in Europe instead of 'Enlightenment' the term Renaissance is (also) used, referring to a period where parts of Medieval societies were slowly achieving greater prosperity, even peace, after the devastating Crusades and long, long years of vicious religious wars, including the Spanish Inquisition. we're talkig 14th century Northern Italy, from which these ideational changes were to spread north- and westwards. more like Erasmus' Humanism Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a staunch criticism of the Church' coruption and stifling abuse of power in many places.
of course, and very much depending on which source one reads. Erasmus is interesting though: in his work he addresses some of the abuses within the Catholic church, while not specifically supporting emerging protestantism (Luther) and calls for a more philosophical approach to catholisism. superficial overview - https://www.thecollector.com/who-was-desiderius-erasmus-life-and-legacy/
I also always wonder about the universal Enlightenment values argument: If the Enlightenment set of political views is describing reality and all rationally derived, why haven't more cultures come up with them? Here, my thinking is informed by the work for the fabulous Dr. Alice Evans, whose Substack I cannot recommend enough:
Summary of stuff I've learned from her economics and social science research: Ideas like equality and individual liberty (she focuses on gender equality, but still the idea applies across the board) are certainly not universal, and do not magically become ascendant in a society when they get more technology and are richer. Indeed, across the Middle East the opposite has happened: countries have simultaneously become wealthier and their populations better educated, *and* more authoritarian, religious, and sexist. Things that I always thought were universal human values, like that you should *love your spouse,* also most certainly are not universal values, and they again do not become so just because people get richer and more educated and techy.
So, whenever Team Enlightenment gets all excited about how the political and epistemic views they espouse are the religion-free ones, I always wish they would maybe, you know, familiarize themselves a little bit with how those views play out in cultures that have different religious backgrounds.
Very nice points, thank you! Despite all the talk of science and empiricism, Team Enlightenment certainly did not arrive at the idea of universal human rights through observation!
Law of universal gravitation, electromagnetism, general relativity also came from "western" scientific tradition. All of humanity can still claim them as a shared triumph. Should non-greeks reject Euclidean geometry? We must embrace good ideas wherever they originate!
I think Dx. Periwinkle's point is that, if "Enlightenment values" are the result only of rational reflection, then it's hard to see why they emerged only in some parts of the world and relatively late in human history. Were those people from different times and places all irrational?
I'm sure we don't have the final world on all knowable and provable truths.
People have been working hard at it, and made progress at different times to different degrees.
Were people prior to Copernicus or in other places irrational? It may be an interesting question for people who want to study the structure of scientific revolutions.
But whatever the circumstances he formulated a simpler structure of the solar system. This is not a disparagement of others.
And students of Kant or Voltaire (say) do not consider these "revelations" or final worlds, or disagreement with them as heresy.
They have shared their methods, the same line of reasoning is open to us all. Kant being in Königsberg is irrelevant. The place is not "holy". The reasoning is not parochial. It is available everywhere to everyone.
Hi, Neeraj, and thank for your excellent point that all the good things any humans come up with belong to all humans. It's of course the case that many discoveries are chancy and contingent on other things, and so we wouldn't expect every culture to, say, discover penicillin at the same time--or for penicillin to be discovered ever. When it does get discovered, we'd expect people who don't want to die of infections (so, everyone) to be pretty happy about penicillin, and there to be widespread adoption of penicillin. And I agree that should happen: penicillin rightly belongs to all of humanity, even if it was a British guy who discovered it and some Australian dudes who figured out how to make it into a medicine. And that is what we see with scientific and technical advancements: widespread adoption across the globe as soon as they're affordable, no matter where those technical developments first occurred.
Now, Team Enlightenment makes the claim that the political and moral beliefs that they have are similarly rational, not tied to underlying culture, and that anyone could rationally work out their value. Certainly, TE claims, ideas like personal liberty and equality before the law are just so obviously self-evidently rationally awesome that any rational person will recognize them as such, even if one didn't discover those ideas on their very own--the same way that everyone wants to not die of infections, and so everybody likes penicillin. Sure, TE concedes, every culture might not independently discover every cool idea, but once discovered, if it's really rationally a good idea, everyone will embrace it, because its rational goodness is universally recognizable. If all cultures don't embrace these good ideas, there's got to be an explanation, because maybe the people in a culture are too poor to afford a new technology, or too uneducated to appreciate a new idea. But give those folks more wealth and education, and they'll adopt those same rational values--because, again, they're rational and thus accessible to everyone thinking rationally, independent of cultural background.
