Considering the Tea Party’s candidates and leader’s (deliberate?) misconceptions about our founding fathers and what they truly believed, I am writing this in the hopes that some of them may read this.
Today, we are presented such distortions about everything from religion to government and politics and the beliefs of our founding fathers, if a film were made concerning these aspects, it would have to be directed and written by Federico Fellini.
The key figures in the founding of our nation, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams (John, not John Quincy) were products of the Enlightenment, or Age Of Reason. Their ideas for founding a new and democratic government in “the new world,” came predominantly from this period. They saw firsthand the abuses on society resulting directly from aristocracies and monarchies.
The Enlightenment began with a group of intellectuals intent on using reason and logic to reform society and advance knowledge. These intellectuals came from several different countries including France, England, Scotland and Germany, Italy and Spain. It began around the mid-seventeenth century up until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Some of the greatest thinkers of the time dedicated their lives, intent on improving a society as a whole and the lives of individuals. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses by the church and state.
The center of the enlightenment was in France where philosophical discussion took place in “salons,” or precursors of the modern day coffee houses and sidewalk cafes. These salons were used to elude the notice of the authorities. Much of these philosophies were counter to the existing order of the day. Much of Enlightenment ideology was considered heretical and subversive.
Some of the great contributors were some of the world’s greatest philosophers such as Spinoza, John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, Voltaire and Montesquieu and Immanuel Kant. Their writings culminated in the great Encyclopédie (1751–72) edited by Denis Diderot. Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume set were sold, half of them outside France. The political ideals influenced the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791.
According to Kant,The Enlightenment was “Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.” The thesis of the liberation of the human mind from the dogmatic state of ignorance that was prevalent at the time is the epitome of what the age of enlightenment was trying to capture. In his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), he described it simply as freedom to use one’s own intelligence. More broadly, the Enlightenment period is marked by increasing empiricism, scientific rigor, and reductionism, along with increasing questioning of religious orthodoxy.
For the last decade or so, Republicans have been using fear as the key ingredient for governing. And with the advent of the Tea Party (a not so subtle and erroneous reference to The Boston Tea Party) the fear has spread further and wider. Although the GOP/TP leaders are reportedly collage graduates, they behave as thought they never heard of The Enlightenment or read any of the philosophy of it’s main contributors such as Spinoza and especially John Locke, since he was probably the greatest influence on our founders.
So the question that hounds me is how to get the horse to drink after it’s been lead to the trough? How can we initiate a new Enlightenment, a new Age of Reason? Or maybe the Enlightenment never got old, but simply discarded as being inconvenient to today’s atmosphere of greed, the lust for power and moral domination?
An excerpt of an essay by Henry A. Giroux…
It derides the principle of communal responsibility for the well-being of its members, decrying it as a recipe for a debilitating “nanny state” and warning against care for the other leading to an abhorrent and detestable “dependency”.
wts, in your response about Khirad, you and myself each doing an article on the three dystopian novels, I think is a great idea. Only, not too tight a deadline. 😉
Hey KT, I just saw this! Sorry for the delay in responding. Let’s do it! And, like you said, flexibility on the “deadline” since we all have other fish frying, I’m sure. Khirad, what say?
KT, you ever read any Dorothy Parker? One of her lines has always stuck in my head, “That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including HERE, it was against her better judgement.”
Pretty funny texlib. I haven’t read any Dorothy Parker. Is she a novelist?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
Quote:
“Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.”
Sorry, Kant. Anybody declaring something the final anything is almost always completely wrong.
The young wish to be older and the old wish to be younger. Man never comes of age at the right time it appears.
Sally, I am about 20 years older than I ever thought I would be. So, from that perspective, I am glad to be here. Much luck and many angels have brought me to this once seemingly “old age.” 😉
And, I am glad you have made it, too!
Aw shucks! Thank you Sally, the feeling is mutual.
Caru, I think we’ve probably seen the final Harry Potter film.
