the American revolution was the product of the Scottish Common Sense Enlightenment, friendly to religion and common sense the "Enlightenment" = the French Revolution the beginning of secular modernity and madnesshttp://www.historytoday.com/maurice-cranston/french-revolution-ideas-and-ideologies …
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Tom, how do you see Romanticism as influencing the Age of Revolution? "Give me liberty or give me death" doesn't seem to be exactly pragmatic or rational.
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well, the Americans meant it, eh? at least the best of them the crux is liberty as a God-given or natural right vs the continental Enlightenment's belief that man's will is supreme the French did not fight for their liberty they murdered for ithttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964724/Vende-French-call-for-revolution-massacre-to-be-termed-genocide.html …
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I just… want people to understand that the Enlightenment tradition went down some very wrong alleys, like phrenology and eugenics, on the way to bringing us antibiotics, mass literacy, etc. Also there are indirect dangers, like Nietzchienism inadvertently inspiring Nazism.
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(Of course I haven't read Pinker's book
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I feel like there's this idea that if something's good, it's "Enlightenment progress," whereas all bad things are evil counter-Enlightenment forces; but, rationality and secular society are explicitly not supposed to be magical idols.
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Commence Pedant mode: Reason has it's limits though. Ultimately any decision is based on emotion. There is nothing *objectively* wrong with pain, suffering, inequality, whatever. It takes a gut feeling to decide they're wrong.
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