, Robertson concluded, “degraded and debased the human species,” sowing the seeds of its own destruction—a point Edward Gibbon would later extend in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.c36

  Because only the men (and eventually women) of commercial society are truly ready, intellectually and materially, to be entrusted with true liberty—“modern” liberty in the Enlightenment formulation—in which governme
nt leaves as much decision making in the hands of individuals as possible to enable them to live their lives as they, not others, see fit.

  Compared with the ancients, medieval man had felt like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. Erasmus and the Renaissance mind felt much the same. Now, thanks to the Enlightenment, Western civilization felt free to lay aside the burden of the ancient past and keep its eyes on the road ahead.37

  But where were they headed? And above all, what was the driving engine behind all this progressive change?

  It was yet another Scot, David Hume, who supplied the answer. Born in 1711, Hume lived in Edinburgh and eventually bought a house in the New Town. In his lifetime, Hume wore many hats. He was a philosopher, historian, literary critic, and social scientist. His most important contribution was to focus on the single principle that centuries of moralists starting with Plato had condemned, but which Hume showed actually kept civil society dynamic and expanding.

  This was the power of self-interest. Hume was careful to distinguish it from mere selfishness. Self-interest was instead the passionate desire to improve our material circumstances that beats in every human heart and fills every human mind, even in the most barbarous and primitive societies. As Kames put it, “Men thirst after opulence.” That thirst, Hume realized, was the driving engine of social and economic change.

  In the early stages of society’s evolution, people can’t afford the untrammeled operations of that passion. The needs of the individual must yield to the imperatives of the group, such as the need to share the spoils of the hunt or the meager bounty of the harvest. In commercial society, however, self-interest can find a range of constructive outlets. Instead of enriching ourselves by robbing our neighbors at swordpoint, we open a store or bank. Instead of seeing the stranger from a foreign land as a potential enemy, we see him as a potential customer. Instead of representing a threat to the safety of the group, self-interest becomes a force for constructive cooperation with others, in order to get the things we want and achieve the results we dream of.