Providential Enlightenment

Providential Enlightenment

Christopher Britt

I

            With the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the nihilistic logic of mutually assured destruction that had dominated the Cold War rapidly gave way to more hopeful views of the future.  In the West generally, but particularly in the United States of America, such optimism was cast in a triumphant light.  Francis Fukuyama gave this victorious vision its definitive form when, in 1992, he interpreted the end of the Cold War as the end of History itself.  As he visualized it, in this “post-historical” era there would not be too much for us “last men” to do, except attend to the administration of global empire and enjoy the resulting prosperity and ever-lasting peace.[1]

We are enjoying this peace today: a global war on terror that has no end in sight; an ever-expanding global market economy whose frenetic use of energy is fast pushing the world to the brink of ecological collapse; and everywhere the signs of social and political disintegration associated with a so-called state of exception that has now become the new norm in governance, not just among despotic regimes, but also, and more importantly, among democracies the world over.[2]  Actually, as a result of this continuing global violence, there are now more refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people in the world than at any time since the end of the Second World War.[3]  We are not living in a post-historical era of perpetual peace, but in an age of mounting global war and destruction.

II

Critical analysis of America’s legacy of enlightenment reveals that the Enlightenment in America has always and already contained the seeds, not only of the republican virtues that have sustained American democracy over the centuries, but also of the imperial vices that have persistently and repeatedly weakened that democracy.  Not unlike the modern democratic virtues it undercuts, this imperial vice is British in origin.  It finds its first philosophical formulation in Francis Bacon’s identification of inductive reasoning as a new organ or method for thought, which alone would liberate men from ignorance and reveal to them the laws by means of which they could rise above and govern nature.  In John Locke’s political theory, enlightenment is also identified with self-mastery: a mastery of the self that extends, by reason of industry and labor, over the “virgin lands” and “uncivilized people” such labor allegedly improves.  Enlightenment, according to these original formulations, is a liberating mastery that frees enlightened men from ignorance while enabling them to dominate both nature and men.  Significantly, for both Bacon and Locke, this enlightened imperium was also a matter of providence and of the Biblical injunction to improve nature.

When, in 1776, the British colonists in North America declared their independence from the British monarchy, they believed that their society was the truest embodiment of this providential notion of enlightenment.  And when, in 1789, the Founding Fathers ratified the Constitution of the United States of America, they envisioned the United States as a mythical “City on the Hill” and a beacon of light in the vast darkness of natural history.  In 1803, when Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, he did so believing that his country would thereby realize its purpose as an “empire of liberty” destined to spread the emancipating light of reason across the entire globe.  From Franklin to Jefferson and from Washington to Hamilton, the Founding Fathers embraced the providentialist logic implicit in the imperialist notion that enlightenment is a liberating state of mastery.  In 1823, John Quincy Adams, who firmly believed that the United States had been designated by God as the redeemer nation, declared, by means of the Monroe Doctrine, that America’s empire of liberty naturally included all of the Americas.[4] 

Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the conviction that America had a “manifest destiny” to fulfill led the government of the United States to annex ever-greater expanses of land, whether by means of purchase (as was the case with Oregon and Alaska) or by outright conquest (as was the case with Florida, northern Mexico, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines).  While these conquests surely expressed America’s enlightened legacy of empire, they nevertheless called into question America’s commitment to the enlightened republican and democratic ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, by 1900, the majority of Americans had become so enamored of the idea that America had been chosen by Providence to civilize the world for Christianity, for democracy, and for capitalism that, in the Presidential election of that year, they openly voted against the republic in favor of empire.[5]

At the start of the twentieth century Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt committed America to a foreign policy that would advance American global imperial expansion at the expense of democracy both at home and abroad.  The pretense, however, was that U.S. imperialism in the twentieth century favored democratic self-determination.  This idea was closely tied to the notion that American imperialism was historically unique: it was an anti-imperial imperialism, which sought to spread everywhere the so-called blessings of American civilization. In the years leading up to World War II, Henry Luce summed up this idea when he urged Americans: “to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power … as the Good Samaritan … as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice” and to fashion a vision of the Twentieth Century as “the first great American Century.”[6]  Conceived in this progressive manner, the American Century would introduce to the world a new kind of anti-imperial imperialism, a new kind of American imperialism that would allegedly use its power only in order to serve and advance the interests of humanity.  We need only recall the horrors of U.S. weapons sales and the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to understand the profoundly nihilistic and destructive nature of the so-called human interests that this would-be enlightened imperialism advances and serves.

