Reason, Faith, & Revolution by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300155501
Publisher: Yale University Press

There is nothing wrong with a belief in the possibility of progress, as opposed to a full-blooded ideology of it. It is not inconsistent to speak up for progress while refusing to be the pawn of Progress. Ditchkins should also keep in mind the fact that many religious types have been as ardent apologists for Progress as he is. Not all of them, however. As Alastair Crooke points out, many mainstream Islamists reject the Western narrative of inexorable progress, along with Western materialism and individualism. When a Washington think tank announced recently that “we cannot survive … confronted with people who do not share our values,” it forgot that Western civilization managed to survive in just this way for some centuries. It was known as colonialism. What it had in mind was clearly not that Western civilization would hardly survive a full-blooded critique of its own crass materialism and selfish individualism, and might be all the better for it. Instead, the think tank concluded that the answer lay in a restoration of “Western certainties,” along with a determination to use all means, including the nuclear option, against its enemies.14

An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns. There is even a sense in which humanism, looking around our world, seems at times almost as implausible as papal infallibility. Can a world incapable of feeding so many of its inhabitants really be described as mature? Is J. L. Austin really a signal advance on Saint Augustine? As far as reason goes, what are we to make of a capitalist system which is at once eminently rational and one enormous irrationality, accumulating as it does for accumulation’s sake and generating vast amounts of waste and worthlessness in the process? An excess of light, as Edmund Burke knew, can result in darkness; a surplus of reason can become (as Burke’s compatriot Jonathan Swift demonstrates in Gulliver’s Travels) a species of madness. A form of rationality which detaches itself from the life of the body and the affections will fail to shape this subjective domain from the inside, thus leaving it prey to chaos and violence. Primitivism is the flip side of rationalism.

This is one of several senses in which Enlightenment reason, inestimable though it is, can easily spawn its own opposite. The ideology of progress, for which the past is so much puerile stuff to be banished to the primeval forests of prehistory, plunders us of our historical legacies, and thus of some of our most precious resources for the future. Those who hope to sail into that future by erasing the past will simply find it returning with a vengeance. The global resurgence of religion is one example of this return of the repressed. A self-preening Enlightenment reason was largely blind to the nature of religious faith. It could not see

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