And that is what has happened with penicillin, but it is not what has happened with a lot of moral ideas that are dear to TE's hearts.
TE argues that, for instance and to use my example from above, the idea that women should have equal legal rights to men is an enlightenment idea, equally accessible to all rational people--at least once they're introduced to it, and at least if they're rich and educated enough to get why it's rational. So what you would predict is that cultures might start off as sexist and poor, but then become increasingly egalitarian as folks are more educated and wealthier. And that is what you see--in some cultures. But in others, increased per capita wealth and median education level does not result in less legally-enshrined sexism, but, rather, more. What TE needs to explain is why, if sexism is irrational and all enlightenment values are rationally-derived, why sexism doesn't go away in all cultures once they get rich and educated enough.
TE does not explain this, though. Instead, TE seems ignorant of this entire phenomenon, that all cultures do *not* immediately embrace TE's moral values once those values are introduced, even when said cultures do embrace the technological/scientific discoveries. In my experience, when someone does bring up this evidence, TE partisans wave it away, with a claim that the many people in many cultures who do not endorse every last particular of TE's moral worldview are just not rational enough (too poor, too dumb, too religious) to get it. But that makes TE's hypothesis that their moral claims are rationally-derived non-falsifiable, ironically.
Thanks for the detailed response, think I understand this line of reasoning better now.
As a member of team TE, going to attempt a response :)
The correctness or validity of some technological or non-technological matter does not lie in its universal or even widespread adoption. Human beings and institutions must exert their agency in any direction to affect change.
We can use equal rights as an example, and may be further narrow it down to some principles of law (many of these pre-date the enlightenment of course)
Claim: The right to examine evidence against oneself, to cross-examine witnesses, and guaranteeing meaningful defense advocacy is better than the opposite (i.e. no right to examine evidence or witnesses, etc.)
In Putin's Russia these procedures may not be available to everyone who is under trial. Likewise in many other jurisdictions. The argument that "Look, Putin doesn't follow your principles, and Russia has had enlightenment era thinkers, therefore your formulation of these rights is flawed" is fallacious. You will have to argue why the opposite or some alternative is better. i.e. from some axioms like "it is better not to punish someone for a crime they have not committed" which we consider self evident, you will need to arrive at "deprive the accused the right to know what crime he is charged for" to prove your case.
More fundamentally, the enlightenment insight is we all have the ability to undertake such reasoning exercises (for example what sort of punishments should we have: retributive, utilitarian, reformative, etc. etc. rather than here is a parable on casting stones). Now the question is what sort of explanations are you satisfied with. "I was handed this tablet on a mountaintop" or "this is how societies in the past have done it" or some deductive and inductive reasoning. TE issues a challenge to us all -- we have been equipped through many years of natural and cultural selection with certain traits, among them is Reason -- applying rules of logic, mathematics, etc. to discern the truth. And we ought to exercise it.
Thank you, also, for your detailed response. To be clear, I support the same moral claims that TE does: individual liberty, equality under the law, and a bunch of associated ideas are Good. I also think, as, I understand, TE does, that it is *true* that these things are good. I am not a relativist who is like "but punishing the innocent and not letting women testify in court might be good, it depends on the culture." So I think that we're in agreement on that idea, that there are correct moral ideas, in the same way that there are correct scientific ideas. I'm going to go a step further and guess that you'd also agree with me that it's not quite that there are completely "correct" scientific/moral ideas that we as humans have, but there are *more correct* and *less correct* ones, and a major thing that we mean by human progress is that we move from less correct to being more correct. I think that our only area of disagreement is where these ideas come from.