Don’t hold me to that though 🙂
Caru, I think Kant meant “finally.” As if he were waiting for this for a long time. And in another sense, with the Enlightenment’s success, would come a certain finality to a totally ignorant and sheepish society. The sheepishness and lack of reason is still with us, but the Enlightenment really did bring us out of the dark ages. Ages we will never completely return to. Largely due to science and a better understanding of spirituality.
KT, I don’t know if you can get that horse to drink from the trough after it has drank too much koolaid. It is amazing to me how young some of those Founding Fathers were at the time. (and I am not referring to John Quincy Adams, the Founding Kid.) Good article, KT. Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear TJ, JA, BF and others thoughts on the issues we face today and how we handle or don’t handle them.
There’s the rub Sally. Getting younger republicans to give up the kool-aid and encourage them to learn more about universal truths. I think any one of our founders would be appalled at what is happening in 21st century America. Thanks for your reply.
This is an interesting suggestion, KT. The ideas of the Enlightenment would certainly be useful in combating fear’s grip on society. However, there is a problem with many Enlightenment philosophies, and that is their attitude towards emotion.
Following Enlightenment reasoning as I understand it, Fear is a constraint. Something that needs to be cast off. Something that needs to be defeated. But, I believe that this is a simplistic view of human nature.
Fear is something that needs to be recognised as a legitimate and necessary part of the human experience. Fear needs to be understood, not condemned or ignored. The same principle holds true for other emotions.
Of course we should not allow our emotions to rule us, but neither should we suppress them a la Vulcans. We all need to understand our emotions and the emotions of others. This, in turns, gives us an understanding of why people do what they do, e.g. road rage.
We all need a crash course in empathy. We don’t need to accept the emotions or actions of others, but why do need to understand where they are coming from.
One who has absolutely no understanding of this aspect of humanity is either a monster or a god.
OK, I have no idea why this appeared here. I was responding to the Post, not KT’s comment above
Caru, you raise a good point, but Enlightenment thinkers referred to fear as a lack of courage, not a basic human emotion as a survival mechanism.
Here is a bit of how Kant describes it:
“Kant answers the question quite succinctly in the first sentence of the essay: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. Our fear of thinking for ourselves. He exclaims that the motto of enlightenment is “Sapere aude”! – Dare to be wise! The German word Unmündigkeit means not having attained age of majority or legal adulthood. “Unmündig” also means “dependent” or “unfree”, and another translation is “tutelage” or “nonage” (the condition of “not [being] of age”). Kant, whose moral philosophy is centred around the concept of autonomy, here distinguishes between a person who is intellectually autonomous and one who keeps him/herself in an intellectually heteronymous, i.e. dependent and immature status. Kant understands the majority of people to be content to follow the guiding institutions of society, such as the Church and the Monarchy, and unable to throw off the yoke of their immaturity due to a lack of resolution to be autonomous. It is difficult for individuals to work their way out of this immature, cowardly life because we are so uncomfortable with the idea of thinking for ourselves. Kant says that even if we did throw off the spoon-fed dogma and formulas we have absorbed, we would still be stuck, because we have never “cultivated our minds.” The key to throwing off these chains of mental immaturity is reason. There is hope that the entire public could become a force of free thinking individuals if they are free to do so. Why? There will always be a few people, even among the institutional “guardians”, who think for themselves. They will help the rest of us to “cultivate our minds.” Kant shows himself a man of his times when he observes that “a revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism . . . or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking.” The recently completed American Revolution had made a great impression in Europe; Kant cautions that new prejudice will replace the old and become a new leash to control the “great unthinking masses.”
Excellent article Kilgore. Kilgore, once a wanderer too.
“Not all those who wander are lost”. J.R.R. Tolkien.
Thanks Orcas. Love the quote.
I’m not sure there can be an enlightenment while there is such “enBLINDenment” going on.
To paraphrase JL,
Keep you doped with your Ipods, and sports and TV
and you think you’re so sexy and classy and free
but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
wts, very sad isn’t it? It’s funny, but I was just thinking of Working Class Hero the other day. Too many business degrees and not enough of the Humanities.
yeah, KT. And although the media has the potential to be a very efficient conduit for a New Enlightenment, that just doesn’t seem to be happening. Even the internet. People are watching Youtube videos (heck, WE are!) and gossiping on Facebook more than watching TED talks about how to improve life on earth.
