The Age of Unenlightenment

Even a cursory look at The Age of Enlightenment reveals that it was neither liberal nor particularly enlightening save for a few strands of thought espoused by individual thinkers. It is not practical to encapsulate the concept in a concise timeline. It is also dangerous to assume it was "humanist" in the sense we understand it today because most of the leading lights of the Enlightenment still had a belief in the Almighty. Science and scientific reasoning were to become a kind of test of truth and of what can actually be seen and known. The Enlightenment was not so much a rejection of God but of religious authority. The quest was absolute truth based upon what can be truly known, not on arbitrary rules, which of course were largely determined by the Church; what could be known by observation and the application of common sense, in a word, reason. It was a utopian meme where its adherents believed you could build a society based on common sense and tolerance. It collapsed under the weight of reality and in particular, the French Revolution, just as the hippie dream of the Sixties died at Altamont.

Modern notions of human rights can be demonstrated to have their roots in The Enlightenment, but as David Hume might have said, you can enshrine the right of a beggar to have food, but at the same time you enshrine the right of some to become feckless and indolent.

By the same token, enshrining tolerance in law merely favours an arbitrary community, it does not create tolerance and neither is it going to create a better world, it is merely going to shift the goal posts for a while and worse, allow a hitherto unfavoured segmment of society to gain the upper hand.

Hume understood the concept of right and wrong. I am not sure that we do anymore.

I began to conceive this piece by thinking about something else; decadence. I wondered what it meant, historically and how it affected historical outcomes. By decadence I don't mean a bunch of rather fey young men who dabbled in naughtyness for naughtyness' sake, but a kind of moral collapse that made an impact. It seems to me that decadence has far more to do with societal attitudes than a few mucky books.

Berlin in the  20's and 30's was a hypocentre of decadence. Europe was satirized by people like Fritz Lang and Bertholt Brecht: "There is no greater criminal than a man without money"

There was hyperinflation. Keynes wrote:

"The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance"

Today we live with an absurd sense of entitlement. The politicians are too cowardly to say no and we are too weak not to say yes. Weimar Germany slid into evil and totalitarianism and did so not because it was too naughty, but because it was too greedy.

When the shit hits the fan this time around, we had all be very careful who we chose to lead us back to reality.

In a free society, government reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it. 

Cal Thomas