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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2. Brooks is not a stupid man. So he knows that the actual historical Locke believed in hedged rights for Catholics & atheists, denying land rights to Natives & slavery. So why uphold Locke as hero of universalism, etc. It's "a story we tell about Locke"
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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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Replying to @HeerJeet
True. Much of what Locke wrote was written to support political faction & he served on board overseeing slave trade.
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Replying to @djrothkopf @HeerJeet
What I find perhaps most valuable is Locke’s devastating surprisingly secular critique of Robert Filmer’s hegemonical defence of patriarchy as the divine right of kings (and fathers). That is an Enlightenment ideal. But all that is in The First Treatise.
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Yes, that and the epistemology.
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