Those who produce the shows are well aware that it is easier and more convenient to distract masses rather than educate them.
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell had a friendly disagreement over which of their dystopias would actually play out in the future. Orwell’s “boot on the face” version or Huxley’s “happy mutants” one. Dispassionately, I would have to say that Huxley has been more right. Many former dictatorships have lightened up. Heck, even China! But we just keep on soaking up our distractions, the “feelies” and “soma” of Huxley’s BNW.
Kudos on the Huxley vs Orwell remarks. I am in total agreement. Huxley’s dystopia is much closer to our present day reality. Orwell got the war part right, but Huxley got the societal and cultural part right. You may have already read Huxley’s follow up on BNW, “Brave New World Revisited.” I read it back in the 80s, and it scared the crap out of me. It really seems to be where we are heading and in some respects, where we are now. If the GOP/TPers have their way.
Don’t forget the final one in my dystopian Trinity: Fahrenheit 451.
The scene with his wife in front of the screen, and talking about voting for the leader with the best hair so nailed it.
Khirad, maybe you, KT and me should each do an article on one of the three books. You take F451, I take BNW, and KT takes 1984. We comment on what parts of each one are most connected to today’s world.
Yep, perfectly. I believe it was Huxley that predicted an “actor,” would be president. By that, I think he meant just a perfect form and character of a figurehead. And along comes Reagan.
Khirad and KT – Also, there is my favorite book, Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions,” in which the character Kilgore Trout writes a story about a chimpanzee becoming the President of The United States:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8Rvbn07LhvMC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=vonnegut+breakfast+of+champions+chimp+president&source=bl&ots=JfZ50JSdlt&sig=JrHu64aDq4de0jYtgB2-vdO4UmY&hl=en&ei=_O4UTo22DYbpgQeM9fn9BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
(Actually, I have to admit that I was reminded of this when George W. was in office…)
HA! Buddy, just another reason why I love Vonnegut’s work.
wts, Young people use movies, ipods, ipads and phones to occupy their minds. But are they avoiding thought? I’m not so sure. All my nieces and nephews are pretty much adults.. 😉
They don’t verbalize much about their big decisions, (perhaps we did/do to a fault?) but in quiet times, and in one on one conversation, I find they have thoughtfully laid out plans, and solid decisions.
I think the picture may not be as gloomy as we think.
Is this a case of using a different approach, but achieving the same results?
Indeed, and you had your color TV and records and Hi-Fi stereos and all those fangled things like Technicolor. Why can’t we go back to only black and white before those colors corrupted the youth? And heck, let’s go back to phonographic cylinders!
Fucking disasters y’all turned out to be. 😉
Khirad, your idea of a simpler and more enlightened existence is
living in a yert, with a greenhouse full of ‘plants’ and your computer!!!
..and remember- to make that music play on cylinders, you have to crank the machine!!!! Seems like more work than you would do, just for music. 😉
Oh wait.. I forgot Bollywood! You don’t need a music machine!!
‘Fucking disasters y’all turned out to be. ‘
This from someone who wears a skirt and plays bagpipes!???
Hah!
And what’s with women in trousers?
George Will really said it best though. It’s the fault of denim.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/15/AR2009041502861.html
And I don’t play the pipes. Those are fancy new contraptions compared to the drum. Why not just play the flute? The double reed is just so decadent.
Women in trousers???? Was Kate Hepburn sexy??
..and Then there Are Men in skirts….
George Will makes dinosaurs look current.
And sure- all women make SO much money they can dress like Grace Kelly, who I might add has been dead for many years- so how can she be a role model from the grave???
HA! So you wear a skirt and play a drum??????
WOW! My admiration knows no bounds. 😉
I love the sound of an oboe and a bassoon.
Disasters? I don’t follow. All the gadgets we have today grew out of more primitive gadgets of the past. It’s not the devices themselves that are an obstacle, but how they are used. Our technology won’t save us, by itself.