For instance, in your example, you say that the starting axiom "it is better not to punish someone for a crime they have not committed" is "self-evident." Why? Because it isn't fair/just? If so, who decided "justice" was a value? Or is it because it leads to bad outcomes? If so, how did we decide those outcomes were bad? Now, I personally think that "injustice is bad" seems like more of a human universal--although how we define "injustice" definitely is not universal. But I don't see where TE gets to say that any moral value is "self-evident," aside from a non-falsifiable handwave of the kind you accuse religionists of doing. If the only legit ideas are those we have empirical and logical proof for, how do we get moral axioms at all? Show me the logical proof for the axiom "all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights" that doesn't rely on at least an implicit "...by their Creator."
I agree with you that once you start with a pretty limited number of axioms--like "there are fundamental human rights"/"all humans are equal with respect to fundamental rights"--you can reason your way to the moral place that you as a proud representative of Team Enlightenment and I as a Christian want people to get to. I agree that reason is a great way to get to true (*or less wrong) conclusions. I'm just wondering where those initial, ah, self-evident axioms are coming from. Because if they're actually self-evident, then they would be near-universally adopted, right? Or at least very widely adopted?
**I also think you're uncharitably dismissive of the reasoning abilities of, shall we say, pre-Enlightenment people, and of what religious people now and in the past actually think. "This is how people in the past have done it" is actually a pretty great reason to do things that way; you're describing basically all of education. Relatedly, "here's a story to make a moral point" is a beloved tradition embraced both by Jesus Christ and Voltaire. I think this can hurt your argument, because if you don't understand what the religious explanations are, how can you show they're wrong?
Apologies for the off-handed comments on parables and beliefs of religious people.
On the source of axioms, and what is "self-evident":
I think this too comes down to what you consider an explanation.
If you say "the source of my axiom is the Creator" and that satisfies you, I suppose thats fine. It does not add anything for me. For example, why does the Creator want to prevent innocent people from punishment? How did the Creator tell you what these axioms are? What else does this Creator do -- i.e. why stop at the axioms, why does the Creator not work it all out? Do the axioms of arithmetic, set theory, geometry come from this same Creator? Who gave these axioms to the Creator? Was there a choice of sets of axioms that the Creator chose from? And if so what is the source of this wider set? And so on.
Adding the suffix "by the Creator" or leaving it out has the same valence to me. In fact, adding the suffix confuses the matter, because now I have to think about a much much more complex entity. (this last idea is from Dawkins -- in order to explain some complex entity you have resorted to a yet more complex entity, and have created for yourself a bigger problem, i.e. where does this yet more complex entity come from)
I know this is unrelated to this particular discussion, but God is not an "entity" or a "supreme being". This is what Dawkins (and the other New Atheists) don't understand.
And...please forgive my off-hand "by the Creator." I was completing the phrase from the US Declaration of Independence, from which the verbiage in most English-language documents on "inalienable human rights" comes. I am not making the claim that you should accept that as the explanation--I'm just, in an off-handed way, noting the referent that this "human rights" language comes from is one that explicitly invokes "the Creator". Sorry to muddy the waters with this. :/
Anyway, I agree that you shouldn't agree that "Creator says so" is an explanation for why an axiom is "self-evident"--I'm asking for what the source of your axioms on morality are. If they're "self-evident," why don't more people, uh, find them evident throughout history or cultures, even after the axiom is introduced.
"X = X" is self-evident and logical. "All people have human rights" isn't even though we both seem to agree it's true. So I'm still wondering where that axiom comes from.
As an "online defender" may I say your treatment is less than fair. On a few grounds.
1. That the period is inexact, and it has a variety of disparate ideas, and we are selective in what we choose to highlight.
This is true of any "period". In the Victorian Age, things did not magically fall into alignment due to the birth or death of a monarch. And yet from a distance we are able to characterize the period as having particular norms on sexuality, slavery, franchise, industry, and so on. No summarization would be possible otherwise.
2. That the ideas are not original, and instead build on earlier times.
True in part, again a characteristic shared with other eras. Martin Luther's borrowing of ideas from Augustine will not inspire a "Shut Up About the Reformation" for example. And also not true in part. Kant's mature works are truly a departure from prior thought, and original, and a shining example of what reason can achieve.
