THIS book comprises five essays, which originated in a series of lectures at Massey College, Toronto. Writing in the shadow of the millennium, Conor Cruise O'Brien addresses our present and future discontents. The book opens with Yeats's "The Second Coming", and Michelet's evocation of the awe which the closing of the first millennium elicited among contemporary Christians.
O'Brien's prose resonates with Michelet's "chanting in a sombre, cathedral". Dancing with his habitual agility amid the gargoyles, he has religion as a central preoccupation. O'Brien holds the present incumbent of the papal throne in particular disesteem ("I frankly abhor Pope John Paul II"). As O'Brien was virtually the first western commentator to discern the deeply reactionary tendency of John Paul's papacy, this is a subject which establishes the author's prophetic credentials.
John Paul is "the Pope of the Counter Enlightenment as surely as any of his sixteenth - or seventeenth - century predecessors were popes of the Counter Reformation". In the convergence of the Vatican with fundamentalist Muslims at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development of September, 1994, Cruise O'Brien discerns an Alliance for the Repeal of the Enlightenment".
He espouses "an Enlightenment that respects the religious imagination, but not the claim of some religious to know what God wants from us and to have the duty to enforce that knowledge". If he abhors the pope, he admits ("old Voltairian though I am") to an admiration for the durability of the papacy, against which he measures the terrible fragility of the Enlightenment. which is his theme.
This is also a personal testament, the product of O'Brien's own remarkable odyssey in a century which "has known anguish of apocalyptic dimensions": "I feel myself to be a child of the Enlightenment, but a somewhat chastened and battered one ... The Enlightenment we need is one that is aware of the dark, especially the dark in ourselves that knows that even the enlightened have to sleep and that our dreams are not particularly enlightened".
In one of its aspects, On the Eve of the Millennium is a sharply-observed essay on comparative national hypocrisies. O'Brien is sceptical about the political direction of the European nation-states, and too-seasoned a historian and old diplomatic hand to seek solace in notions of a federal Europe. He looks, instead, like a good late 18th-century philosophe, to America. This is not merely because of the politico-economic strength of the United States, but because he views it as the only country where a commitment to Enlightenment values has taken indigenous root. He is fully alert to the perilous implication of his argument, which is that the survival of Enlightenment values is dependent on American nationalism continuing to take relatively benign forms. This prompts an anxious and sophisticated consideration of the nature of what he terms "the American civil religion".
As a metaphor, this is much to be preferred to Gore Vidal's limp and incessantly reiterated conception of the United States as a multinational corporation.
The modesty of intellectual prentensions which he advocates leads O'Brien to eschew over-specific prophesies. His predictions come almost as asides. What concerns him is the threat to the intellectual values of the Enlightenment posed by a process of "cognitive degeneration": the abdication of intelligence, the submergence of rational discourse in the complacency of the sound-bite.
He is unsparing on the trahison dex clercs in its contemporary manifestation. He deplores "the witless complacency which set in at the end of the Cold War", of which Francis Fukuyama's proclamation of the end of history provides merely the most dismally comic example. The "ingrowing triviality, the pompous frivolity of complacent Establishments" may prepare the way for the emergence of "ferocious new elites", particularly in the states of the former USSR and the undeveloped world. George Orwell was out by a decade: 1994 conformed more closely to his prophesy than 1984.
O'Brien's comparison of the symbolic purpose and impact of Hitler's Munich beer-hall putsch of 1923 to that of the 1916 rising will not disappoint those devout nationalists who experience a thrill of indignation of almost erotic intensity at what they see as O'Brien's blasphemous ardour.
Acutely sensitive to the vulnerability of the Enlightenment legacy, the author articulates the humane and sceptical alertness by which alone it cannot be sustained. Especially in its opening and closing movements, this is a deeply affecting book. A sagely admonishing almanac from hell, it subverts the unwarranted smugness of our time.