The Enlightenment and its critics
from www.rationaloptimist.wordpress.com
The Enlightenment began about three centuries ago. It was an intellectual movement centered upon the realization that the world is not impossibly mysterious, but makes sense; that science and rationalism can give us authentic truth, and thus the means for better lives. This is the essence of the modern mindset. Yet it has its detractors, who mainly paint it as mere Western ethnocentrism. The Enlightenment did arise in the West. However, its appeal was not its Westernness but, rather, its human universality. Multiculturalists who say that rationalism is something peculiarly Western are actually insulting non-Western cultures.
Some deeper cynics even reject the values of the Enlightenment. Everything seen as bad in subsequent history has been laid at the Enlightenment’s doorstep. It took us directly to Auschwitz, we are told; it promoted a misplaced, inhumane deification of reason and science, a foolhardy optimism, and that mainstay of the misanthropic hit parade, hubris. This indictment is symptomatic of the postmodernist infection, denying that we can know anything or that anything is really true.
But the Enlightenment did not represent a Pollyanna belief that reason can solve everything. To the contrary, its whole point was to deal with the world’s hard realities, without fairy tale delusions. The Enlightenment did stand for truth and reason; and for freedom, justice, equality, and tolerance. It opposed superstition, witch burning, torture, unearned privilege, and the kind of fatalism that actually refused to combat evils and misfortunes because they must be God’s will. The Enlightenment was self-critical, subjecting its own assumptions to the same rigor it applied to others. It held that people have a right to happiness, and can reasonably hope for it. Progress was not deemed inevitable — merely possible.
That’s hardly a cockeyed optimism. But in fact Enlightenment thinking has given us progress way beyond anything its originators could have dreamt, and not only in material conditions of life. The American Revolution was its direct product; the Declaration of Independence was an Enlightenment manifesto. Those ideals, as well as reason and science, have utterly transformed the world, and we are vastly the better for it.
Sneer at all this, reject it if you like, but that’s of no help whatsoever in living our lives and improving them. Most who disdain the Enlightenment would not even be around to do so were it not for the scientific advancement it spawned.
Some pessimists nevertheless hold that the Enlightenment has basically failed, because in the conflict of reason and science versus faith and superstition, the latter still have the upper hand. The religious impulse is indeed deeply embedded in human psychology, perhaps even wired in somehow by evolution. Yet by no means are we prisoners of this mentality; religious belief has plummeted in Europe in recent decades, showing that people can free themselves of it.
Biologist Stephen Jay Gould tried to paper over the divide by arguing that science and religion are “non-overlapping magisteria” that concern entirely different things, and hence are not in conflict. However, it’s no coincidence that the centuries when Christianity ruled supreme were called the “Dark Ages” and scientific knowledge actually retrogressed. We all remember how the church stomped on Galileo, and even today we see religious efforts to suppress evolution science. But fortunately the Dark Ages are behind us, with religion’s power waning. And, having struggled for millennia prising out the truth from nature, we are hardly about to turn our backs on the answers. Spirituality may still have a place in human culture, but if so, it increasingly must find accommodation with a world of reason and science.
It is true that religious fanaticism has perennially been a source of conflict and bloodshed, and the religious-based violence coming from the Muslim world today might be seen as merely the latest recrudescence of a perpetual malady. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith, details how murderous religiosity has been throughout history. And yet, it seems clear that the advanced nations have finally outgrown this. While many Americans take their religion pretty seriously, the day is long past when even the truest of believers would entertain the idea of killing people with different beliefs. Instead, the psychology of pluralism and tolerance has taken such firm hold that for all their religious fervor, Christian fundamentalists are wholly acquiescent in living amid synagogues and mosques and even secular humanist associations. In the wake of 9/11, it was remarkable not that a few American Muslims were violently attacked, but that it was so few, and the nation was practically unanimous in condemning such attacks.
If this Enlightenment spirit of peaceful toleration has not yet been attained by all human societies, one can quite reasonably hope, and foresee, that in due time those other laggards will catch up, and grow up.
We can’t expect it overnight. An awful lot of blood was shed before we Westerners at last gave up torturing and burning people over religious issues. But we have come a long way, and our better ideas are spreading. Taken as a whole, humanity is on the right path.