But what clinches the argument is your own style of writing. Using "reason" rather than "authority" or scripture to try to persuade that the Enlightenment wasn't real :)
Reason is all we have, everything else is quicksand.
Thank you for the comment! Much of what you say is true, but this period (Enlightenment, eighteenth century, whatever) is precisely when “reason” is dethroned and critically examined. In English literature, at least, the “passions” start to be valued a lot more.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there were not great social changes and important thinkers during the period called Enlightenment - just that it was so varied any summary claiming that it “caused” twenty-first century is selective and misleading, and tells us much more about the writers of that argument than the historical period itself.
But I’ll cover all of this in detail in future posts.
Another good question -- let's just say for now that some writers, notably Kant, weren't willing to accept the results of "reason" at face value. Kant famously argued that reason has limits and is not (as other philosophers thought) transparent or infallible.
Reach not for your pills, good sir, but for your Luger!
A further notable omission from advocates of the Enlightenment (what should we call them? Illuminati?) is a figure I consider most representative of its French strain, namely one M. de Sade, whose fantasies have become virtual reality. His handmaid J-J Rousseau's unfortunate tendencies are also quietly forgotten. Dostoyevsky forgot neither of them when the Jacobins once again raised their heads.
In his essay "Truth and Freedom," the late Pope Benedict opposes against the French Enlightenment a more sober, Anglo-Saxon strain, wherein the rights of man are grounded in the Christian doctrine of humanity bearing the image of God. Without this supernatural doctrine, he suggests, all human rights discourse is nothing more than collective fiction.
For Pope Benedict, at least, there is a positive stream of the Enlightenment, but it is not the one advocated by the people whom you quite rightly have in your sights.
PS While you are on the subject of Freemasonry and the Enlightenment, there's a very good book on it by John Dickie called "The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World".
The Enlightenment liberal democratic belief system shares one more "cultural unconscious" trait with its Christian foil, wherein Christianity's universal One True Faith becomes today's Universal Human Rights: Onward, Liberal Soldiers! No matter how well-intended in theory, in practice, it's one of the most unfortunate legacies of both ideologies, as many non-Western cultures and states then and now will testify.
Apologies for the written-while-fatigued comment. The "No matter how well-intended in theory, in practice,..." phrases tried to signal my meaning. The geopolitical abuses of human rights interventions are legion at this point to me and many others. Genocide in Xinjiang or Ukraine claims ring out from the US State Dept while at the same time, on Gaza, denial and deafening silence.
Of course human rights are a thing worth caring about. But when we go the next step, and say "defined by me/my culture," it becomes stickier. Again, the universalism. Too ripe for cynical abuse on the one hand, and for blindered hubris on the other.
I'll end cryptically because I'm busy, lol: maybe the fact that I'm an American who has lived in China for the last 23 years has something to do with my view. I see the HR question differently from the inside. I can appreciate the cost/benefit trade-offs in ways impossible without that experience. The "universalism" is less obvious as a result.
Oh yes, I think I understand you know and I agree. As I mentioned in my Christopher Hitchens review: "in Iraq, the United States and its allies waged an illegal war, suspended habeas corpus, and used torture in order to uphold the rule of law and human rights."
Yes and more: "human rights" is as ambiguous a concept as "the Enlightenment." And claims of universalism are again, to me, missionary in the Christian sense. The Chinese delegate to the committee that drafted the UNDHR criticized its Western individualistic assumptions from a Confucian social/communitarian perspective, which I find of continued relevance today. "Social rights" or "cultural rights" don't mesh well with individual ones in several respects. And Putin, to non-Western Global Majority audiences, is successfully exploiting this tension in his defense of traditional (Christian, Muslim, etc.) binary sex identities against the latest LGBTQ rights campaign by the US/West.
in Europe instead of 'Enlightenment' the term Renaissance is (also) used, referring to a period where parts of Medieval societies were slowly achieving greater prosperity, even peace, after the devastating Crusades and long, long years of vicious religious wars, including the Spanish Inquisition. we're talkig 14th century Northern Italy, from which these ideational changes were to spread north- and westwards. more like Erasmus' Humanism Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a staunch criticism of the Church' coruption and stifling abuse of power in many places.
