Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Today, the idea that it is inherently noble to kill and maim people and destroy their roads, bridges, farms, dwellings, schools, and hospitals strikes us as the raving of a madman. But during the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment, it all made sense. Romantic militarism became increasingly fashionable, not just among Pickelhaube-topped military officers but among many artists and intellectuals. War “enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. It is “life itself,” said Émile Zola; “the foundation of all the arts . . . [and] the high virtues and faculties of man,” wrote John Ruskin.³⁰

Romantic militarism sometimes merged with romantic nationalism, which exalted the language, culture, homeland, and racial makeup of an ethnic group—the ethos of blood and soil—and held that a nation could fulfill its destiny only as an ethnically cleansed sovereign state.³¹ It drew strength from the muzzy notion that violent struggle is the life force of nature (“red in tooth and claw”) and the engine of human progress. (This can be distinguished from the Enlightenment idea that the engine of human progress is problem-solving.) The valorization of struggle harmonized with Friedrich Hegel’s theory of a dialectic in which historical forces bring forth a superior nation-state: wars are necessary, Hegel wrote, “for they save the state from social petrifaction and stagnation.”³² Marx adapted the idea to economic systems and prophesied that a progression of violent class conflicts would climax in a communist utopia.³³

But perhaps the biggest impetus to romantic militarism was declinism, the revulsion among intellectuals at the thought that ordinary people seemed to be enjoying their lives in peace and prosperity.³⁴ Cultural pessimism became particularly entrenched in Germany through the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, and Oswald Spengler, author in 1918–23 of The Decline of the West. (We will return to these ideas in chapter 23.) To this day, historians of World War I puzzle over why England and Germany, countries with a lot in common—Western, Christian, industrialized, affluent—would choose to hold a pointless bloodbath. The reasons are many and tangled, but insofar as they involve ideology, Germans before World War I “saw themselves as outside European or Western civilization,” as Arthur Herman points out.³⁵ In particular, they thought they were bravely resisting the creep of a liberal, democratic, commercial culture that had been sapping the vitality of the West since the Enlightenment, with the complicity of Britain and the United States. Only from the ashes of a redemptive cataclysm, many thought, could a new heroic order arise. They got their wish for a cataclysm. After a second and even more horrific one, the romance had finally been drained from war, and peace became the stated goal of every Western and international institution. Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.

Many people refuse to believe that progress toward peace, however fitful, could even be possible. Human nature, they insist, includes an insatiable drive for conquest. (And not just human nature; some commentators project the megalomania of Homo sapiens males onto every form of intelligence, warning that we must not search for extraterrestrial life lest an advanced race of space aliens discovers our existence and comes over to subjugate us.) While a vision of world peace may have given John and Yoko some good songs, it is hopelessly naïve in the real world.

In fact, war may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty. Though conquest may be tempting over the short term, it’s ultimately better to figure out how to get what you want without the costs of destructive conflict and the inherent hazards of living by the sword, namely that if you are a menace to others you have given them an incentive to destroy you first. Over the long run, a world in which all parties refrain from war is better for everyone. Inventions such as trade, democracy, economic development, peacekeeping forces, and international law and norms are tools that help build that world.

CHAPTER 12SAFETY