Back in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun wrote an essay, “Swift, or the Capacity for Reason,” that continues to astonish me.
My favorite excerpt:
When in our weariness we look back to the great ages shining in history by their art, science, and the merged glory of worthy lives and deeds, we long for their clear outlines and envy their unchallengeable merit. They seem both the product and the evidence of order, of reason; particularly so if Reason was one of their slogans and historians have turned the word into a descriptive tag. Actually, no generation of men has set out to be unreasonable. And if the Age of Reason, the age of classicism, the age of order, hierarchy, and monarchy looks to us like a haven for our distraught selves, it is only another mirage induced by distance and desire.
There is something restful about what cannot be changed, and obviously Queen Anne is immovable. Versailles, Racine, Milton, Dryden, Molière, Pope, Louis XIV, Newton, Lock are — as we say — “fixed values,” whereas our own are in doubt and in flux. But this fixity is something which we enjoy, not they. They were in the same flux and perhaps at a greater disadvantage toward it than we to ours.
Quoting Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Barzun asks:
At what moment during the past two hundred years, would it have been false to say that the “account of our affairs during the last century is only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce”?