Oh yes, the word “Renaissance” is also carelessly thrown around.
of course, and very much depending on which source one reads. Erasmus is interesting though: in his work he addresses some of the abuses within the Catholic church, while not specifically supporting emerging protestantism (Luther) and calls for a more philosophical approach to catholisism. superficial overview - https://www.thecollector.com/who-was-desiderius-erasmus-life-and-legacy/
I also always wonder about the universal Enlightenment values argument: If the Enlightenment set of political views is describing reality and all rationally derived, why haven't more cultures come up with them? Here, my thinking is informed by the work for the fabulous Dr. Alice Evans, whose Substack I cannot recommend enough:
https://www.ggd.world/
Summary of stuff I've learned from her economics and social science research: Ideas like equality and individual liberty (she focuses on gender equality, but still the idea applies across the board) are certainly not universal, and do not magically become ascendant in a society when they get more technology and are richer. Indeed, across the Middle East the opposite has happened: countries have simultaneously become wealthier and their populations better educated, *and* more authoritarian, religious, and sexist. Things that I always thought were universal human values, like that you should *love your spouse,* also most certainly are not universal values, and they again do not become so just because people get richer and more educated and techy.
So, whenever Team Enlightenment gets all excited about how the political and epistemic views they espouse are the religion-free ones, I always wish they would maybe, you know, familiarize themselves a little bit with how those views play out in cultures that have different religious backgrounds.
Very nice points, thank you! Despite all the talk of science and empiricism, Team Enlightenment certainly did not arrive at the idea of universal human rights through observation!
> why haven't more cultures come up with them?
Law of universal gravitation, electromagnetism, general relativity also came from "western" scientific tradition. All of humanity can still claim them as a shared triumph. Should non-greeks reject Euclidean geometry? We must embrace good ideas wherever they originate!
I think Dx. Periwinkle's point is that, if "Enlightenment values" are the result only of rational reflection, then it's hard to see why they emerged only in some parts of the world and relatively late in human history. Were those people from different times and places all irrational?
I'm sure we don't have the final world on all knowable and provable truths.
People have been working hard at it, and made progress at different times to different degrees.
Were people prior to Copernicus or in other places irrational? It may be an interesting question for people who want to study the structure of scientific revolutions.
But whatever the circumstances he formulated a simpler structure of the solar system. This is not a disparagement of others.
And students of Kant or Voltaire (say) do not consider these "revelations" or final worlds, or disagreement with them as heresy.
They have shared their methods, the same line of reasoning is open to us all. Kant being in Königsberg is irrelevant. The place is not "holy". The reasoning is not parochial. It is available everywhere to everyone.
Hi, Neeraj, and thank for your excellent point that all the good things any humans come up with belong to all humans. It's of course the case that many discoveries are chancy and contingent on other things, and so we wouldn't expect every culture to, say, discover penicillin at the same time--or for penicillin to be discovered ever. When it does get discovered, we'd expect people who don't want to die of infections (so, everyone) to be pretty happy about penicillin, and there to be widespread adoption of penicillin. And I agree that should happen: penicillin rightly belongs to all of humanity, even if it was a British guy who discovered it and some Australian dudes who figured out how to make it into a medicine. And that is what we see with scientific and technical advancements: widespread adoption across the globe as soon as they're affordable, no matter where those technical developments first occurred.
Now, Team Enlightenment makes the claim that the political and moral beliefs that they have are similarly rational, not tied to underlying culture, and that anyone could rationally work out their value. Certainly, TE claims, ideas like personal liberty and equality before the law are just so obviously self-evidently rationally awesome that any rational person will recognize them as such, even if one didn't discover those ideas on their very own--the same way that everyone wants to not die of infections, and so everybody likes penicillin. Sure, TE concedes, every culture might not independently discover every cool idea, but once discovered, if it's really rationally a good idea, everyone will embrace it, because its rational goodness is universally recognizable. If all cultures don't embrace these good ideas, there's got to be an explanation, because maybe the people in a culture are too poor to afford a new technology, or too uneducated to appreciate a new idea. But give those folks more wealth and education, and they'll adopt those same rational values--because, again, they're rational and thus accessible to everyone thinking rationally, independent of cultural background.
