Ours is an Age of Destruction.
The myriad crises that we face today --from global warming to global
warring-- are a brutal but eloquent testimony to this destruction. How are we to make sense of these forces of
destruction and combat the nihilism, the intellectual apathy, and lack of
creativity that drive them?
The trend in the humanities over
the last several decades has been to identify these forces of destruction with
the Enlightenment. Enlightenment Reason,
we are told, is not universal but Euro-centric; it is not a liberating force,
but a dehumanizing, humiliating, and dominant force that is intimately tied up
with colonialism, imperialism, and even fascism. This post-modern critique of the
Enlightenment points to internal flaws in Enlightenment thought, to its
underlying contradictions and weaknesses.
Post-modern critics have reduced the Enlightenment --which was a
transformative movement that helped modernize science, technology, politics,
economics, and society-- to nothing more than a so-called “grand narrative” or
“discourse” by means of which Enlightenment thinkers sought, not to liberate
themselves and others from tyranny, ignorance, and superstition, but to place
humanity under the tutelage of instrumental reason.
Although such post-modern
critiques of Enlightenment point correctly to dogmatic features in
Enlightenment thought, their caricature of this intellectual and political
movement as strictly rationalist and the call that they make for a radical
break with the universal moral and political values of Enlightenment, ignores
the extent to which Enlightenment thought has failed to live up to its promise
in large part because it has always and everywhere been opposed by very
powerful enemies. Think, for example, of
the absolutist Spanish monarchy and of the Inquisition; or, if you prefer, of
the Salem witch hunts, or for that matter, of aspiring politicians who claim
that evolution is but a theory and that global warming is but a delusion.
The Enlightenment, for all its
internal contradictions and historical failures, still provides a needed model
for projects of cultural theory and social reconstruction in the Americas and
the world. Indeed, what post-modern
critiques of the Enlightenment express, first and foremost, is the enlightened
hope for a way to re-conceptualize progressive thought and practice. But because post-modernists throw the
Enlightenment’s baby of universal human values out with the proverbial bath
water of modernity, the would-be progressive programs of thought and practice
that they espouse are mired in the skeptical relativism and historical nihilism
that characterize post-modern perspectivism.
What is needed to ward off this
nihilism is an alternative view of the Enlightenment and the ambiguity of its
legacy in our own age of destruction. At
its conception, the Enlightenment, with its new science based on inductive
reasoning, promised to liberate men from superstition and ignorance and reveal
to them the mysterious laws that govern nature.
Today, it is fair to say, the Enlightenment has failed to deliver on
this liberating promise. But this is
because the Reason that was to set men free and help them understand nature has
been reduced to its instrumental dimension: the scientific search for truth is
no longer an end in and of itself, but a means to an end. And what is that end? Nothing short of the domination of nature by
man and the creation of an all-too-human world that lords its technological
power over the organic forces of nature.
The Enlightenment also promised to set men free politically. When the colonists in New England fought
against the tyranny of the English monarch, they justified their revolution for
independence by appealing to Enlightenment ideals of democratic sovereignty and
self-rule. Today, many peoples around
the world see the US as a bully and a tyrant.
Indeed, it would seem that as a people we Americans have regressed from
our progressive political virtues of democratic self-government back toward
more primitive forms of authoritarian rule.
In the name of freedom, we now torture our enemies or assassinate them
with unmanned drones, while at home our age-old right to habeas corpus has been suspended by the bureaucrats in the world’s
single largest bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security.
The technological elimination of
Enlightenment’s liberating power and the accompanying regression toward
primitive forms of political power are the two most salient features of our age
of destruction. Humanists would do well
to keep this in mind when they venture their post-modern theories on modernity
and its discontents.
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