2. A few footnotes. As Bouie notes, the recent advocates of the Enlightenment are conservatives & centrists (Pinker, Goldbeg, Jordan Peterson) creating a usable past. It's worth noting how badly their own commitments fit their fictional intellectual history.
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3. If Jordan Peterson's talk of Female Chaos & Male Order really Enlightenment? Nope. it draws on mythologists (Jung, Eliade, Campbell) rooted in Germanic romanticism (a mystical & anti-Enlightenment tradition).
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4. And Jonah Goldberg is heir to National Review conservatism, a tradition whose leading intellectual lights (Burnham, Chambers, various Straussians) were decidedly outside the Enlightenment.
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5. Whittaker Chambers (a huge figure in National Review's history) once suggested Enlightenment was like the apple that Satan got Adam & Eve to eat.
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6. Pinker has more right to claim an Enlightenment linage but his critique of Blank Slate-ism sits uneasily with his echoes of Enlightenment ideas of perfectibility.pic.twitter.com/UwaaQKyYC8
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7. Which is all to say that the current enthusiasts of the Enlightenment are (like the rest of us!) not really 18th century thinkers but engaged in a complex with past. The problem is they want to claim full ownership of a what is in fact public domain thought.
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7. Which is all to say that the current enthusiasts of the Enlightenment are (like the rest of us!) not really 18th century thinkers but engaged in a complex dialogue with past. The problem is they want to claim full ownership of a what is in fact public domain thought
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8. Why claim the Enlightenment when you are really in complex argument with it? Because you see the Enlightenment not as a complex historical phenomenon but rather as a brand. "We're Team Enlightenment," the argument goes. "You are Team Tribalist."
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9. Team Enlightenment is interesting as a branding exercise. But let's not confuse it with intellectual history.
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10. Why does the racism of long dead thinkers like Locke & Kant cause a scandal? Because it hurts the brand of Team Enlightenment. But if you're interested in history, not branding, you can handle fact of checkered history.
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