Re: Enlightenment

On Sun, 25 Mar 2001 Threehegemons@aol.com wrote:

> Any definition of the enlightenment, left or not, has got to put rationality 
> at the center.  The enlightenment involves the belief that rationality 
> applied systematically will bring progress.  'Left' and 'right' (actually 
> left and  liberal--the right, until Hayek-Thatcher-Pinochet-Reagan pretty 
> much let the center and the left have the idea of enlightenment for 
> themselves) may disagree about how much equality is entailed in progress, or 
> whether the market is rational or not, but if they believe in the 
> enlightenment, they believe in rationality (and they all believed science was 
> the only true form of rationality).  That's why the enlightenment socialists 
> claimed to be 'scientific'--they had little use for any cultural tradition 
> that didn't celebrate rationality,

        Okay, rationality is pretty central to both the Left and the Right 
Enlightenments, but I don't limit the Enlightenments to the 17th or 18th
or 19th Centuries.  They have evolved, and on the whole steadily
diminished the epistemological scope of the "founders."  Science has come
more and more to denote simply the logical analysis of sensory data
without any claim to finality or even "truth."

> and often weren't particularly nice to 
> those they ran into. I'm pretty tempted to say that all enlightenment 
> thinkers also put the state at the center of rationality, although perhaps 
> this is slightly more ambiguous. 

        Resist that temptation!  It's true of Hegel, but of few others.

> Minus rationality, one can find dozens of 
> religions, radical uprisings, etc that had nice ethical beliefs worth 
> repeating. So the central question is, is replacing God with rationality, as 
> happened in the last two to three hundred years a good thing or not (if you 
> believe it was not, by the way, that doesn't necessarilly mean one wishes to 
> restore God--perhaps one wants nothing at the center, asserting a royal claim 
> to 'the way')? 

        Those are certainly two diametrically opposed choices!  God or
Nothing?  Premodernism or postmodernism?  That's carrying hatred of
modernism to the point of absurdity.    

> Warren wants to avoid evaluating things by claiming his 'left 
> enlightenment' isn't responsible for anything. 

        No, he doesn't.  The Left Enlightenment has seldom been empowered,
but it has worked long and hard to ameliorate the conditions of working
people, and enjoyed limited success in achieving this worldwide.  It also
helped inspire the experiments in socialism in Soviet Russia, China, Cuba,
and elsewhere, experiments that went awry.  Had there been no Left
Enlightenment, those experiments would not have been made--to that extent
you can blame the Left Enlightenment for helping to set in motion what
perhaps could not have succeeded.  But those experiments did not entirely
fail, either.  They opened up opportunity to hundreds of millions of
people who had little hope under tsarism, warlordism, and so on.  And I'm
not sorry there was an industrialized Soviet Union in 1941-1945 to
annihilate the Third Reich.  

> By the same token, since 
> Fransicans had better ideas than most Christians, we cannot say much of 
> anything about the impact of Christianity, since the Fransicans were always 
> pretty marginal.  Or he suggests that Russia was really a medieval country 
> (so much for world systems analysis!).  'Scientifically', I think its also 
> worth noting that states ain't what they used to be, and this is going to 
> raise problems for left enlightenment types whether they like it or not.  
> Minus the state, how does one attain the 'god's-eye view' necessary to 
> rationally reorganize culture, society, economics, politics?  I believe 
> Warren usually proposes a world state, but, without a thorough rethinking of 
> the bases of action, this would undoubtedly result in cultural, human and 
> environmental devastation that would dwarf the first wave of the 
> enlightenment project.  

        I'm all for thinking, rethinking, and never stopping thinking, but
I don't see any conceivable way to save the environment, redistribute
wealth, end war and genocide, and liberate and empower all people without
the emergence of a worldwide will for justice that subordinates all local
and regional and privileged interests to the democratically decided
interests of humankind.  If there is a way to achieve these ends without
politics, government, and law on a planetary scale, let's hear what it is.

        Warren