KT, Khirad is being a stinker because he just learned where the fan came from today. And, we don’t want to go back that far!
Egyptian slaves and palm fronds?
Nope, KT, it was the water buffalo. I had to enlighten him in the Morning Blog. Of course, he had to take it to another level with graphic description of the process. This will explain the stinker, too.
jkk, I mentioned Ipods in order to update the John Lennon lyrics, but I don’t feel that young people are any more “blinded” by media than those who are older than them. Although I DO find it annoying that young people cut their videos before I have a chance to ogle female derrieres, beyond that I don’t feel that their addiction to mass entertainment is any different than anyone else’s. My main point is that Distraction is an insidious form of controlling populations, and that the current glut of content may make it harder, rather than easier, for a new age of enlightenment to occur.
As the Zen Buddhists say, you have to “empty the cup” in order for enlightenment to take place, but these days peoples’ cups are continually being poured to overflowing by the ubiquitousness of media.
I think many people are unaware of the fact that we need to “unlearn,” some things we’ve learned along the way. Thus “emptying the cup.”
jkk, i agree to an extent, but do they think in terms of universal truths, or a more general sort such as forming plans? Cell phones and IPods and such are actually products of the Enlightenment when you think of the emphasis those thinkers put on science. The mathematicians also. Like Pascal and Newton for example.
We all have benefited greatly from the Enlightenment, sometimes in ways we don’t readily recognize. For example, computers. The internet can be used as one large and extensive “salon or coffeehouse,” like PlanetPOV. 🙂
KT – I think that the conservatives on the Far Right disagree with Enlightenment ideals in a very fundamental way. I think that the better they were made to understand them, the more they would despise the concepts.
I don’t claim to be any kind of scholar, but to me, the basic notion to take away was this: the real world is a thing that lies outside of ourselves, and it is discernible to anyone who can see and understand evidence, and has the capacity of reason.
And THAT notion is counter to conservative thought as I’ve always known it.
I was raised in the working class South. It’s very much a pre-Enlightenment world. When I first read about these ideas that led to the founding of this country, I was kind of shocked. When I first read “The Declaration of the Rights of Man” I was shocked.
In the social structure I’ve always known, truth comes from Authority. If you want to know what the truth is, you find the man in charge, and you ask him. You can hear this if you listen to the Rush Limbaugh show. It often seems as though callers call in to confirm that they’re seeing the world the “right” way. It’s important to all “be on the same page,” so to speak.
How true an idea is depends on the status of the person who speaks that idea. An idea itself has no intrinsic value, and cannot be judged on its own merits. That is a pre-Enlightenment idea that is larger than the South; it is pervasive in corporate culture. In any large company, the worth of an idea wholly depends on one’s place on the “totem pole” within that company. The boss’s nephew is always going to have more valuable ideas than the mailroom employee, for example.
How can Enlightenment ideals have any meaning in today’s world, when those ideals are so contrary to the worldview of so many people?
Buddy – that is what we in the progressive faith community struggle with daily. There is a split in this broad Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) world view that is going to become the historical equivalent of the Reformation and the Great Schism.
Those who have come from a social justice tradition, wherever that lay – Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim – are great believers in reason. We follow the teachings, put little primacy on Authority and much less on salvation especially as a “sheep v. goats” delineation of who’s in, who’s out. We think globally, universally, with fervent respect for ideas and science and the capacity to make the world a better place than we found it.
On the other side are the fundamentalists – also Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim – who are grounded in rules, in rejection of liberal thought, of teachings, of works – for them the capacity to be “saved” or one of the elect is essential. Then and ONLY then can you rise above others and rule the world with your “God inspired” views. INEQUALITY and lack of freedom are keystones – there is an elect or elite, everyone else is subordinate, so the Bill of Rights becomes relative. Rights are NOT for everyone. Science and social justice and philosophy are tools of the Devil sent to taunt us and pull us away from our serfdom. Faith is all that matters – works are irrelevant. Secular concerns – especially the Constitution – must be bent to the will of God as we see him.