III

Today, more than one hundred years after the presidential election of 1900, we are living through the consequences of that fateful betrayal of democracy in favor of empire.  Indeed, America’s legacy of enlightenment has become so thoroughly confused with the providentialist view of America’s imperial manifest destiny that it is almost impossible to tell the two apart.  Consider, for instance, how in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the U.S. government created an intelligence-gathering program intended to achieve “total information awareness.”[7]  Housed in the Information Awareness Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, this program essentially involved the development and implementation of a surveillance apparatus capable of policing the electronic communications of the entire world.  The idea was to ensure that terrorists would never again surprise the United States.  Conspicuously, this program developed a logo for itself that purposely confused America’s providential destiny as a world empire with the revolutionary rhetoric of the Enlightenment.  DARPA’s logo usurped the meaning behind one of the Enlightenment’s central metaphors --that the light of reason frees us from ignorance-- and turned its emancipating logic on its head.  Rather than represent freedom from ignorance, fear, and arbitrary external controls, the radiant light of enlightenment was here made to represent the freedom to control totally and on a global scale.

The eye of providence, which figures so prominently in this logo, is of course also a key component of the Seal of the United States.  But in the Seal, this all-seeing eye is not related to the imperialist ideal of total global domination.  It rather expresses the enlightened assertion that when men exercise their reasoning power, they become capable of comprehending the order of the universe and of governing themselves according to the laws of nature. Thus, the harmonious unity symbolized by the Seal of the United States is altogether different from the one depicted in the DARPA logo.  It is not the providential unity of technology, capitalism, and imperialism, but rather the ethical unity of mind, community, and the cosmos: a unity to which Emerson would give a transcendentalist expression in his philosophical essays on nature.

This ideal of a rational, harmonious, and cosmic unity has taken on a devastating irony.  In place of universal reason, we now have the epistemological divisions of expert forms of knowledge and the moral limitations of the bureaucratic mind; in place of a rational community of compassionate human solidarity, the divisions and conflicts of unbridled global capitalism; and in place of a harmonious relationship to nature, the technological, industrial, and imperial domination of both nature and mankind.  Such is the crisis of our so-called post-historical age: the enlightening power of reason, rather than set our minds in proper and harmonious relation to our communities and to nature, has splintered our minds, fragmented our communities, and alienated us from nature.

And yet, in spite of all its evident failures and its destructive nihilism, enlightenment remains for us today the only viable source of creative power by means of which we may yet aspire to construct an ethical unity of mind, community, and nature.  This is so, not in the sense of a providential and imperial enlightenment, but rather in terms of the enlightened secular, democratic, and communitarian ideals proposed by Thomas Paine at the start of the American Revolution.  Of course, Paine’s opposition to empire, monarchy and religion, his insistence on popular democracy, universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and free public education, led most of the other Founding Fathers to regard him as a dangerous radical, a demagogue, and promoter of an all-too-genuine form of democracy.[8]  Recalling these enlightened democratic ideals today, we denounce the jingoistic nationalism and providentialist imperialism that stand in the way of our aspirations for a better future.

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[1] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

[3] UNHCR Global Trends Report, 2013.

[4] William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1992. p.17.

[5] The Democratic Party Platform was organized almost entirely around an anti-imperialist stance: “We declare … that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon the consent of the governed is tyranny; and that to impose upon any people a government of force is to substitute methods of imperialism for those of a republic.”  The platform goes even further in its opposition to U.S. imperialism by asserting: “no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.”  To back this final point, the platform describes U.S. tyranny in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines and concludes with the specter of militarism, which “means conquest abroad and intimidation and oppression at home”. “Democratic Party Platform of 1900”, July 4, 1900. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.  Http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29587.

[6] Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, New York, Penguin, 2004, p.65-66.

[7] http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/nsa-and-pentagon-dream-total-information-awareness

[8] Paul Atwood.  War and Empire: The American Way of Life.  New York: Pluto Press, 2010, p.53.

