of war against the impotence of ignorance. ‘Enlightenment’ had two meanings, both evident in the Encyclopédie: the discovery of truth and its subsequent diffusion. The purpose of the Encyclopédie, Diderot said, was to ‘change the general way of thinking’; and it succeeded. The Enlightenment had many critics, but its illuminating influence and achievements were apparent in the history of the next two centuries – the waning of absolutism and superstition, the rise of secular democracy, the understanding of the natural world, the transformation of historical and scientific study, the new political resonance of notions such as ‘progress’, ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’.
Does that light still shine today? If you type ‘The Enlightenment’ into a search engine at the online retailer Amazon, more than 1,500 books are listed. Look more closely, however, and you’ll notice that many of them have nothing in common with what Kant, or indeed Foucault, meant by Enlightenment: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment; The Secrets of Kung Fu for Self Defence, Health and Enlightenment; Crystal Enlightenment: The Transforming Properties of Crystals and Healing Stones; The Rosicrucian Enlightenment; The Tibetan Art Colouring Book: A Joyful Path to Right Brain Enlightenment; Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment; and Golf for Enlightenment: Playing the Game in the Garden of Eden, a recent title from the entrepreneurial mystic Deepak Chopra. ‘The Enlightenment made explicit what had long been implicit in the intellectual life of Europe: the belief that rational inquiry leads to objective truth,’ the British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in 1999. ‘Even those Enlightenment thinkers who distrusted reason, like Hume, and those who tried to circumscribe its powers, like Kant, never relinquished their confidence in rational argument … For the ensuing 200 years, reason retained its position as the arbiter of truth and the foundation of objective knowledge. [But] reason is now on the retreat, both as an ideal and as a reality.’
For Scruton, this counter-revolution ‘puts our entire tradition of learning in question’. Its leaders may seem an incongruous coalition – post-modernists and primitivists, New Age and Old Testament – but they have been remarkably effective over the past quarter-century. Nor are they merely dunderheads or fanatics who argue that ‘ignorance is bliss’ to assuage any prickings of guilt at their own imbecility: those who may know no better have been aided and abetted by a latter-day trahison des clercs. We have now reached the point at which a British prime minister who styles himself as a progressive moderniser (and recites the mantra ‘education, education, education’) can defend the teaching of creationism rather than evolution in school biology classes, with no apparent shame or embarrassment. Even intellectuals who respect Enlightenment values often seem reluctant to defend them publicly, fearful of being identified as ‘liberal imperialists’ or worse.
The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore. Some are manifestly sinister, others seem merely comical – harmless fun, as Nancy Reagan said of her husband’s reliance on astrology. Cumulatively, however, the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilisation, especially as many of the new irrationalists hark back to some imagined pre-industrial or even pre-agrarian Golden Age. (‘Where We Stand. The revolt against reason is the seed of insurgence,’ declares the manifesto of the Coalition Against Civilisation, a group of rural anarchists. ‘We believe that through the invention and use of agriculture, certain people were able to force their lifestyles upon the rest of the world. What was being pushed is civilisation, the state of society that forces all to become domesticated and thus mediated from the natural world.’) My purpose in this book is to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters: those who rewrite or romanticise history, like those who rejoice in its demise or irrelevance, are condemned to repeat it. The story begins a quarter of a century ago, in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini inaugurated an Islamist project to turn the clock back to medieval times, and Margaret Thatcher – who posed as a disciple of the Enlightenment giant Adam Smith – set out to re-establish ‘Victorian values’. Neither could have dared imagine just how successful they would be.
Why might not whole communities and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals? Nothing but this principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally at least with private persons, can account for the major part of those transactions of which we read in history.
BISHOP JOSEPH BUTLER (1692–1752)
Although 1979 may not have the same historical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when the world was jolted by a violent reaction to the complacency of the existing order. Two events from that year can both now be recognised as harbingers of a new era: the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran and the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in Britain. The Imam and the grocer’s daughter represented two powerful messianic creeds whose ‘conflict’ – though often more apparent than real – found its most gruesome expression some twenty-two years later, when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York were reduced to rubble by a small kamikaze squad of Islamist martyrs.
What seemed to be a straightforward battle between modernity and medievalism was in truth a more complex affair, ripe with ironies: the most ardent apostles of Thatcherite neo-liberalism were themselves engaged in a struggle against the world as it had evolved during the twentieth century (welfare states, regulated economies, interventionist governments, sexual permissiveness), while the pre-modern Islamic fundamentalists – commonly portrayed as bearded loons in an Old Testament landscape of caves and deserts – had a high-tech savvy that continually amazed and infuriated their enemies. Osama Bin Laden knew how to exploit the power of satellite TV and twenty-four-hour news channels; his lieutenants were Westernised enough to pass without notice in Europe and the United States. And it was a Boeing jet which carried the Ayatollah Khomeini back to Tehran on 1 February 1979.
‘A nation trampled by despotism, degraded, forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter,’ the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote of the Iranian revolution. ‘But a whole nation cannot emigrate, so it undertakes a migration in time rather than in space. In the face of circling afflictions and of reality, it goes back to a past that seems a lost paradise. The old acquires a new sense, a new and provocative meaning.’ Although millions of Iranians celebrated the Ayatollah’s arrival, by no means all were fundamentalist zealots yearning for jihad: Iran was a secular state by the standards of the region. What made his installation possible was that he was the only alternative on offer. Why? Because the increasingly corrupt and brutal Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had suppressed the voices of democratic dissent. And who was responsible for this counter-productive folly? The United States, among others: the CIA had helped organise the coup which toppled Mohammed Mossadegh’s left-liberal government and reinstalled the Shah on the Peacock Throne. Hence the seething resentment, felt even by some Westernised Iranians, against the ‘great Satan’ of America. It was President Carter’s subsequent decision to let the Shah enter the US for medical treatment that provoked the storming of the American embassy and the ‘hostage crisis’.
Ironically enough, Jimmy Carter was the only president who had dared to defy the conventional wisdom that guided American foreign policy for more than three decades after the Second World War: that in order to ‘contain’ the spread of Communism it was essential to support anti-Marxist dictators in Africa, Asia and South America, and to look the other way when they were torturing or murdering their luckless subjects. Although the founding fathers said in the declaration of independence that ‘governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’, and promulgated the American constitution to ‘establish justice … and secure the blessings of liberty’, their successors in the second half of the twentieth century were reluctant to bestow these blessings beyond their own borders. Under Carter, however, even strategically important countries on America’s doorstep – Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala – were warned that further US aid was dependent on an improvement in their human-rights record. In an address at Notre Dame University on 22 March 1977, Carter deplored the ‘inordinate fear of Communism which