So you have, broadly speaking, a powerful schism. Those who believe in faith and their own superiority to run things vs. those who see the teachings on equality and freedom the fundaments of liberation and universal goodness. The latter can and did and does co-exist with liberal political ideas. The former cannot.
So far we’ve avoided Holy War. So far we’ve avoided witchburnings (unless you think, as do I, that the murders of GLBT and pro-choice people, etc. are manifestations of that.) So far we’ve avoided pogroms or ethnic cleansing (unless you look at Northern Ireland, Serbia, and sectoral blow ups in the Mide-East)…
But for how long?
I do not care if people in Estill Springs, TN handle snakes to “prove” their holiness. I don’t care if they homeschool their kids (until the kids object). I don’t care if they follow their precepts and teach the world is flat and only 6000 years old.
I DO care that they want US to stop teaching our kids what is commonly believed, to stop running our institutions for the benefit of everyone, and I want them to stop taking OVER the mechanisms of state and society to impose their views on the rest of us.
I want to halt the young woman Dominionist Christian who once told me that she could not WAIT for the separation of church and state to end and that, “our founding fathers got it a little bit wrong. We are going to make it right”.
Some of the smartest and wisest people created this Great Experiment called the United States, and it is critical that their work and approach NOT be jettisoned to individual particularistic views, especially not religious ones. What IS “American Exceptionalism” is NOT the raping and pillaging of the land for building wealth and empire. It is NOT the imposition of a single religious view. It is NOT white supremacy. It is NOT autocratic leadership.
It IS the capacity for everyone, anyone, to live and breathe free without coercion, to follow one’s own lights, to build a strong and self sufficient way of life to the best of his or her capacity trusting that one’s government is there in times of need. It is our diversity of belief and race and ethnicity. That was the promise of the Declaration and the Constitution, and we need to take that back!
choice, very well said and very accurate. Keep on trucking! How does an idea, or group of ideas spread? I think they are still most effectively spread from person to person. The internet has taken the place of salons and coffee houses. I think we should spread Enlightenment ideas as far and wide as possible. They are timeless in their truth. Not archaic or outdated principles. (as you well know)
The biggest problem we have now is the unchecked accumulation of wealth and the resulting power that such wealth brings. Romanticism, should be left to the artists, poets, musicians…..etc.
choicelady – Thank you for talking about the progressive faith community. Many conservatives can’t even imagine that there is such a thing.
Sometimes on the Huffington Post, a conservative would express surprise whenever any progressive mentioned faith… sometimes it was feigned surprise, but often it seemed to be real. To many on the Right, we liberals are all a bunch of “Godless heathens.” Of course, that isn’t true.
Most of the religious people around where I grew up were Baptists, which has a lot in common with Calvinism. One of the tenets of the Calvinist faith is that personal wealth is a sign of the blessing of God.
THAT idea translates directly into modern conservative thought. If you see a person who is rich and successful, they must have been blessed. They “must have been living right,” as they say around here. Bottom line: they DESERVE it.
The same is thought to be true of the poor. If they are suffering, then they must also deserve their fate. Everything is earned. Everyone gets what they deserve.
I can see the comfort in such a belief. The opposite idea: that we live in a chaotic world, an unfair world where evil often flourishes and the good often die young… that’s a nightmarish world. That’s the worst thing anybody can think of. No WONDER so many people refuse to believe in that! Even people who are not religious, but instead consider themselves “spiritual,” will say “What goes around comes around,” or they will speak of karma.
The way I see it, the world is a big and complicated place. Sometimes people get what they deserve, and sometimes they don’t. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. I forget who said that, but it rings true to me.
Buddy, it is a truly worrisome fact of today’s society in general. The corporations are the new aristocracies. They may exist, on the surface, as individual corporations, but they are all somehow tied together by very foolish laws. Citizens United comes to mind. In a very real sense, corporations are one big entity controlled by an extremely small group of people and the average American is, more and more, living the life of a “serf,”
How do we get that horse to drink, after it’s lead to the trough? Better still, how do we lead this horse to the trough?
