Would it be reasonable to describe you as a fundamentalist of the Enlightenment?
Not a fundamentalist. But I’m an admirer of what you might call ‘Enlightenment values’ (though they go way beyond the Enlightenment). Things like scientific empiricism, the separation of church and state, the waning of absolutism and tyranny, yes, I cling to those.
And did you yourself reach that position through the application of reason – rather than through indoctrination as a child, for example?
Certainly through thinking, yes. I had a lot of time for thinking when I was a child. I was packed off to boarding school at the age of about seven, and so in school holidays for the next ten years or so I was not exactly on my own, because I had an older and a younger brother, but all my friends were at school and I would spend long periods just sitting in my bedroom, brooding on things and reading a lot and observing. So it gave me plenty of chance to think.
It was quite a religious household. I wouldn’t be surprised, frankly, if I’m the first Wheen to be an atheist. And so, of course, there was a lot of church-going and all the rest of it, and gradually, through my childhood, I found myself rejecting more and more of it, until finally all I was left with was the Litany and the hymns. I know the Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern and the King James Bible practically backwards, and I’m very fond of them all.
In the book, you quote Peter Gay: ‘The Newtonian heavens proclaimed God’s glory.’ Did it not occur to you that these heroes of the Enlightenment never saw faith and reason as being opposed?
No, they didn’t. Newton was into all sorts of things – astrology, alchemy – it’s perfectly true; and it continues to be true to this day, of all sorts of people. It never ceases to surprise me: people I know who appear to be intelligent, sophisticated people you then discover have some fantastically eccentric peccadillo – they can’t get out of bed in the morning, for instance, without reading what Jonathan Cainer says in his horoscope. So, faith and reason in that sense can often coexist in the same person.
Immanuel Kant believed the Enlightenment would free people from what he called their ‘self-incurred immaturity’. That was a long time ago, of course.
Yes. He rather thought it would all be done by the year 1800. A tiny bit optimistic, I think.
It’s easy to fault the Enlightenment on the grounds that it never delivered the Utopia it promised …
It’s easy to say that, but I think its achievements are not negligible. Of course it’s a slow process, but I do think that actually over the 200 years since the Enlightenment you can see the gradual acceptance, in certain countries, of secularism, of liberal democracy and so forth. And also scientific progress (though of course we’re not allowed to use that word these days, because there’s a tremendous anti-science backlash). That, too, you could say is a legacy of the Enlightenment.
But over the last twenty or twenty-five years there has been a retreat from that. It seems to me that there is now a fierce hostility to the Enlightenment, with a very odd assortment of pre-modernists and post-modernists ganging up on modernity. And the pre-modernists are not just the Taliban and al-Qaeda but also primitivists, neo-Luddites, the deep-green Earth-Firsters who are so technophobic they think the invention of the plough was a bad thing and we should all go and live in tiny, remote communities – which is my idea of a nightmare, because actually small communities can be extremely oppressive. One of the joys of the communications revolution of the last 200 years – the invention of the railways, the telephone – is that you can more easily escape from the tyranny of a small community and find kindred spirits. It’s very liberating.
To go back to self-incurred immaturity: you were not too impressed by the communal grief that followed Princess Diana’s death…
I did find the mass ululating slightly creepy. Such eruptions can turn into a form of tyranny – and also I think they are a form of narcissism. I’m not a cold ultra-rationalist to the total exclusion of emotion. I’ve nothing against people (to use a vogue phrase) having ‘emotional intelligence’, as long as it is allied with ‘intelligent intelligence’. What I am less enamoured of is people diving into emotionalism and abandoning anything else at all.
Is it harder to be taken seriously as a political commentator when you’re known as a humorist?
There was a review of my biography of Karl Marx in the London Review of Books which complained that it had jokes in it and therefore was frivolous. Personally, I think there are often occasions that are so serious that only humour can do justice to them. Sometimes the language of the absurd is the only style that does justice to an absurd world, or an absurd institution or train of events. Once I discovered that Marx was a fan of Tristram Shandy, that wonderful shaggy dog story of a novel, it seemed to me to explain an awful lot of strange and whimsical passages in Das Kapital. He knew what he was doing: he was using a topsy-turvy style because it was the only thing that could do justice to the topsy-turvy world he was describing.
Could the Church do with a sense of humour?
Yes, in a word. Some bits of it do have a sense of humour, though a lot of the humour is unintended in my view. I am very fond of the Church of England as an institution, in spite of everything, because it seems to me to represent religion restrained by long experience which has come to a kind of accommodation with society and does not wish to boss us about and dominate all our lives. I’m passionately in favour of freedom of religion just so long as we have freedom from religion as well and I don’t have the Pope telling me that the sun revolves round the earth and that I’ve got to say the same or else it’s the rack for me, matey.