Intellectuals and Idiots

Perhaps the best way to account for the failure of the Enlightenment is to compare its ideal of universal human emancipation with the grotesque historical realities it has engendered: global warming and ecological devastation brought on by the technological and industrial domination of nature; a global war on terror that threatens to impose a state of permanent civil war on the entire globe; and everywhere the signs of social, economic, and political disintegration associated with the tyrannical powers of a so-called “state of emergency” that has become permanent. To our dismay, we see evidence everywhere of freedom being used as an instrument of domination. The liberties we enjoy are, at best, deceptive liberties: free competition at administered prices, a free press that censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets. These are not the liberties enjoyed by an enlightened people, but by a people who would be more aptly described as idiots. Idiots: not so much in the modern sense of the word, which we use to designate someone who is stupid, incapable of learning, and has thus been condemned to a state of permanent immaturity; but more so in the sense that the ancient Greeks used the word to mean someone who selfishly neglects public affairs in order to attend to their private interests and concerns. The Enlightenment had promised universal emancipation, it has instead wound up creating a global hegemony that aspires to global domination. In a political sense, this has meant the destruction of republican self-rule and the gradual but persistent convergence of modern democracy with totalitarian forms of governance. Enlightenment has devolved into a state of tyranny and idiocy. Can this process be reversed, and a new age of enlightenment somehow made to emerge from out of the tyrannical idiocy and idiotic tyranny of our day?

The dialectic of enlightenment, as first set forth by Horkheimer and Adorno, provides a negative critique of this process. Their analysis of the failures of enlightenment revolves around two central themes. The first is the loss or elimination of the emancipatory dimension of modern science and its transformation into an instrument of domination. The second is the social regression of enlightened society toward primitive forms of authoritarian power and archaic forms of thought: that is, toward a state of tyranny that incites, stimulates, and promotes the regression of humanity toward a state of primitivism and idiocy. The Enlightenment, which once promised the progressive liberation of mankind from darkness, has instead wound up subjecting humanity to a new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism, and the terror of global war.

For the ancient Greeks, idiocy was a punishment. It was a ban. Idiots were free men who had been banished from the political life of the republic because, out of preference for their own private interests, they had failed to participate actively in the public life of the polis. This banishment from public life was equivalent to the loss of liberty and, consequently, to the reduction of life to the pursuit of a private, domestic, and ultimately trivial happiness. “The principal characteristic of the tyrant,” writes Hannah Arendt, “was that he deprived the citizens of access to a public realm; he confined them to the privacy of their households, and demanded to be the only one in charge of public affairs.”

Alexis De Tocqueville saw the relationship between tyranny and idiocy otherwise. For him, it was rather idiocy that incited tyranny. But the idiocy he has in mind differs from that of the ancient Greeks in at least one basic characteristic: it wasn’t the idiocy of individuals but the idiocy of the masses, the idiocy of prosperity, the idiocy of progress. In his prescient treatise on democracy in America, de Tocqueville portrayed this idiocy as a kind of enslavement to prosperity: the stimulation of happiness at the expense of political liberties. Democracy was destined to generate masses who only seek from government that it provide them with enough security to attain a happiness that is stupid. Since 9/11, the largest bureaucratic megamachine in the history of the United States has imposed this security by means of the Department of Homeland Security and its global policing apparatus.

But why do we tolerate these increasingly totalitarian forms of tyranny? Could de Tocqueville have been right when he suggested that idiots willingly give up their own freedoms because they have become slaves to prosperity? Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this argument, in one form or another, has dominated theoretical attempts at explaining mass idiocy. From Marx’s notion of alienation to Veblen’s assessment of the leisure class to Galbraith’s affluent society or Marcuse’s one-dimensional life, modern theories of mass idiocy underscore the selfish stupidity and corruptibility of the masses; they assume that the masses have been duped into accepting the bribe of tyranny that de Tocqueville had identified in his study of modern democracy.

We have a problem here: By assuming the stupidity of the masses, these theories of idiocy also assume that the intellectuals who put them forth have transcended the prevailing idiocy of our times and that they therefore stand above and beyond it. From the distant heights of this transcendence, intellectuals fail to perceive that they are implicated in the very same idiocy that they presume to criticize from afar. This is why exemplary critics, like Julien Benda, C. Wright Mills, and Russel Jacoby, have revealed how public and academic intellectuals have not only betrayed society because they have abandoned the critique of tyranny in exchange for security and privacy, but also because they have actively associated themselves with it. Intellectuals are idiots who invite tyrants to exercise tyranny in support of idiocy.

