Tuesday, April 17, 2012

The Celtic Mind

One contemplates the power, depth, and breadth of the finest 18th-century minds only with some trepidation and humility. Or at least, one should.

The favorite study of the great men of that day, famed editor of The Nation E.L. Godkin explained in 1900, was the glorification of the person against political power. In “opposition to the theory of divine right, by kings or demagogues, the doctrine of natural rights was set up. Humanity was exalted above human institutions, man was held superior to the State, and universal brotherhood supplanted the ideas of national power and glory.”

But the world changed profoundly in the 19th century. The immensely complex theories of Friedrich Hegel, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud deconstructed Western man, breaking him into categories, boxes, longings, desires, and bits. The ideologues of the 19th century not only subverted thousands of years of finely honed ideas, dating back to Socrates, they also provided the means by which to seize, strangle, and suffocate the men of the West.

English historian Christopher Dawson presented the change with startling starkness:

The history of the nineteenth century developed under the shadow of the French Revolution and the national liberal revolutions that followed it. A century of political, economic and social revolution, a century of world discovery, world conquest and world exploitation, it was also the great age of capitalism; and yet saw too the rise of socialism and communism and their attack upon the foundation of capitalist society. … When the century began, Jefferson was president of the United States, and George III was still King of England. When it ended Lenin already was planning the Russian Revolution.

In that short century, man and men went from wholeness to pieces.