What Was the Enlightenment?
The European Enlightenment of the 18th century introduced the world to modern-day science, economics, medication, and political liberty– or so we’re informed. Is what we’re informed precise? Political philosopher Yoram Hazony explores this question and provides some surprising answers in this really informing video.
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Script:
Modern science, medication, political freedom, the market economy– all of them, we’re told, are the result of a sort of miracle that happened 250 years ago. That wonder is called the Enlightenment, a moment in history when thinkers suddenly toppled religious dogma and custom and replaced it with human factor. Harvard teacher Steven Pinker puts it in this manner: “Progress is a present of the perfects of the Enlightenment.”
There’s simply one problem with this claim. It isn’t actually true.
Think About the U.S. Constitution, which is often said to be a product of Enlightenment thought. Already in the 15th-century, the English jurist John Fortescue elaborated the theory of “balances and checks,” due procedure, and the role of personal home in protecting specific freedom and economic success.
Or think about contemporary science and medication. Long before the Enlightenment, tradition-bound English kings sponsored path-breaking clinical organizations such as the Royal College of Physicians, established in 1518, and the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660.
The fact is that thinkers and statesmen, particularly in England and the Netherlands, articulated the concepts of totally free federal government centuries before America was established.
Why provide the Enlightenment all the credit? Because it does not look excellent to confess that the best and most essential parts of modernity were provided to us by people who almost all held conservative spiritual and political beliefs, apparently.
The claim that all good things come from the Enlightenment is most carefully associated with the late-18th-century German thinker, Immanuel Kant. For Kant, reason is universal, infallible, and independent of experience.
His extraordinarily dogmatic philosophy firmly insisted that there can be only one right response to every question in science, morality and politics. Which to reach the one right answer, mankind needed to complimentary itself from the chains of the past– that is, from experience, custom and history.
This Enlightenment view is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Human factor, when cut loose from the restrictions enforced by custom, history and experience, produces a lot of insane ideas.
The abstract Enlightenment approach of Jean Jacques Rousseau is a fine example. It quickly pulled down the French state, leading to the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror, and the Napoleonic Wars. Millions died as Napoleon’s armies looked for to reconstruct every federal government in Europe because of the one right political theory he believed was allowed by Enlightenment approach.
Today’s cheerleaders for the Enlightenment tend to avoid this part of the story. The greatest disasters of modernity were engineered by individuals who declared to be working out factor.
In contrast, the majority of the progress we’ve made originates from conservative customs openly doubtful of human factor. The Enlightenment’s critics, consisting of John Selden, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, emphasized the unreliability of “abstract thinking” and urged us to stick near to custom, history, and experience in all things.
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source
The European Enlightenment of the 18th century introduced the world to modern science, economics, medication, and political freedom– or so we’re informed. That miracle is called the Enlightenment, a moment in history when thinkers all of a sudden toppled spiritual dogma and custom and changed it with human factor. The abstract Enlightenment viewpoint of Jean Jacques Rousseau is a good example. Millions died as Napoleon’s armies looked for to reconstruct every federal government in Europe in light of the one proper political theory he believed was allowed by Enlightenment philosophy.
Today’s cheerleaders for the Enlightenment tend to avoid this part of the story.