And that is what has happened with penicillin, but it is not what has happened with a lot of moral ideas that are dear to TE's hearts.
TE argues that, for instance and to use my example from above, the idea that women should have equal legal rights to men is an enlightenment idea, equally accessible to all rational people--at least once they're introduced to it, and at least if they're rich and educated enough to get why it's rational. So what you would predict is that cultures might start off as sexist and poor, but then become increasingly egalitarian as folks are more educated and wealthier. And that is what you see--in some cultures. But in others, increased per capita wealth and median education level does not result in less legally-enshrined sexism, but, rather, more. What TE needs to explain is why, if sexism is irrational and all enlightenment values are rationally-derived, why sexism doesn't go away in all cultures once they get rich and educated enough.
TE does not explain this, though. Instead, TE seems ignorant of this entire phenomenon, that all cultures do *not* immediately embrace TE's moral values once those values are introduced, even when said cultures do embrace the technological/scientific discoveries. In my experience, when someone does bring up this evidence, TE partisans wave it away, with a claim that the many people in many cultures who do not endorse every last particular of TE's moral worldview are just not rational enough (too poor, too dumb, too religious) to get it. But that makes TE's hypothesis that their moral claims are rationally-derived non-falsifiable, ironically.
Thanks for the detailed response, think I understand this line of reasoning better now.
As a member of team TE, going to attempt a response :)
The correctness or validity of some technological or non-technological matter does not lie in its universal or even widespread adoption. Human beings and institutions must exert their agency in any direction to affect change.
We can use equal rights as an example, and may be further narrow it down to some principles of law (many of these pre-date the enlightenment of course)
Claim: The right to examine evidence against oneself, to cross-examine witnesses, and guaranteeing meaningful defense advocacy is better than the opposite (i.e. no right to examine evidence or witnesses, etc.)
In Putin's Russia these procedures may not be available to everyone who is under trial. Likewise in many other jurisdictions. The argument that "Look, Putin doesn't follow your principles, and Russia has had enlightenment era thinkers, therefore your formulation of these rights is flawed" is fallacious. You will have to argue why the opposite or some alternative is better. i.e. from some axioms like "it is better not to punish someone for a crime they have not committed" which we consider self evident, you will need to arrive at "deprive the accused the right to know what crime he is charged for" to prove your case.
More fundamentally, the enlightenment insight is we all have the ability to undertake such reasoning exercises (for example what sort of punishments should we have: retributive, utilitarian, reformative, etc. etc. rather than here is a parable on casting stones). Now the question is what sort of explanations are you satisfied with. "I was handed this tablet on a mountaintop" or "this is how societies in the past have done it" or some deductive and inductive reasoning. TE issues a challenge to us all -- we have been equipped through many years of natural and cultural selection with certain traits, among them is Reason -- applying rules of logic, mathematics, etc. to discern the truth. And we ought to exercise it.
Thank you, also, for your detailed response. To be clear, I support the same moral claims that TE does: individual liberty, equality under the law, and a bunch of associated ideas are Good. I also think, as, I understand, TE does, that it is *true* that these things are good. I am not a relativist who is like "but punishing the innocent and not letting women testify in court might be good, it depends on the culture." So I think that we're in agreement on that idea, that there are correct moral ideas, in the same way that there are correct scientific ideas. I'm going to go a step further and guess that you'd also agree with me that it's not quite that there are completely "correct" scientific/moral ideas that we as humans have, but there are *more correct* and *less correct* ones, and a major thing that we mean by human progress is that we move from less correct to being more correct. I think that our only area of disagreement is where these ideas come from.
For instance, in your example, you say that the starting axiom "it is better not to punish someone for a crime they have not committed" is "self-evident." Why? Because it isn't fair/just? If so, who decided "justice" was a value? Or is it because it leads to bad outcomes? If so, how did we decide those outcomes were bad? Now, I personally think that "injustice is bad" seems like more of a human universal--although how we define "injustice" definitely is not universal. But I don't see where TE gets to say that any moral value is "self-evident," aside from a non-falsifiable handwave of the kind you accuse religionists of doing. If the only legit ideas are those we have empirical and logical proof for, how do we get moral axioms at all? Show me the logical proof for the axiom "all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights" that doesn't rely on at least an implicit "...by their Creator."
