1. David Brooks: "That belief, championed by John Locke, or a story we tell about Locke, paved the way for human equality, pluralism, democracy, capitalism...." I like that "a story we tell about Locke."https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/opinion/renaissance-right-gop.html …
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3. People get strangely testy when I point out that "the Enlightenment" as celebrated by Brooks (and Pinker, Harris and, Jung help us all, Peterson) has nothing to do with the actual historical Enlightenment.
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4. But to critique popular myth making about "the Enlightenment" isn't to say Locke, Newton, Voltaire, Diderot & co. have no value. Rather, it's that deserve to be understand in full complexity & not as smooth pavement on the road to glorious us.
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5. As used by people like Brooks & Pinker "the Enlightenment" is a myth: a tribalist myth in fact since it involves covering up the history of those killed & dispossessed in the name of Enlightenment values. It's identity politics for elite centrists.
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6. What's also interesting about neo-Whig celebrations of Enlightenment is not just negative stuff that gets left out but also things like the anti-militarism of Adam Smith or the broader republican critique of luxury
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7. One way to understand the Enlightenment is to realize it predated the democratic revolutions of the 19th century & certainly the anti-imperialist revolutions of the 20th. Those revolutions borrowed from Enlightenment ideas but also radically transformed them
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8. One of the genuine great achievements of Enlightenment was critique of historical mythmaking (see Paine on Bible). It's a betrayal of that achievement to set up Enlightenment thinkers as Idols, timeless oracles of wisdom whose own historicity is avoided.
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9. Again, this is not to say there isn't great stuff in Locke. Like the epistemology or this:https://twitter.com/_HelenLindberg_/status/985658673329524741 …
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"Brooks is not a stupid man." Sometimes, I'm not so sure about that...
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"Denying land rights" is a really interesting way to say justifying a genocide
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