Why Wonder About the Enlightenment?

 From Tal Bachman at Steyn Online:

Why wonder about the Enlightenment? Well, for one thing, the nations today which most boldly profess allegiance to, and at least ostensibly pursue, Enlightenment ideals, are precisely those in which Wokism has made the most gains.

How can that be? Don't Enlightenment ideals conflict with Wokist dogma?

They seem to, yes.

So how did we go from one thing to its opposite? That's the big question. A few possible answers spring to mind:

Possibility #1.) Nothing framed by mortal hands can last, no matter how great it is. Everything dies in the end. It's just what happens, and there's no way around it. No point wasting time trying to figure this out.

Possibility #2.) Saboteurs, foreign and domestic, have ruined everything. As Christ said in the Parable of the Tares, "an enemy hath done this".

Possibility #3.) Focusing just on America for a moment, there was something amiss in the original Enlightenment ideals, and the Lockean liberalism through which they found expression, which informed America's founding. Something in Enlightenment liberalism all but guarantees we—and maybe the West in general—were always going to wind up where we are now.

As for that first possibility, surely we can all accept that mortals can't create immortal objects and institutions. It's just that to dismiss any investigation into how we got here on grounds nothing lasts forever feels pretty silly. By that standard, no autopsies should ever be performed to find out how someone died, or whether they died needlessly or prematurely, since everyone's going to die in the end anyway. That doesn't make much sense.

So while Possibility #1 might be strictly true, I vote for setting it aside for right now.

As for Possibility #2, of course there have been saboteurs. How much damage has Joe Biden done to America in just nine months? That damage is as heartbreaking as it is infuriating and incalculable. It might actually be irreparable. This might be Humpty-Dumpty-level.

And of course, any adequate Enemies List would have to include hundreds of thousands of people, even millions. The politicians list would be long enough. What about all the academics? The media propagandists? The corporatistas? The social media censors? The intelligence agency sociopaths who tried to remove a duly-elected president by framing him? The Milley types among military brass? A huge number of people have wilfully, maliciously damaged American government and society—of late, particularly in the name of Wokism. Obviously, they're still succeeding.

But in a way, Answer #2 seems to beg the ultimate question of, "Why is Wokism so popular in the first place?" (a question we touched on a few months ago).

That leads us to Answer #3: the possibility that there is something within Enlightenment liberalism itself that all but guaranteed we were going to wind up here—that is, that all but guaranteed the eventual arrival and domination of Wokism as an official state ideology.

This is a difficult thing to consider, especially for conservatives. After all, to be a modern American conservative is to love America. To love America is to love its foundational precepts and goals. To love its foundational precepts and goals is to actually be an Enlightenment (or to say the same thing, a Lockean) liberal. To be an America-loving Enlightenment liberal is to be someone who wants America to return to its Lockean roots and stay there. And to be someone like that is to view with horror the possibility of a causal connection between the Enlightenment liberalism of the American founding and the Wokism now destroying America. In fact, such a discovery might be so painful, one might just reject the possibility out of hand.

But on the presumption we have unusually brave readers here at SteynOnline, I propose we start to wade into this and see what we find. After all, maybe we'll discover something to help us beat back the Wokist lunatics and get the country back on track, even if it takes twenty years. (Read more.)

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