Tired and Emotional

One of the things that struck me when I went to the Intelligence2 debate at the Methodist Hall on October 18, 2009 was the emotionalism of those arguing against the motion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.

Christopher Hitchens positively trembled with indignation as he took the Church of Rome to task for such historical indiscretions as the Crusades, the Inquisition, Slavery, and Anti-Semitism - all of which we may have cause discuss on some other occasion. 'Hitch' demanded apologies all round, and swiped those which the Vatican has already made, like a child taking a trick in a game of Top Trumps, screaming with excitement at the prospect of further tricks to come. How dare the Church preach a system of morals, he thundered, when its own history was a long record of transgression against the rights that we, in our own enlightened times, have enshrined and sanctified in law?

Hitchens' righteous anger was richly complemented by Stephen Fry's tearful self-pity - who, asked Fry, was the Pope to tell him, a homosexual, and proud of it, that his way of expressing his love, his way of expressing sexuality, and - dammit - his way of just having a little bit of fun was 'disordered' and a prelude to eternal damnation? Let everyone be free to believe what they liked in the privacy of their own home, all Stephen asked was to be left alone in the bedroom to do as he would be done by. After all, he asked, who was a sexless, repressed or hypocritical celibate like Saint Augustine to preach to anyone about the joy of sex?

The thing that struck me about these men's emotionalism was how at odds it was with the rationalism which both expressly espoused when they declared that they were the intellectual heirs of 'the Enlightenment'.

Quite what this meant was never made clear, and has always been a bit of mystery to me anyway. After all, putting Voltaire in the same category as Rousseau is rather like comparing Mozart with Beethoven - each of these great men were, roughly speaking, contemporaries, and yet no one but a fool would suggest that their personalities, philosophies or attitudes were remotely similar. Voltaire and Mozart are most alike in their wit, playfulness, and detachment of feeling (which is not in the least the same as its absence). Rousseau and Beethoven were anything but detached or playful, and would have been mortally offended to have been thought so, even if they were not without their own laborious variety of wit.

But Voltaire was nearly always able to find things funny; stupidity, it is true, excited his contempt, particularly when it was allied with cruelty; but on the whole he took the pragmatic view: life was as it was, and the best one could do was to laugh at folly, and avoid situations in which one might become its victim. For Rousseau, being a victim was what it was all about: he was the poor, lonely, put upon prophet living in a hopelessly corrupt and artificial age - the remedy lay in the sincere expression of one's intimate feelings - in short, what de la Rouchefoucauld once bitingly described as 'the bad manners of the young'.

Listen to the voices of revolution, from 1789 until our own day, and they are nearly all of this type - hectoring, sentimental, and completely lacking in humour - immediately identifiable as those of the adolescent sons of boring old Jean Jacques.

How Voltaire would have laughed at them!

How Voltaire would have laughed at the idea that the representatives of one idiotic generation should solemnly apologise to each other for the outdated idiocies of their ancestors.

As for homosexuality, Voltaire regarded it as no more than a passing phase and pretty well the consequence of locking boys up together in single sex schools at a time when most of them looked liked pretty girls anyway. It was something to grow out of as soon as the flower of adolescence faded and more attractive temptations became available to the unspoiled appetites of the very young. For, he added sobrely, 'what seems a charming faiblesse in the youthful Alcibiades is a disgusting travesty when manifested in a Dutch sailor or a Russian muzhik'.

How fortunate for the great man that he is safely beyond being dug up and frog-marched off to apologise for these unnatural, irrational, and hurtful views or, indeed, to have to hear the term 'enlightenment' appropriated to underpin the canting and self-indulgent pomposities of men like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry!