August 2008

Werl, as the new Doctor Who says, it all started some weeks ago when the partner brought home A.C. Grayling’s Towards the Light This is too well-known to need describing to my learned readership, but (if you came in late) it is a Whiggish account of those struggles for liberty which culminate in the UN’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Grayling begins with the Reformation and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, goes on through the Encylopaedists, the American Revolution and 1789, describes the movements to achieve personal liberty for slaves, workers and women and ends with a polemic directed against those in Western governments who wish to protect us against terror by removing civil liberties.

People of a certain age and background may well ask what point there is in telling such a familiar story.
Younger people, however have not usually been encouraged to learn this particular narrative, and if they have been exposed to the humanities and social sciences, have encountered instead the various anti-Enlightenment stories that now constitute an orthodoxy in universities. They have heard, for example, that no possible historical narrative is superior to any other, that what is called Enlightenment is only another species of repression and that the central Western values of liberty, autonomy and equality before the law are nothing but masks of Power. They have learnt that reason itself is part of a repressive apparatus.
In other words they can make no meaningful distinction between their lives and those of (say) Afghani women under the Taliban. Oops.
That orthodoxy – never quite the only game in town – is fading today: what will replace it is unclear. Meanwhile, for all its shortcomings, Grayling’s book is a very useful one for the young – and we have some of those around the place.
Werl anyway: I began to think about reason and science and all that, and the ways in which Grayling’s book might be improved, and re-read Locke’s Second Treatise for the first time in decades, then dug out Leslie Stephen’s account of Shaftesbury and . . . I fell into the Age (always so-called) of Reason. That it might not have been – was any age? – but it was the age of lucid, graceful and flexible prose. Oh and of Johnson.
Forgetting briefly that I was supposed to be checking out the Whig story I picked up the century’s most famous Tory and was lost. It’s many years since I had occasion to read Johnson and for a week or so there I was struck dumb with admiration. It’s a wonderful feeling. I read straight through The Lives of the Poets, dutifully earmarking blogworthy bits until . . .
I picked up Boswell’s Life of Johnson to check something. But I’m up to A.D. 1762 Aetat. 53 and even Johnson can’t live forever.