Enlightenment

The Enlightenment - A Timeline

The "Enlightenment" was a philosophical movement that began as a response to the religious wars of the 17th century. It was a rejection of faith and religion in favor of cold reason and science. Enlightenment philosophers felt that religion and superstition had failed us, and the only way to solve our problems was to think our way out of them. They had the beginnings of an idea, but the application and the conclusions they reached have caused terrible misery in the world. Perhaps because they managed in their great thinking to reduce humanity to an abstract idea and completely overlooked the humans who had to live with the consequences of their ideas.

Bad Enlightenment Ideas

In the previous post we talked about Thomas Malthus, a thinker of the late 18th century whose ideas are still being put in practice and affecting lives negatively to this day. You'd think that the use of reason would result in good ideas and rejection of bad policy, but instead their thinking became twisted to reinforce their biases and dealt with people as numbers on a spreadsheet. Instead it led to things like the horrors of the French revolution in which the people overthrew the monarchy for the establishment of a new, more ideal society and to a lesser extent the American revolution where the colonizers were rejected in favor of self-rule. From a broader perspective, it led to things like genocide and eugenics inspired by Enlightenment ideals created to rationalize things like colonization. The ideal man, according to the Enlightenment, was a man much like the philosophers themselves, European and male and upper class and concerned with a longer-term plan for humanity. Certainly, as far as they were concerned, no great thinkers ever came from the lower classes. 

Thomas Hobbes

Unfortunately, a lot of the good ideas came packaged with some very bad ideas. Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes believed that people were naturally vicious and cruel. He believed that we maintained peace with one another through the "social contract", or a sort of compromise between the governed and the governing institutions. He believed that a strong governing power must exist to enforce this contract and keep the people in check, because their natural state was something like brute animals according to too many of the philosophers in this period. It turns out that taking a dim view of human nature leads to applying laws accordingly, assuming that the average uneducated peasant cannot possibly know what is good for them and so we must govern them like the animals that they considered them to be. It was uncharitable toward the common man, to say the least.

Both Hobbes and Malthus were trying to employ reason to solve humanity's problems, but ironically they completely rejected the idea that the common man could be made to reason. Their classist point of view made no allowance for the ability of the ordinary peasant to think for himself. They had to make themselves superior, authorities on human behavior with the benefit of breeding and education. In order to set themselves up to pass judgement and legislate for the good of the people, they had  to set themselves up as knowing better than the peasants what was good for them. 

Enlightenment thinkers used scientific principles to dehumanize people and classify them according to their own thinking. They did not realize that what we do to others to dehumanize them has moral and ethical consequences for the people doing it. When they talked about human rights and the dignity of man, they were only talking about themselves. It was noted with some cynicism that some of the founding fathers in America preached about liberty and the rights of man while simultaneously holding people in slavery. They were not talking about the little people when they talked of liberty and creating a new form of government. They never intended for most of us to have a voice in our own governance. They were only referring to people like themselves. They were setting themselves up as the natural rulers of society because they knew better than anybody else how to run things. They were making themselves a new sort of non-hereditary intellectual aristocracy and they were going to run things scientifically. They wrote reams of literature supporting their natural superiority and the inferiority of those they sought to make decisions for in order to justify their right to do it. They didn't see it as high-handed to appoint themselves the authorities on what was good for everybody else.

In their efforts to eliminate emotional thinking, the Enlightenment made us heartless. It made us view our fellow man as cattle. It made us assume the worst of our fellow man. It allowed us to dehumanize other people. The unfortunate irony of dehumanization is that it it robs the person doing it of their own humanity. If we are unable to see others as human beings, we can have no empathy. Without empathy we can have no conscience. The Enlightenment represents the switch in human consciousness from emotional reasoning to intellectual reasoning, but it didn't represent an improvement in the human condition. Now perhaps it is up to us to make another shift to bring balance to our reasoning and restore our humanity and our conscience.