I agree with you that once you start with a pretty limited number of axioms--like "there are fundamental human rights"/"all humans are equal with respect to fundamental rights"--you can reason your way to the moral place that you as a proud representative of Team Enlightenment and I as a Christian want people to get to. I agree that reason is a great way to get to true (*or less wrong) conclusions. I'm just wondering where those initial, ah, self-evident axioms are coming from. Because if they're actually self-evident, then they would be near-universally adopted, right? Or at least very widely adopted?
**I also think you're uncharitably dismissive of the reasoning abilities of, shall we say, pre-Enlightenment people, and of what religious people now and in the past actually think. "This is how people in the past have done it" is actually a pretty great reason to do things that way; you're describing basically all of education. Relatedly, "here's a story to make a moral point" is a beloved tradition embraced both by Jesus Christ and Voltaire. I think this can hurt your argument, because if you don't understand what the religious explanations are, how can you show they're wrong?
Apologies for the off-handed comments on parables and beliefs of religious people.
On the source of axioms, and what is "self-evident":
I think this too comes down to what you consider an explanation.
If you say "the source of my axiom is the Creator" and that satisfies you, I suppose thats fine. It does not add anything for me. For example, why does the Creator want to prevent innocent people from punishment? How did the Creator tell you what these axioms are? What else does this Creator do -- i.e. why stop at the axioms, why does the Creator not work it all out? Do the axioms of arithmetic, set theory, geometry come from this same Creator? Who gave these axioms to the Creator? Was there a choice of sets of axioms that the Creator chose from? And if so what is the source of this wider set? And so on.
Adding the suffix "by the Creator" or leaving it out has the same valence to me. In fact, adding the suffix confuses the matter, because now I have to think about a much much more complex entity. (this last idea is from Dawkins -- in order to explain some complex entity you have resorted to a yet more complex entity, and have created for yourself a bigger problem, i.e. where does this yet more complex entity come from)
I know this is unrelated to this particular discussion, but God is not an "entity" or a "supreme being". This is what Dawkins (and the other New Atheists) don't understand.
And...please forgive my off-hand "by the Creator." I was completing the phrase from the US Declaration of Independence, from which the verbiage in most English-language documents on "inalienable human rights" comes. I am not making the claim that you should accept that as the explanation--I'm just, in an off-handed way, noting the referent that this "human rights" language comes from is one that explicitly invokes "the Creator". Sorry to muddy the waters with this. :/
Anyway, I agree that you shouldn't agree that "Creator says so" is an explanation for why an axiom is "self-evident"--I'm asking for what the source of your axioms on morality are. If they're "self-evident," why don't more people, uh, find them evident throughout history or cultures, even after the axiom is introduced.
"X = X" is self-evident and logical. "All people have human rights" isn't even though we both seem to agree it's true. So I'm still wondering where that axiom comes from.
As an "online defender" may I say your treatment is less than fair. On a few grounds.
1. That the period is inexact, and it has a variety of disparate ideas, and we are selective in what we choose to highlight.
This is true of any "period". In the Victorian Age, things did not magically fall into alignment due to the birth or death of a monarch. And yet from a distance we are able to characterize the period as having particular norms on sexuality, slavery, franchise, industry, and so on. No summarization would be possible otherwise.
2. That the ideas are not original, and instead build on earlier times.
True in part, again a characteristic shared with other eras. Martin Luther's borrowing of ideas from Augustine will not inspire a "Shut Up About the Reformation" for example. And also not true in part. Kant's mature works are truly a departure from prior thought, and original, and a shining example of what reason can achieve.
But what clinches the argument is your own style of writing. Using "reason" rather than "authority" or scripture to try to persuade that the Enlightenment wasn't real :)
Reason is all we have, everything else is quicksand.
Thank you for the comment! Much of what you say is true, but this period (Enlightenment, eighteenth century, whatever) is precisely when “reason” is dethroned and critically examined. In English literature, at least, the “passions” start to be valued a lot more.
