Bad Ideas Have Bad Consequences

Mr Pearce discusses the end results of the Endarkenment's faulty philosophical anthropology, the ideas of human perfectibility and inevitable progress.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

The Enlightenment’s misreading of man and history has led to a reductionist understanding of human society. This, in turn, has led to the reduction of the human person to that of being a mere subject, or dare we say, guinea pig. The consequences of such a bad idea are clear enough. It leads and has led already to the crushing of humans in the name of humanity.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. Take, for instance, the Enlightenment, otherwise known as the Age of Reason, which can be judged by the superciliousness of its definition of itself. In claiming to be the “enlightenment”, it was claiming ipso facto that the world was living in darkness until its “enlightened” perspective arrived; in calling itself the “age of reason”, it was dismissing the whole heritage of humanity as being lacking in reason until the arrival of the “rational age”. In this light, or darkness, we can see that the so-called Enlightenment was a progenitor of today’s cancel culture which sees the past as inherently inferior to the present.

At the heart of the Enlightenment was the egocentrism of René Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), which placed the individual at the centre of a subjective microcosmos, in which the deified self knows nothing with any certainty but his own thoughts. It is a very short leap from this entrapped perspective, bereft of any contact with the outside world of objective verity, to the belief that I can reinvent myself in my own image. In this light, or darkness, we can see Cartesianism as the progenitor of transsexualism and transhumanism.

At the other end of the Enlightenment spectrum from the idealism of René Descartes is Thomas Hobbes who reduced all existence to mere matter. “All that exists is body,” Hobbes insisted, “all that occurs motion”. Such philosophical materialism gave rise to the historical determination of Karl Marx, whose ideas have led to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Yes indeed. There’s no doubt about it. Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences.

Although Descartes, Hobbes and Marx will be well-known to most vaguely informed people, another major influence on modern thought and culture, somewhat less known, is Auguste Comte. In his book, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Henri de Lubac devotes considerably more space to Comte than he does to the other three central figures on whom he focuses as being central to the rise of atheism and its godless consequences. De Lubac discusses the ideas of Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche in the first part of his book but devotes the whole of the second part to Comte.

The impact of Comte on his own age was summarized by the French philosopher, Émile Saisset: “Herr Feuerbach in Berlin, like Monsieur Comte in Paris, offers Christian Europe a new god to worship – the human race.” This divinizing of humanity as the one abstract Being, which all individuals must serve, was Comte’s life mission. By the end of the nineteenth century, he had been so successful that Lucien Lévy-Brühl could write that “the positive spirit”, which Comte had done more than anyone else to isolate and define, was “so closely interfused with the general thought” of the age that it had become almost unnoticeable and yet ubiquitous, “like the air one breathes”.

De Lubac connects Comte’s positivism as “the ally of the Marxist and Nietzschean currents” insofar as it has the same ultimate goal: “Like them, it is one of the ways in which modern man seeks to escape from any kind of transcendency and to shake off the thing it regards as an unbearable yoke – namely, faith in God.”

 At the heart of Comtean thought was an evolutionary understanding of the development of human society and culture. “From the very nature of the human mind,” he wrote, “every branch of our knowledge has necessarily to pass through three successive theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state.” Put in layman’s terms, human culture and society begins with a belief in fictitious beings called gods; it then progresses to a metaphysical approach to this fiction, seeing the fiction as mere metaphor, as a means of explaining it and ultimately explaining it away; until finally, metaphysics can be abandoned, or jettisoned, so that science might come of age.

Summarizing this “positive” process in his book on Comte, Lévy-Brühl wrote that “the history of mankind can be represented, in a sense, as development from the primitive religion (fetishism) to the definitive religion (positivism).”  De Lubac debunks this historical determinism, which is itself a fictitious fetish, by reminding us that Comte’s three successive states were actually “three coexistent modes of thought”. Again, to put the matter in layman’s terms, history does not evolve from one type of thought to another but embraces all three forms of thought at all times, in every stage of history. Our ancestors, throughout the millennia and centuries, have always seen a supernatural dimension to reality (religion); they have always sought to understand this reality in terms of reason (metaphysics); and they have always pursued knowledge of the natural world (natural philosophy).

Comte’s misreading of man and history has led to a reductionist understanding of human society. This, in turn, has led to the reduction of the human person to that of being a mere subject, or dare we say guinea pig, in the efforts of positivist sociological “science” to remake man in the image of Comte’s misunderstanding of humanity. The consequences of such a bad idea are clear enough. It leads and has led already to the crushing of humans in the name of humanity.

Humanity is not really human, any more than Big Brother is really a brother. Humanity is a tyrannical abstraction that must be defeated so that the truly human can reemerge in its place.

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The featured image, uploaded by David Labreure, is “Auguste Comte et ses trois anges: Clotilde de Vaux, Rosalie Boyer, Sophie Bliaux” (2013). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.