There is much the Progressive / Socialist / Anarchist movement occurring in the U.S. today has in common with the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” (May 5, 1789- November 9,1799). The three factions – differentiated by title only – who oppose the U.S. Constitution and America’s historical narrative are the same ideologues who opposed the monarchy of King Louis XVI and the domination of the Catholic Church.
The French Revolution occurred for two reasons: institutionalized moral and political corruption within the Catholic Church and the monarchy, and economic destitution – the famous “Let them eat cake!” uttered by the queen of hubris Marie Antoinette. The fuel for the flames of revolution was the period called the “Enlightenment” populated by philosophers whose names and esoteric ideas still confound socio-political Western Civilization today: Rouseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Kant. Their revolt against tyranny quickly morphed into a Reign of Terror by such men as Robespierre, Danton, and Marat who incited the population to behead over 1,400 people – only to be “shortened” by the blade themselves from the same mobocracy.
That part of “Progressive” theology today that doesn’t derive directly from Marx and Lenin comprises ideology from “Enlightened” -but deluded- French philosophers. The solipsistic intellectualism of The Left actually germinated from Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” under the rubric of “philosophy.” Lenin would gleefully praise America’s Left as communism’s “Useful Idiots.”
The 18th century critic, Samuel Johnson, challenged Berkeley’s view that “nothing is material” by recommending he kick a rock. The Left should kick a rock or two to wake them from their utopian fantasies.
As the extremes of the Revolution continued to increase in barbarity, the population turned from faith in God to faith in their own reasoning – to the point of social chaos, massive immorality and the destruction of the family. It was Napolean who saw the necessity of restoring morality through religion to save the nation. Supporting him were two men who wrote essays indicting the 18th century move from faith to “reason” and from tradition to “enlightenment”: Vicomte Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald who saw that religion was indispensable to good government; and Joseph de Maistre.
“Young Maistre wrote early in adulthood “nothing can replace the education given by a mother.” He admitted that the government of Louis XVI had been vacillating and incompetent, and that the Church needed moral renovation – both selling indulgences to maintain power; but to change the form, policies, and methods of the state so rapidly and drastically was to betray an adolescent’s ignorance of the recondite foundations of government. No polity, he believed, could long survive which lacked roots in tradition and time, or supports in religion and morality.
His Essay on the Principle Generator of Political Constitutions (1810) derived constitutions from the conflict in man’s nature, between good and evil (social and antisocial) impulses, and the need for an organized and lasting authority to maintain public order and group survival by supporting cooperative, as opposed to individualistic, tendencies. Every man naturally longs for power and possession, and, until tamed, is a potential despot, criminal and rapist. In most of us virtue cannot of itself master our basic instincts; and to let every supposed “adult” judge all matters by his own reason (weak through inexperience, and slave to desire) is to sacrifice order to liberty. Such undisciplined liberty becomes license, and social disorder threatens the power of the group to unite against attack from without and disintegration from within.
In Maistre’s view, the Enlightenment was a colossal mistake. He compared it to the youth who, by his eighteenth year, concocted or adopted schemes for the radical reconstruction of education, the family, religion, society and government. Voltaire was a choice example of such jujune omniscience. He talked of everything for a whole age without once piercing below the surface”; he was ‘so continually occupied with instructing the world’ that he had ‘only rarely time to think.’ If he had studied history humbly as a transitory individual seeking instruction from the experience of the sages, he might have learned that impersonal time[experience] is a better teacher than personal thought; that the soundest test of an idea is its pragmatic effects in the life and history of mankind; that institutions rooted in centuries of tradition must not be rejected without careful weighing of losses and gains; and the that the campaign to destroy the moral authority of the Church which had disciplined adolescence and formed social order in Western Europe – would bring the collapse of morality, the family, society, and the state. The murderous Revolution was the logical outcome of the blind “Enlightenment.” Philosophy is essentially a destructive force”; it puts all its trust in reason, in intellect, which is individualistic; and the liberation of the individual from political and religious tradition and authority endangers the state, and civilization itself.
Hence the present generation is witnessing one of the most dramatic conflicts humanity has ever seen; the war to the death between Christianity and the cult of philosophy.
Since the individual lives too briefly to be fit to test the wisdom of tradition, he should be taught to accept it as a guide until he is old enough to begin to understand it; he will, of course, never be able to understand it fully. He should be suspicious of any proposed change in the constitution or the moral code. He should honor established authority as the verdict of time-tested tradition, and therefore the voice of God.” – (Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. XI, p. 334)
See also:
Mortimer J. Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes, 1985
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
