The Enlightenment Is A PR Myth Whatever Little Progress Has Happened It Wasn't The Source Of It

If, with all that brilliantly conceived of PR campaign, all those great slogans, the 18th century "enlightenment" was so great, where is the manifestation of that greatness?   Because when I look at what that phenomenon produced in the 18th century, stuff like the French Revolution, the reign of terror, the military despotism and imperial adventurism of Napoleon, the Brit system that threw up an ever more horrible class system, with death camps, such intellectual bright - lights as the putrid Thomas Carlyle, the pudding-headed utilitarians (and they were nice guys) and a whole bunch of other stuff  . . . I don't see much in the way of reason and light.   In the United States the "enlightenment" constitution protected slavery and allowed it to, as in Britain, become worse as the British gave up their few domestic slaves in favor of relying on those in the colonies and former colonies as well as the serfdom of their beleaguered working class.  And that's not to mention that in the land of the free, working conditions in factories and elsewhere had a lot in common with the lot of slaves, so much so that the apologists for slavery made the point that at least since they were property, they didn't have as much of an incentive to work them to death or injury and abandon them to die in the same kind of squalor that Northern industrialists and the investor class did.  And, then, there is the massively corrupt period up to the Civil War and the corruption that flourished not long into Abraham Lincoln's mouldering in the grave.  Our Constitutional government as an emblem of some enlightened order has to be the biggest of all jokes, apart from the French Revolution and its aftermath.   Granted the feudal aristocracy and royal rule had to be brought down but the character of what did that (in about two places) is presented in a dangerous fiction as can be rapped and danced on Broadway proving that when Broadway does history it gets it about 3/5ths wrong and when they include singing and dancing, they give up that last two fifths, as well.   That they do it with people of color playing 18th century slave owners and the merchants who worked hand in glove with them only shows how stupid musicals are.  I mean, is that supposed to mean something?

All of that happened under what modern romantics consider the most "enlightened" of Western governments.  Speaking of romantics, if the enlightenment were so great, why did they quickly push it aside for the romantic movement?   

I think I'm going to start a project of looking harder at the "enlightenment" in the same way I looked at Darwinism because it, as well, has been the beneficiary of a cover-up of what it really was in all its sordid hypocrisy.  Since a good part of that phonied up history prevents us from looking hard at the aspects of the American Constitution that are driving us into fascism, it's way past time for us to give up the echoing voice of Barbara Jordan because the total confidence in it she asserted has certainly proven to be misplaced.   We can't even avoid a Trump through it.   

The supreme "enlightenment" value is a sometimes thing but it is often asserted to be a dedication to THE TRUTH, to a view of and assertion of reality in all its real ness and with scientific precision in observation and accuracy of measurement.   Well, that's a scam because the great supporters of the enlightenment myth are those who are the most opposed to allowing people lied about to sue the people who lie about them,  people who read what I write will know that I assert that is what got us here.   In the education that reading and interacting with many more people than I ever could before I went online has been, I've come to see that the biggest fans of the enlightenment are also some of the biggest fans of lying about thing beloved of them, the common received lies of their ideology (all ideologies develop those,  they even develop in science).   They are as wedded to their illusions and preferences as any of the benighted fundamentalists and as supportive of violence in defense of their ideologies.   The scandal of the secular left in regard to Soviet and, later, Maoist and a series of Nazi level murder regimes on account of alleged economic and "scientific" stands the regimes mouthed is something I expect to be dealing with the rest of my life.   That I bought that crap for a second of my adult life is something I can't help but be ashamed of.   When I see such journals of that secular left as The Nation and In These Times, such frauds as the Green Party in cahoots with the unmasked mafia state of Putin, essentially an updated version of the same thing, when I see even the Democratic Socialists putting up pieces that refuse to look at the immoral depravity that Marxism has been in real reality instead of stinking pubic relations bull shit, I'm glad to be shut of that left before I die.   

The secular left has done nothing to protect us from Trump, it has skidded the ways for him, either knowingly and duplicitously or unknowingly and stupidly.   The secular left's hero Bernie Sanders and his man, Jeff Weaver, this week, has made his role in giving us Trump newly relevant as, to my horror, I read that he's seriously thinking of pulling the Nader act in 2020.   I had been willing to believe Sanders saw the folly of what he did, I had hoped that much of him, but I've come to conclude that when you look at the effect of the secular left from the late 19th century till today, you can take your pick, both Nader 2000 and Sanders 2018 are a microcosm of what it will always bring you.   Materialism cannot produce what the real, traditional American liberalism of egalitarian democracy, economic equality and equally held moral obligations to produce a decent life because those are to be found nowhere in materialism or science or a Constitution set up by people like Madison, Hamilton, Jay and Jefferson.