The Festival of Reason

This is the script for my two minute broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside on Wednesday 10th November 2010:

Good Morning. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." So wrote the English poet William Wordsworth, reflecting on his own youthful enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Yet what came to be known as the “Reign of Terror” was a travesty of the enlightenment hope of a better society founded on reason and liberty. On this day, the 10th November 1793, a “festival of reason” was established by the revolutionary government in Paris and the medieval cathedral of Notre Dame was transformed into a “Temple of Reason”. An altar to liberty was installed over the old one, and the inscription "To Philosophy" was carved into the church façade. They even had a goddess of reason. The goal of this “Cult of Reason”, the perfection of mankind, was short lived and their utopian vision would end in tyranny. I think this is likely to be true of all utopian visions. I’m a humanist and critics of Humanism often site the horrors of the two centuries since the French revolution as proof that the enlightenment project of the eighteenth century, the “age of reason” has been a failure and that to believe in human progress is naïve. I think that goes too far. I don’t think humanity is perfectible and science and reason are not my gods. Progress is always going to be three steps forward and two steps back. It is slow and piecemeal. Nevertheless, a quality of life known only to the aristocracy and senior clergy before the enlightenment is now available to all Europeans. This is progress and the improvement is almost entirely the result of the flowering of science and technology through free enquiry, liberal democracy, universal suffrage and human rights, secular government and the liberty which allows individuals to form and express their own opinions and to choose their own way in life, all fruits of the enlightenment.