The Enlightenment repudiation of religious ideas engendered, in the social sciences, the attempt to explain individual and social behavior by analogy with the principles of Newtonian physics. Human actions were also, as La Mettrie observed, wholly due to physical or chemical causes and processes. Positivism, which denied the existence or intelligibility of forces or substances that could not be established by experiment and observation, took hold as a movement. It exalted reason and science without realizing their limitations.
This effort to explain the functions of human beings in mechanical terms tended to make the social sciences materialist and detl~rminist.20 Materialism, a logical consequence of the denial of God, holds that matter is the primordial or fundamental constituent of the universe, which is not governed by intelligence, purpose or final causes. Everything is to be explained in terms of material entities or processes. Human feelings and values began to be described as illusions for which the world of fact gave no warrant. Accordingly, wealth, bodily satisfactions, and sensuous pleasures were either the only or the greatest, values one could seek or attain.
Materialism thus provided the foundation for the commercial culture which has gone from strength to strength over the years and has multiplied wants far beyond the ability of available resources to satisfy. Determinism was also a natural outcome of the denial of a conscious human soul. It implied that all the facts in the physical universe, and hence also in human history, are dependent upon and conditioned by their physical, social or psychical causes. Locke considered the human mind to be a “tabula rasa” which had no inner nature of its own and which served as raw material for the external social and economic forces to shape and design.
Marx, Freud, Watson, and Skil1ner, all emphasized that human beings are conditioned by their environment, by factors outside their conscious control. Human behavior was thus explained as being determined by mechanical and automatic responses to external stimuli as in animals (Watson and Skinner), by unconscious mental states beyond their conscious control (Freud), or by social and economic conflict (Marx). Besides ignoring the distinctiveness and complexity of the human self, determinism led to a repudiation of moral responsibility for individual behavior. This was in sharp contrast with the religious view that human beings are responsible, and hence accountable before God, for their acts. This mechanical view of the universe and man did not go unchallenged. The Romantic and Idealist philosophers like Rousseau, Kant, and Bergson, and a much larger number of religious scholars, raised a series of protests and emphasized not only the limitations of reason but also the role of emotion and intuition in knowledge, to restore to man his enviable status in the cosmic scheme. They expressed a great contempt for the Enlightenment. Words worth calling Voltaire’s Candide “that dull product of a scoffer’s pen”.
In the view of the Romantics, the Enlightenment philosophers were guilty of holding a worldview that was mechanistic and unfeeling and therefore unrealistic and inhuman. However, the Romantics’ efforts were unable to counter successfully the tide of secularism that was gaining ground in the Western world. While the early thinkers of the Enlightenment like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke carried neither their rationalism” nor their opposition to revealed religion to radical extremes, the philosophers in the second half of the eighteenth century like Voltaire, Hume, and Holbach were different. They were not only more radical, they were also hostile.
Consequently, the Enlightenment movement, which had started with a few intellectuals, continued to penetrate in the generations that followed until a major part of the intellectual elite and a substantial part of even the masses became consciously or unconsciously engulfed in it. E. F. Schumacher has accordingly observed that “these nineteenth-century ideas are firmly lodged in the minds of practically everybody in the Western world today, whether educated or uneducated.”
- Crane Brinton also observes that “Westerners, and especially Americans, are still spiritual children of the Enlightenment.
- In spite of the popularity of the Enlightenment movement, faith in God and the hope that it arouses remained deeply rooted in the hearts of men and the institutions of society and did not surrender easily to the verdict of the rationalists. Complete atheism was as rare during the Enlightenment as it is today.
- What did happen, however, was that the thrust of Enlightenment ideas undermined the role of religion as a collective force in society. Its place was taken by secularism, which reduces religion to a matter of individual preference. Moral values lost their collective sanction and collective value judgments became an anathema.2s Ethics courses are seldom mandatory in academic institutions, and as options, they do not attract students who “prefer to take courses that they believe will yield instant payoffs when they step into the real world. Business Ethics does not qualify Since the socio-economic importance of religion essentially lies in the collective sanction it provides to moral values, thereby ensuring their unchallenged acceptance as a basis for socio-economic and political decisions, the loss of the religious sanction for values was a great tragedy. Society became deprived of the socially agreed filter mechanism. Self-interest, prices, and profits replaced it as the primary criteria for allocating and distributing resources and for equating aggregate demand and supply. Even though the individual conscience ingrained in the inner consciousness of the human self may still be there to serve as a filter mechanism at the individual level, it is not sufficient to perform the function of a socially-agreed filler mechanism which is needed to create a harmony between individual self-interest and social interest.
- Given the reluctance to use the filtering mechanism provided by morally sanctioned value judgments, and the weakening of the feeling of social obligation that religion intensifies, it is not possible to realize the dream of a society where all human beings are brothers created by the One God, and where scarce resources are used not only to fulfill the needs of all but also to create an equitable distribution of income and wealth, Toynbee and Durant have rightly concluded, after their extensive study of history, that moral uplift and social solidarity are not possible without the moral sanction that religions provide. Toynbee asserts that, “religions tend to quicken rather than destroy the sense of social obligation in their votaries” and that “the brotherhood of Man presupposes the fatherhood of God – a truth which involves the converse proposition that, if the divine father of the human family is left out of the reckoning, there is no possibility of forging any alternative bond of purely human texture which will avail by itself to hold mankind together, ” Will and Ariel Durant have also observed forcefully that “there is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.