By failing to attend to public affairs and neglecting to exert power over the tyrannical forces of our time, we run the risk of having our lives condemned to a state of political insignificance. The fate of the more than fifty million refugees in the world today, the fate of people who have been made stateless by the on-going civil wars and the different forms of state-sponsored and non-state sponsored terrorism of our time, the fate of people who for one reason or another cannot be integrated into the global economic and political system, may well prove to be the fate that awaits us all. In order to avoid it, we must seek to disentangle ourselves from the intellectual, moral, and political morass of our time and trust that in the process we shall shed some much needed light on how the rampant idiocy of our day can be transformed into tomorrow’s enlightenment. This involves breaking the epistemological and institutional chains that tie the dialectic of enlightenment to imperialism and reformulating enlightenment such that it neither sets us up as the imagined technological masters of nature nor as the would-be liberators of nations. An enlightenment, in other words, that enables us to develop, in harmony with nature and in cooperation with the rest of humanity, an existence that is free from idiocy and tyranny.

The Destruction of Enlightenment

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.   

A Modern Translatio imperii

A Modern Translatio imperii

The idea that the executive branch of the U.S. government should have a legitimate power to wage an imperial war of conquest and colonization, and to do so with only a modicum of congressional approval and oversight, was first tested at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the U.S., taking full advantage of Spain’s definitive collapse as an empire, conquered and colonized Spain’s erstwhile colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  What occurred on a grand scale at this juncture was a translatio imperii or imperial transfer of power from Spain to the United States of America.  But if the medieval concept of the translatio imperii construed such transfers of power from one emperor or empire to the next as a linear continuum that was destined, according to the prophecies of Daniel, to reach the end of times, in the modern era this apocalyptic vision of imperial decline is turned back on itself.  Rather than a continuum of successive transfers of power destined for eventual collapse, the modern understanding of the translatio imperii is optimistic; it sees this transfer of power as a modernizing and enlightening advance.

According to the positivistic logic of this modern view, American imperialism is superior in kind and quality to Spanish imperialism because the American brand of imperialism, as conceived originally by the nation’s Founding Fathers, seeks to spread liberty and Enlightenment, while the tyranny inherent to the Spanish brand of imperialism only served as an impediment to Enlightenment.  It was in such cheerful terms that American imperialists of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would defend the expansion of U.S. dominion over Spain’s ex-colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  America, they claimed, was a liberating and civilizing empire.  There is, of course, a much less flattering interpretation of this imperial transition of power from Spain to the United States of America.  According to the anti-imperialists, this transition rather marked a regression of the American republic toward the unenlightened and tyrannical forms of a pre-modern Spanish imperium.  Instead of a modernizing advancement destined to spread enlightenment around the globe, anti-imperialists viewed U.S. imperial expansion as evidence of the republic’s decline into a sinister state of political and cultural decadence.

Considered in this darker light, the U.S. conquest and colonization of the Philippines was just as savage and cruel as Spain’s conquests in the Americas at the start of the sixteenth century.  But the similarities between U.S. and Spanish imperialism that this anti-imperialist perspective identifies were not limited to cruelty alone.  The connection, as both the apologists for U.S. imperial expansion and their critics made clear, ran much deeper.  U.S. imperialism was a continuation of Spanish imperialism in that, like the Spanish before them, U.S. imperialists, such as Josiah Strong, imagined and justified U.S. imperial expansion as an evangelical crusade; and much as the Spanish conquistadores had done, imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt glorified as heroic, acts of conquest and colonization that would have been more accurately depicted as acts of brutality.  By defending American imperialism in these terms, American imperialists in effect eliminated the liberating dimension of Enlightenment from their would-be civilizing mission and they essentially reverted to primitive forms of authority.  American anti-imperialists like Mark Twain and William James did not sit idly by; they rather attacked the imperialists and their ideas in open and public debate.  At issue in this debate was America’s legacy of Enlightenment: the legacy, that is, that ambiguously combines republican with imperial virtues.