Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

As literacy expanded, and journalism responded, ideas about liberty went through another twist. Individual liberty, in an economic sense, or applied to conscience or opinion, was discovered to be not the same as true political or psychological liberty. Through the newspapers, people became more than ever aware that industrial development, left to itself, only increased the divide between rich and poor. ‘A doctrine which ended in the slums of great cities could hardly contain all truth.’²⁰ This brought about a profound change in liberal minds – indeed, it began to change the very meaning of liberalism itself, and Chadwick says it marked the beginning of what we may call collectivist thinking, when people began to argue more and more for government interference as the way to improve the general welfare.²¹ ‘Liberty was henceforth seen more in terms of the society than of the individual; less as freedom from restriction than as a quality of responsible social living in which all men had a chance to share.’²²

This new way of thinking made Marxism more attractive, including his fundamental tenet, that religion was untrue, which became another factor in secularisation.²³ Marx’s explanation for the continued popularity of religion was of course that it was a symptom of sickness in social life. ‘It enables the patient to bear what otherwise would be unbearable . . .’²⁴ Religion was necessary to capitalist society, he said, to keep the masses in their place: by offering them something in the next life, they would more easily accept their lot in this one.²⁵

Christianity – most religions – accept the existing divisions in society, ‘comfort’ the dispossessed that their misfortune is the just punishment for their sin, or else a trial, the response to which is ennobling or uplifting. Marxism became important not only because of events in the nineteenth century – the Paris Commune, the impact of the Commune upon the International, the German socialists, the growth of a revolutionary party in Russia – which appeared to confirm that what it said was true, but because it too offered a version of the afterlife: revolution, following which justice and bliss would be restored to the world. In offering a secular afterlife, Chadwick argues, Marxism produced an unintended spin-off: socialism and atheism became linked, and religion was politicised.

But Marx was not alone, not by any means. In his Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844, Engels reported ‘almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. . . .’²⁶

Outright atheists were never very common but, in the middle 1850s, across Britain, the first ‘Secular Societies’ were founded. Paradoxically, there was a puritan streak in these groups, many of which were linked with the temperance movement. This appears to have peaked around 1883–1885, one reason being that atheists were given the right to sit in Parliament.²⁷

Another general factor in creating a more secular world was urbanisation itself. Statistics from Germany and France show a fall in church attendance down the decades, with the greater falls occurring in the larger towns, and a parallel fall in ordinations.²⁸ This may have been nothing more than an organisational failure on the part of organised religion but it was important – for it revealed an inability of the churches to adapt themselves quickly enough to the towns. ‘The population of Paris rose by nearly 100 per cent between 1861 and 1905, the number of parishes by about 33 per cent, the number of priests by about 30 per cent.’²⁹

The view that we now have about the Enlightenment, that it was ‘a good thing’, a step forward, a necessary stage in the evolution of the modern world, was not the nineteenth-century view.³⁰ For the Victorians it was the age which ended in the guillotine and the Terror. Thomas Carlyle was just one who thought that Voltaire and his deism were ‘contemptible’. For him, Napoleon was the last great man and Carlyle was proud that his own father had ‘never been visited by doubt’.³¹ Throughout the Napoleonic period and well on into Queen Victoria’s reign, ‘Men thought the Enlightenment a corpse, a cul-de-sac of ideas, a destructive age overthrowing the intellectual as well as the physical landmarks by which human society may live as a civilised body.’³²