I am by no means a scholar, not in the traditional sense of the word. I just have a great interest in learning about some of the best minds in history and to see if I could begin to understand them. And I think I do, for the most part. And no college tuition fees. All of this stuff is available to the public, and I really would like to see a renewed, overall interest nationwide. Many people remark how wise our founders were. But they didn’t acquire such wisdom by chance. The read, and read a lot.
The Enlightenment really began as an “underground movement.” Many of the pamphlets and essays were outlawed by the rulers of the time. Over half of the copies of the Encyclopededie was published outside France because of censorship fears.
Today’s right wing would very much like to censor such ideas.
KilgoreTrout – I would also like to see a renewed interest in these ideas.
Unfortunately, the study material seems awfully dry and boring to the mainstream public. Reading about this stuff will remind many of being back in school, where the main lesson seemed to be this: Learning is No Fun. (sometimes extra reading was even given as punishment!)
I wish the ideas of the Enlightenment could be popularized somehow, maybe in the form of cartoons or something. I thought Carl Sagan did a great job of popularizing science in his Cosmos series. Many of us still remember the old Schoolhouse Rock cartoons.
Now that I think of it, it was the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon “No More Kings” that first got me started thinking about politics and U.S. History.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0LmYEjXNIg
It seems a little bit silly and simplistic now (not to mention insulting to the British,) but I think they were on the right track in producing this stuff. They made this material fun.
Also, whenever I want to quote the Preamble to the Constitution, all I have to do is remember the song which I memorized as a child:
Buddy, I think you may be on to something there. Starting with the young would be a great way to influence the future government and it’s leaders. It would also serve to empower the people to a degree we do not see today.
Personally, I get a lot of joy from reading. The eloquence, with which Enlightenment writers were capable is astounding.
I think one enjoys reading more when there is a pointed interest in the material.
But your idea is a really good one, especially in this present day pace of living. If we must have distractions, they could at least be compensatory.
KT, another thing that I’d wish the Tea Partiers could comprehend is what AD and I were discussing on a previous article, that their claim that The Founders believed in Americans rising up in violent revolution if unhappy with their government…is just plain false and taken completely out of context. Here’s a section from our recent discussion:
So, the Founders NEVER advocated that people should revolt against their federal government. Put that in your teapots and brew it!
Very well put AdLib. I think one of the basic themes of the Enlightenment, concerning revolution, were that a cultural revolution would be more effective than a violent one, unless a government be totalitarian to the enth degree. Wisdom is always more powerful, in the end, than violence ever could be.
I get so sick of the baggers waving flags with the misquote about the blood of tyrants and patriots being spilled. They get the words right, but the context wrong.
Enlightenment ideals are really self evident after all is said and done. Mankind WAS born with certain unalienable rights. BTW, it was your mention of a new enlightenment, the other day, that got me started on this article. TY.
What a coincidence. I’m partially dealing with aspects of the Enlightenment in a post I’m working on as well. An interesting and exciting historical period.
It really was mankind’s “coming of age” after the Renaissance. Never before had scientific thought strayed so far from familiar religious doctrine. It’s where many of the scientific theories we know today really began to take shape.
And I too feel it’s influence is lost in time. Maybe we look around at our modern, automated world and think we are still in the midst of some enlightenment period. Perhaps many think we know what we need to know already.
It’s also about how we inform our citizens. How many think U.S. textbooks are adequate? I sometimes think history is regional. Every place has a different version. You eve read a book on the Founders printed outside this country? You totally get a different story. I believe in the old saying, “The winners write the history books”.
Rome referred to the conquered as “savages” and “barbarians”. That was the belief for centuries. Today we know they were just as culturally advanced as Rome. They just didn’t have the money to build decadent monuments to their awesomeness.
The European world pats itself on the back for it’s “great discoveries” during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but they were treading familiar ground already laid out by Arab and Chinese thinkers. It was the Arab world that brought the West out of the Dark Ages. Shared their profound scientific advancements with them.
And that’s America to me. Born on third base thinking we hit a triple. A country dominated by half truths masquerading as fact. If we’re3 doing it right, then the Enlightenment Era never ended. We will still question and still demand proof.