To be clear, I’m not saying that there were not great social changes and important thinkers during the period called Enlightenment - just that it was so varied any summary claiming that it “caused” twenty-first century is selective and misleading, and tells us much more about the writers of that argument than the historical period itself.
But I’ll cover all of this in detail in future posts.
Look forward to it!
This a strange phrase to parse -- "when “reason” is dethroned and critically examined" -- critically examined how? through yet more reason surely?
Another good question -- let's just say for now that some writers, notably Kant, weren't willing to accept the results of "reason" at face value. Kant famously argued that reason has limits and is not (as other philosophers thought) transparent or infallible.
Reach not for your pills, good sir, but for your Luger!
A further notable omission from advocates of the Enlightenment (what should we call them? Illuminati?) is a figure I consider most representative of its French strain, namely one M. de Sade, whose fantasies have become virtual reality. His handmaid J-J Rousseau's unfortunate tendencies are also quietly forgotten. Dostoyevsky forgot neither of them when the Jacobins once again raised their heads.
In his essay "Truth and Freedom," the late Pope Benedict opposes against the French Enlightenment a more sober, Anglo-Saxon strain, wherein the rights of man are grounded in the Christian doctrine of humanity bearing the image of God. Without this supernatural doctrine, he suggests, all human rights discourse is nothing more than collective fiction.
For Pope Benedict, at least, there is a positive stream of the Enlightenment, but it is not the one advocated by the people whom you quite rightly have in your sights.
PS While you are on the subject of Freemasonry and the Enlightenment, there's a very good book on it by John Dickie called "The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World".
Thank you!
Thank you for the comment! I did consider the Luger but I thought "pills" worked nicely after the allergy metaphor.
I did in fact mention M. de Sade in my first article on this topic (the Christopher Hitchens review mentioned above.)
I'm not familiar with that essay from Pope Benedict, but I will look for it. Thanks for pointing that out!
The Enlightenment liberal democratic belief system shares one more "cultural unconscious" trait with its Christian foil, wherein Christianity's universal One True Faith becomes today's Universal Human Rights: Onward, Liberal Soldiers! No matter how well-intended in theory, in practice, it's one of the most unfortunate legacies of both ideologies, as many non-Western cultures and states then and now will testify.
Thank you for the comment, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean that human rights talk is the unfortunate legacy?
Apologies for the written-while-fatigued comment. The "No matter how well-intended in theory, in practice,..." phrases tried to signal my meaning. The geopolitical abuses of human rights interventions are legion at this point to me and many others. Genocide in Xinjiang or Ukraine claims ring out from the US State Dept while at the same time, on Gaza, denial and deafening silence.
Of course human rights are a thing worth caring about. But when we go the next step, and say "defined by me/my culture," it becomes stickier. Again, the universalism. Too ripe for cynical abuse on the one hand, and for blindered hubris on the other.
I'll end cryptically because I'm busy, lol: maybe the fact that I'm an American who has lived in China for the last 23 years has something to do with my view. I see the HR question differently from the inside. I can appreciate the cost/benefit trade-offs in ways impossible without that experience. The "universalism" is less obvious as a result.
Oh yes, I think I understand you know and I agree. As I mentioned in my Christopher Hitchens review: "in Iraq, the United States and its allies waged an illegal war, suspended habeas corpus, and used torture in order to uphold the rule of law and human rights."
Yes and more: "human rights" is as ambiguous a concept as "the Enlightenment." And claims of universalism are again, to me, missionary in the Christian sense. The Chinese delegate to the committee that drafted the UNDHR criticized its Western individualistic assumptions from a Confucian social/communitarian perspective, which I find of continued relevance today. "Social rights" or "cultural rights" don't mesh well with individual ones in several respects. And Putin, to non-Western Global Majority audiences, is successfully exploiting this tension in his defense of traditional (Christian, Muslim, etc.) binary sex identities against the latest LGBTQ rights campaign by the US/West.
Yes, and the concept of "human rights" is -- just like the term "Enlightenment" -- becoming less and less precise every day.