CHRIS ATHORNE reviews a history of ideas linking the 18th century Enlightenment with our own (post)modern times and shade Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World by Roy Porter (Allen Lane, Penguin Press), £25 If it makes sense to speak of postmodernism and, by implication, modernism, then the suggestion that they were born, like Essau and Jacob, the one hard on the other's heels, is an interesting one.
I am no historian. Porter's is a big book (one third comprising footnotes, bibliography and index) with a neat cover that goes down well with dinner guests. So my job has to be to relate the force of its argument to the concerns of the atypical member of the Sea of Faith.
The book works on two levels. Firstly there is an argument about the role of the British Isles in the eighteenth century's history of ideas. Secondly there is an argument between our view of our own and our view of that century, a constant harking forward to the present. "Light is only that which allows us to cast a shadow. We are creatures of contrast" Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabeus, written and performed at the dead centre of the century in celebration of the English victory over Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, was as popular as The Messiah. What does that say about ideas? Porter, to my mind, neglects the powerful influence of the arts (apart from the novel).
One wonders, particularly in a discussion of religion and the birth of psychology, whether they are negligible.
All in all, the overwhelming picture emerging from all these sources is one of incredible optimism and energy and it may be there that we will find a contrast with our own century: their optimism about the future against our own half-hearted hopes. They, the Scots particularly, were redefined by their immediate past. "We" opines George Steiner "have no more beginnings".
And that brings us to the other, more immediately interesting argument. For Porter is also concerned, quite rightly, to muddy Porter makes a strong case for the enlightening influence of Britain as the first modern democratic state, in which the ideals of philosophical freedom and the scientific pursuit of knowledge became popularly available though expanding print, showing the way to her continental neighbours. This is in contrast to the orthodox emphasis on pre-revolutionary France.
And even here we're operating within a restricted domain. There is little about the politics, in particular the politics of the Union, which influence much of the first part of the century, or Whig dominance in the wake of the "Glorious Revolution" which birthmarks the long eighteenth century and fostered the context in which men and women of ideas could operate. What we have here is a history of the drawing room, the salon and the coffee house; a history of The Spectator and Tatler.
The description of the century's intelligensia moving from idealism to radicalism tinged with cynicism is clearly developed. Porter writes entertainingly on the whole, introducing to us a host of thinkers as he moves between religion, science, the science of politics, the view of the self, of nature, educational theorising and the pursuit of wealth.
But I find myself wondering whether a certain distancing from his sources might not have been achieved by balancing them against cold statistics. Such distancing as there is is an ironic one, part of the other argument. But can a history of ideas be adequate in its own terms? Surely not for our own most recent century.
Does Porter's self-confessed elision of the English/Scots question effectively ignore just this kind of issue: that the contribution of Scottish society to the Enlightenment was in direct proportion to their political humiliation? the waters for any historian who wishes to portray the Enlightenment as a monolithic "project". He does this by using parallels between this and that century to deconstruct the postmodern condition. The aspirations of that society, its arguments over education, religion, even ecology, right through to the freedom of the press, are those we find persisting in the media of today.
The role of the "enlightener" has barely changed at one level. But, at another level, we live with what started, as Porter shows, in the later parts of the eighteenth century, as a questioning of the sources of enlightenment themselves: the light turned back upon itself.
So what has the eighteenth century left us (apart from a fine example of the postmodern novel in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy)? Has it left us locked into the "single vision and Newton's sleep" against which Blake prayed? I think not, for, to force the analogy, light is only that which allows us to cast a shadow. We are creatures of contrast. The imagination won't be cowed. It is perverse. To err is human.
Maybe the Sea of Faith sees itself as an enlightener. Doesn't that make it thoroughly a creature of modernism and not at all, as is sometimes claimed, of its usurping sibling? We have these bursts of clear and single vision, which change the directions of our lives, which are experienced as liberations, new beginnings. We throw out the old nonsense. But then, perversely, we start to doubt and to explore the new shadows thrown up by the new light. That's where the interest lies.
What's in the shadow thrown up by the blindingly obvious assertion that God is a human creation?
Chris Athorne is a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of Glasgow, which he describes as "a leading Enlightenment institution".