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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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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You mean they're not actually Classical Liberals?! My stars.
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Locke was a hack and an apologist for feudalism and nothing he wrote has any place in modern thought.
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The Enlightenment came with more asterisks and escape clauses than your cell phone contract, all written in at the insistence of the wealthy and powerful who made fortunes by exploiting others and would be impoverished in a world that lived by Natural Law without exception.
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Perhaps because your repeated footnote on the Enlightenment just looks like point-scoring. You don’t move past it to engage the idea the writers above are trying to address.
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I don't think you can engage the actual ideas without first noting that they are putting for a version of history that is pure bullshit.
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