I keep reading of the end of The Enlightenment - the philosophical period that made Western Europe. Not having read as deeply of the French Enlightenment as I have of David Hume, I have not always been so sure that rationality had wholly vanquished irrationality. There is a difference between Paris and Edinburgh - in the latter the passions still have a power.
The Guardian's review The End of Enlightenment by Richard Whatmore review – a warning from 18th-century Britain situates the problem in a different manner. It may also point to a way to counter our own Age of Unreason (I suggest start with reading David Hume):
Enlightenment today means something rather different. It signifies humanity’s stirringly unstoppable march from the cave of unreason to the sun of wisdom, and is associated with reason-venerating philosophers such as Spinoza and Kant. That Pollyanna view, though, has been challenged by later sceptical thinkers. Foucault associated the Enlightenment with the rise of the surveillance state typified by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. John Gray blamed the Enlightenment for the evils of global capitalism. And in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer reckoned the Enlightenment’s fetish for reason and calculation set humanity on the road to Auschwitz.
Whatmore thinks each of these conceptions is wrong. Enlightenment, for him and the thinkers he so engagingly profiles, had an objective, namely to overcome superstition that had soaked 17th-century Europe in blood. It ended with Britain’s project to subjugate much of the rest of the world for its own benefit, or with the revolutionary terror unleashed in Paris after 1792. Or both.
Whatmore, history professor at St Andrews University, draws the contemporary resonance: “Once again we live in a world that has suffered an end of enlightenment as strategies formulated after 1945 to prevent civil and international violence, fanaticism and chaos from breaking out have gradually failed or been abandoned.”
The book’s leading lesson is that Britain, albeit today a rain-soaked rump of a post-imperial polity, is, as in the 1790s, in thrall to graft, greed, folly and privately educated narcissists, not to mention deference to royal nonentities. If Tom Paine had managed to get foreign gunships to invade, we might not need a new Enlightenment. But we do.
sch 12/22
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