Well, it's a much longer post than I'm up to writing right now but easily 99% of the scientistic-materialist-atheist claims on "the enlightenment" are proof of only one thing, the SMA using the word never read much of the literature of the "enlightenment". In no case is that more obvious than those who like Coyne and Dawkins and easily most of the more idiot parts of organized for-profit atheism, deny that any such thing as free will or free thought is possible due to their ideological devotion to a very 18th-19th conception of material causation and determinism. Though their confusion is certainly not without precedent. The double-speak that allowed that to develop goes back into the "enlightenment" itself with such things as the materialist monism of that rather curious atheist saint, Spinoza.* That such a view of reality cannot help but erode the position of that supposed god of the "enlightenment," reason, because reason, itself can become no more than an act of materialist causation working itself out on whatever ambient chemicals and physical forces are present in the supposed person performing that reason. It inevitably strips reason of any transcendental significance. As I've pointed out, it reduces it to the same significance as iron rusting, ice freezing and salt going into solution.
I am not a great fan of the "enlightenment" which was never any more than the limits of the men, and almost every one of them were men, who created it. And that fact is, in fact, significant especially in the political context that is the focus of my blog. Lots of them were as hypocritical and inconsistent and irrational as any other people in previous or subsequent thinking. A good example of that is laid out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy dealing with that light of the "enlightenment" and alleged father of "liberalism" and hero of our current Federalist-fascism, John Locke.
Though Locke’s liberalism has been tremendously influential, his political theory is founded on doctrines of natural law and religion that are not nearly as evident as Locke assumes. Locke’s reliance on the natural law tradition is typical of Enlightenment political and moral theory. According to the natural law tradition, as the Enlightenment makes use of it, we can know through the use of our unaided reason that we all – all human beings, universally – stand in particular moral relations to each other. The claim that we can apprehend through our unaided reason a universal moral order exactly because moral qualities and relations (in particular human freedom and equality) belong to the nature of things, is attractive in the Enlightenment for obvious reasons. However, as noted above, the scientific apprehension of nature in the period does not support, and in fact opposes, the claim that the alleged moral qualities and relations (or, indeed, that any moral qualities and relations) are natural. According to a common Enlightenment assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it. This view is expressed explicitly by the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795 and which, perhaps better than any other work, lays out the paradigmatically Enlightenment view of history of the human race as a continual progress to perfection). But, in fact, advance in knowledge of the laws of nature in the science of the period does not help with discernment of a natural political or moral order. This asserted relationship between natural scientific knowledge and the political and moral order is under great stress already in the Enlightenment. With respect to Lockean liberalism, though his assertion of the moral and political claims (natural freedom, equality, et cetera) continues to have considerable force for us, the grounding of these claims in a religious cosmology does not. The question of how to ground our claims to natural freedom and equality is one of the main philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment.
It has been one of the greatest surprises to me that in the past twenty years I have come to see that those cannot be found in science and materialism and that, in fact, scientism and materialism will ALWAYS damage them in the end. I can point out that Locke's commission to write a Constitution for the Carolinas in what would become the United States included grotesque inequality, both in terms of slavery and serfdom. His "enlightenment" document shows he, himself, couldn't bring himself to either abandon the project - due, no doubt, to knowing that the English establishment would never tolerate equality - or to come clean that he really wasn't that opposed to such feudal, medieval institutions.
Shortly after in the same Encyclopedia article, it shows that that other light of "enlightenment" James Madison and the logo of our Federalist-fascists was far cruder in his dismissal of democracy and equality.
However, the liberal conception of the government as properly protecting economic freedom of citizens and private property comes into conflict in the Enlightenment with the value of democracy. James Madison confronts this tension in the context of arguing for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution (in his Federalist #10). Madison argues that popular government (pure democracy) is subject to the evil of factions; in a pure democracy, a majority bound together by a private interest, relative to the whole, has the capacity to impose its particular will on the whole. The example most on Madison’s mind is that those without property (the many) may seek to bring about governmental re-distribution of the property of the propertied class (the few), perhaps in the name of that other Enlightenment ideal, equality. If, as in Locke’s theory, the government’s protection of an individual’s freedom is encompassed within the general end of protecting a person’s property, then, as Madison argues, the proper form of the government cannot be pure democracy, and the will of the people must be officially determined in some other way than by directly polling the people.
In case you wonder how we got Trump even though he lost the election. That Madison's desire to not have his wealth redistributed has produced the most massively and vulgarly and stupidly materialistic man to have ever held the presidency only goes to support the idea that such distortions, in the fullness of time, can ripen into total depravity.
I would recommend you read the article, especially noting that those great heroes of the "enlightenment" were not so "enlightened" when it came to Women and People who aren't white and from other places. Those habits of thought persist still, the backlash against "SWJs" "feminists" etc. prove that the habits of privilege that characterized and, basically, shaped the thinking of the "enlightenment" are with us still, especially among those who say "enlightenment".
I feel entirely justified in referencing an Encyclopedia, the topic being the "enlightenment," which was largely an encyclopedia project. I can't help pointing out that the Stanford Encyclopedia is generally superior to Diderot's in just about every way and far more modest in its claims.
The terror of the French Revolution was a direct result of the muddle of such "enlightenment" thinking which inevitably resulted in an abandonment of moral restraint necessary to avoid that. The French Revolution was only the precursor of the totalistic murder machines of the 20th century. It was succeeded, immediately, by another emblem of "enlightenment" Napoleon's imperialistic, military mass slaughter. I would bet there were many a beneficiary of the "enlightenment" who would really rather have missed the opportunity to experience it in reality instead of in ink on paper.
* I have to say, I'm a lot more on the side of the Rabbis who cursed him and excommunicated him than I am with him these days. Though maybe he didn't think through the consequences of what he wrote, which only shows the limits of trying to apply mathematical thinking that far outside of where its efficaciousness can be demonstrated. Geometry was invented to treat idealized objects, not the more complex world of life.
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