Michael Fry: Not terribly enlightening, your highness

THE Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the 18th century which aimed to give a true account of our world as it is, and why it is as it is.

Leaders of the movement, in the different European countries where it took place, were often at odds with the existing political and religious establishment. One reason was that, despite being intellectuals, many aimed in the end to liberate the people from the superstitions and oppressions they laboured under. Two centuries later, the liberation has been largely, though far from perfectly, achieved.

Who, then, could be against the Enlightenment? Prince Charles.

It might be expected that the prince, himself a leading figure in a British establishment worn out and discredited but not so far overthrown, would show a natural affinity with those of royal blood whose heads rolled two centuries ago: King Louis XVI of France, Tsar Paul of Russia, King Gustav III of Sweden and others.

But that is not, in fact, the cause of Charles's disgruntlement. Like those long dead distant cousins of his, he has got out of joint with the age in which he exists. For them, the disjuncture had fatal consequences. For him, it merely means he is pilloried in the press and laughed at by the public. The reasons are the same: he does not like his age because he cannot cope with it, and he cannot cope with it because he does not understand it. The man who gets it all wrong and does not see that he does has been a stock comic figure since comedy began, 3,000 years ago in ancient Greece.

What is it that Charles does not understand in the Enlightenment in particular? For one thing, he thinks it was all about reason. Reason is, indeed, a dry sort of business, at its worst a matter of abstract chains of deductive reasoning, which leave everything else out of account, including humanity. "What is the point of all this clever technology if at the end of the day we lose our souls?" was the anguished question of the heir to the throne at a conference of the Prince's Trust this week.

His view of the Enlightenment is not at all uncommon. It is, for example, shared by Tom Devine, professor of Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh, who, in his principal work in the subject he professes, wrote that the Enlightenment was all about "faith in reason". Unfortunately, this view is wrong. For the Scottish Enlightenment, it is especially wrong.

Of course reason played some general part in the overthrow of superstition and oppression. Galileo discovered that the Earth moved round the Sun, rather than the reverse, and the persecution he then suffered by the Roman Catholic Church in the end caused people to lose confidence in the Church rather than in him. Sir Isaac Newton determined that the universe is best understood not through divine decrees but through mathematical laws, and we have ever since been much more usefully employed in working out the right formulas for our progress and happiness than in poring over a contradictory Bible, where many of its objectionable characters meet a sticky end.

Scotland also played its part in this scientific revolution. John Napier of Merchiston invented logarithms and a forgotten mathematician called David Gregory may have anticipated Newton in devising the differential calculus. But the Scots, not alone but certainly to the fore, always felt aware that scientific revolution in itself was not enough. Within a single man's lifetime, their country went from the last burning of a witch (at Dornoch in 1727) to constructing a modern urban living machine (the New Town of Edinburgh from 1763). Here was a development not caused by, and not to be understood by, abstract chains of deductive reasoning.

Instead, the Scottish Enlightenment set out from the view that, in order to understand our world or its particular aspects, we should weigh up the whole range of forces that went into shaping them – "holistic" would be Prince Charles's word for it.

In particular, the philosopher David Hume did not believe in the power of reason, and repeatedly said so with some vigour. On the contrary, he thought human beings were guided in their everyday lives above all by custom and prejudice. The custom and prejudice could be changed for the better – how about abolishing religion for a start? But people might also remain quite happy with the custom and prejudice they had been born to. The enlightened absolutism of France was, for example, much more pleasant and civilised than the vulgar populism (anti-Scottish to boot) of England.

The same with Hume's friends, Adam Smith, the father of economics, and Adam Ferguson, the father of sociology. Smith told us to look beyond the immediate effects of any commercial transaction and take in all its ramifications. I am sure that in the credit crunch, he would have been urging us not just to rub our hands over our rising house prices but to ask where they came from and where they would end, and he would have been right. Ferguson produced a complete theory of progress yet did not fool himself that its meaning could be reduced to anything so trivial as material satisfaction. On the contrary, he thought a bit of blood, a bit of pain and suffering, were good for us. He was right too.

Prince Charles said, in his rambling fashion: "I believe it is of crucial importance to work with, in harmony with, nature, to rediscover how it is necessary to work with the grain of nature, as it is necessary to work with the grain of our humanity."

There is nothing here different from what Hume, Smith or Ferguson could have said, except they would have said it better. Reason might have been the watchword of the 17th century, necessarily so for the scientific revolution to get under way. But by the 18th century, the great minds were already well aware of the limitations in what a previous generation had sought to do. And if they had been forced to choose a single watchword for their own endeavours (something they would, of course, have objected to), then the best one would have been nature.

They would all much more readily have agreed that a little learning is a dangerous thing. And being acute, articulate fellows, they would have seen in Prince Charles one very good reason why.