These Changing Times: Proofs of a Conspiracy...pp. 196-199

We're back from grading, more grading; and then the murder storm that felled my city (Buffalo). We left off beginning Robison's conclusion. Way back in the beginning of this project I mentioned how refreshing it was to read Robison. This is because I had just come off of Gary Allen's book, and to remind old readers--reading conspiracy theories is my profession. Robison's work, I found at the time, to be surprisingly coherent. His work was focused, he began a chapter to discuss the Illuminati and that's what the chapter was about. His problem is that he relies on the reader to draw connections between the disparate groups that he mentions. The events, the people, the letters...so many letters; all dance around a subject because he doesn't have the information which connects these things. However, the writing quality itself isn't bad. For the most part, he's competent but then in other parts he's very good. It's a level of quality that we don't see anymore and that's probably because of who Robison is and his background.

"Does it not carry ridicule and absurdity in its forehead?--Such an assertion of personal worth and dignity (always excepting Princes and priests) and such abject acknowledgments of worthlessness."

I hate when people use rhetorical questions to make their point. I think it's the coward's way of making an argument, but here Robison does a good job of it, he also kind of answers the question that he asks. His point here is that all of the grandiose ruminations of the Illuminati--that we are both insignificant in the face of nature but also that we can have a value that we self-impose are false. They are false and hollow because they are not instilled in us by religious belief. This is the problematic notion that he finds, see, the enlightenment is taking something that religion provided and is now claiming that it is no longer unique to religion. We are powerless in the presence of god, but god loves us so that gives us value--modern philosophy (which is the name for this period) is saying the same thing but it is also saying we don't need religion to feel this way. We are an insignificant blip in time, but our lives can have the value that we ascribe to them. 

I've repeated the following sentiment many times and I'll do so again, Robison's problem is not the existence of the Illuminati it's that the Illuminati is doing the same thing religion does without religion, without god. That's Robison's problem, the times are changing and he wants to make people afraid of it. He's invented this entire conspiracy to protect him from the realization that the natural philosophy of which he was a shining pillar is responsible for it. 

Ultimately, what Robison cannot fathom is how one can derive truth from this new philosophical movement. Truth, to him, must come from a divine source, and this new way of thinking is upending that foundation. Why should we trust the word of someone like the illuminated when there is nothing that underwrites their promise? Robison believes we should not. Without the backing of the divine a promise is just a string of words said by a knave, "and who would trust a knave?"

What's more, is that because of this, Robison believes that all of the enlightened are unwise. So unwise that they do not realize that everyone despises them. An enlightened judge is admitted into the houses of the important and wealthy but secretly the owners of those houses secretly hate them. This accusation is childish playground taunting. Yeah, sure the local minister invited you to the party but he totally secretly hates you--uh, sure. We have no evidence for this claim, in fact, we cannot have the evidence because as Robison puts it, "they are inwardly despised as parasites, by the rich, who admit them into their company, and treat them with civility, for their own reasons." 

It's a secret subjective thing, that Robison has privy to--except he does not. He hopes that this is the case. It is more playground taunting but here it is mixed with goal post shifting as well. If the Illuminated are not invited to the party it's because the men of quality see how immoral they are, when they are invited well it's because the men of quality secretly hate them but need them for a different reason. What Robison is doing is a blatant attempt at making other people think no one likes them. One of the wrinkles that Robison has to deal with is that the enlightenment philosophy was adopted by the opinion-makers of his day. Deism wasn't some angry 18th-century blogger's attempt at being edgy--people like Benjamin Franklin were part of it. Robison has to pretend that people like Franklin were pragmatically useful, that everyone was pretending that they were into it; or else he will have to really wrestle with the idea that society had changed around him. 

The strangest attack is his attack on the Greek Philosophy of Stoicism. Stoicism as a philosophy is irreligious. There are gods, but they are gods which are not like the Christian god in that they do not instruct. Fate instructs. Stoicism is a deterministic philosophy in that there is no free will. The slave and the king are subject to the same fates. The best Stoic is the one that has achieved mental peace with the role that fate has chosen for them. Robison is holding this philosophy up as the one time in the ancient world it worked out. He lauds the Roman Epictetus, a slave who wrote one of the two chief books on Stoicism. Yet, Robison also notes that without religion, even the Romans could realize that the state was in danger because anarchy and subversion would follow.

Robison is misunderstanding the point. Cicero points out in one of his religious (it's either "On Fate," "On Divination," or "On the Nature of the Gods"--I can't remember) dialogues that religion is necessary for control of the people. What Robison misunderstands is that this claim has nothing to do with the truth of religion but its effect. Yes, even the dumb pagans realized this truth, but they didn't realize that religious was true, only that it was an effective way to control the plebs. The people would listen to the gods more than they would listen to the law; so you could create a religion out of nothing and use that. 

It's this latter point that the Illuminated point out is wrong. Robison's argument is a false premise. When he goes on to lament that France eliminated its prohibition on prostitution in 1794. Why did they do this? According to Robison because they mean to demean women. In normal society, the woman as an ornament of the man's acquisition appears as his equal, and domestic bliss is possible. Yet the Illuminated want to remove those shackles and treat women as masters of their own love and sex. Robison is appalled. He makes a claim that the reason France wants this is that it will free up women to have more children--I'm not sure how this is possible. A woman is now free to be a prostitute or not, to marry or not, to have a child or not; so his claim about needing children is weird and only sourced in a single comment by an anonymous letter from someone named Psycharion who is never, unlike other Illuminati, given a proper name. We can refer back to the moral outrage about bare-armed women attending the French opera, his problem here is that women are becoming free and this new freedom is showing how bound up their lives were in chains under the supposed freedom that Christianity offered. 

The next section is going to be Robison summarizing the political and social implications of this dastardly plot...which is weird because I thought we were already doing that.