What is the central idea of the Enlightenment? Human dignity? Secularism? Pluralism? Freedom?
All these things matter. But something came before them and made them feasible, something so woven into contemporary Western culture that we rarely pause to contemplate its vastness or its strangeness. The modern world rests upon our acceptance of our own ignorance.
The distinguishing feature of the Age of Reason was a readiness to find things out through experimentation and logic, to reexamine orthodoxies, to discard established theories when better ones came along. That presupposes a willingness to accept that there are lots of things still to be discovered.
People of previous epochs assumed that there was one truth ordained by nature or the gods. The political and sacerdotal elites generally got to tell everyone else what that truth was. The notion that the truth might be independently verified by a process of trial and error, reason and debate, is an astonishingly new one.
I have long argued in these columns that the spasm of identity politics through which we have been passing since 2015, the Great Awokening, is a threat to the empirical and rationalist assumptions that underpin the modern world. To harrumph and call it “political correctness gone crazy” is to miss the dreadfulness of the menace. When we argue that lived experience trumps logic, that truth depends on perspective, that people are defined by their sex or color rather than by the validity of their arguments, we are rejecting modernity itself.
If that sounds far-fetched, look at the way our culture warriors are turning on the men who made the Enlightenment. David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher who has a pretty good claim to be the foremost Enlightenment thinker and whose works have taught generations to trust verifiable data rather than inherited dogma, has had his name removed from the Edinburgh University tower that honored him. Why? Because he wrote that civilization was an essentially white phenomenon, a proposition that we can now see to be false but which, given the technological disparities he observed, was perhaps not such a surprising inference to draw in the 18th century.
London’s Natural History Museum is reviewing its collections because Charles Darwin is offensive. The bearded sage thought that biological sex differences were big, saw savages as cruel and wretched rather than noble, and generally believed in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
If you think Darwin’s preeminence will save him from the mob, look at the scientists and philosophers who have already been canceled for holding the views of their own age rather than ours: Sir Francis Galton, Sir Ronald Fisher, H. C. Yarrow, and Carl Linnaeus. Voltaire is condemned because he saw Africans as “children,” Immanuel Kant because he ranked the races of the world, with whites at the top and indigenous Americans at the bottom.
Even John Locke, the grandfather of liberalism, is condemned for having owned shares in the Royal African Company, which traded in slaves, and because the constitution of Carolina, which he drafted on the orders of others, seems designed to allow for slave-holding.
To make an obvious point, we never honored these men because of their views on race, which were incidental to their achievements as scientists and philosophers. To anathematize them now is to condemn the system of thought that they upheld, which is, indeed, the goal of the postmodernist agitators stirring our current discontents.
According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the United States is permeated by “aspects of whiteness” that include “the scientific method,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” and “cause and effect relationships.” Imagine being told that if you are not white, the whole concept of science is alien to you. Here we see, stated openly, the philosophy behind the idea that “lived experience” trumps data and that your physiognomy counts for more than your argument.
We have come full circle. Many Enlightenment thinkers were condemned in their own time for challenging religious dogma. Hume was denied a post at Edinburgh in 1742 because of his alleged atheism. Darwin became a hate figure for many congregations. Now, once again, they are howled down for insisting that logic and evidence matter more than comfortable assumptions.
The worst of it is that the wokes, like the religious fundamentalists of earlier epochs, probably have the numbers on their side. The Enlightenment happened, in evolutionary terms, an eye-blink ago. We are far more attuned to notions of tribe, hierarchy, and absolute authority than we are to such flimsy concepts as experimentation and empiricism. I have a horrible feeling that the past three centuries may have been a brief interglacial, a rationalist blip between long ice ages.