The irony of all of it is that most of our great thinkers from the past were wealthy men. Or at the very least lived quite comfortably. They were the only ones with the money and free time to pursue these things. That was another great thing about the Enlightenment. it began to elevate a middle class. To prioritize education for all. To create the circumstances that would allow a future patent clerk from Zurich to become the most famous scientist in history.
There will be a new age of Enlightenment. Don’t know exactly when, but it’s coming. Information has never been more available and more and more households are getting access to it everyday. We have to learn to fail before we can learn to succeed though. The people won’t fail though. They never have. Or we wouldn’t be here.
“born on third base thinking we hit a triple” – that is so accurate, AD. That’s the attitude of the Limbaughs, Coulters, Palins and Bachmanns of this world.
KT
I think partially the Tea Party(some version not the TPPatriots) received a shock to their system back in 2008. Like all of us, they expected to have a long healthy body/financial retirement. For so many those dreams crashed in 2008. How many have had to go back to work, put off their retirement etc? How many lost their jobs? Lost their savings?
Perhaps it is just a luck of the draw that Obama became President at this time. Not necessarily good luck either. The one thing that is missing from these TP rants is their responsibility for what happened and their party’s responsibility. That is what makes them so not credible to a lot of us. Had they shouldered some of the responsibility and worked with the president, their credibility would be intact.
As far as enlightenment goes, any group that uses the tenents of the John Birch Society(and even the halfway decent TPs do) is not going to be enlightened even if you spoon feed it to them.
Sue, what you say is, unfortunately quite true. The TPers didn’t actually exist as a group in 2008. It was the election of Obama that brought them into one large body. And they were brought together by deception and outright manipulation by the extremely wealthy. Think Koch brothers and Roger Ailes.
The members of the tea party are brainwashed to their uneducated views of American history. They are plied with false patriotism and extreme nationalism, combined with a false sense of moral superiority. These are the same people who refer to us as the liberal “elite.” TP leaders actually prey on the ridiculous belief that people can be too educated. That education is somehow brainwashing by “those commie professors.” They preach individual freedom, but in truth, they hate such an idea. It is counter to their aims.
I think of the Tea Party as more Lynchian. It’s surreal in a creepy way and I’m always thinking: WTF?
Of course with the baggers, it’s not in a good way. And at least I can shut off a movie, whereas they’ve constructed their own elaborate parallel reality here – and can’t distinguish fact from fiction.
Oh, and thank the Scottish Enlightenment for secular liberalism. 🙂
I thought you might appreciate the inclusion of Scottish thinkers. You can also thank the Dutch, for Spinoza, the Germans for Goethe, and the French for Descartes, who really started the whole ball rolling and the English for Locke. (who is considered to be the father of classical liberalism) Truth is, many great thinkers contributed to the Enlightenment. The older ones inspiring the younger ones.
‘So the question that hounds me is how to get the horse to drink after it’s been lead to the trough? How can we initiate a new Enlightenment, a new Age of Reason? Or maybe the Enlightenment never got old, but simply discarded as being inconvenient to today’s atmosphere of greed, the lust for power and moral domination?’
KT, is this not a generational question? Every decade, do we not have a new group of people who look back and pose the same question?
Personally, I would like to see Caru comment on this post, because I’m prone to thinking that young people think they can improve the system; do try- and occasionally succeed.
My frustration has always, and continues to be, the power structure. There should be NO appointments for life, no unlimited terms, no electoral college; because at that point we are locked into a certain way of thinking for far too long. Removing that complacency might translate into movement, action and fresh ideas.
jkk, you raise an excellent point. The current power structure is indeed a huge hurdle to a better society. How to change that power structure is the really big question. And the Citizen’s United ruling makes that hurdle even bigger.
I have long believed that we do not need an electoral college. It really diminishes the whole concept of government “by the people.”
In this article, I was laying bare my hopes for a better future. And I strongly believe that too many Enlightenment ideas have been deliberately discarded by those that would much rather have an aristocracy. And I think you are absolutely correct about this being a generational thing. What worries me also is the sheer amount of distractions facing our young people. Too many boredom killing devices, when in reality, good old fashioned “book reading,” is one of the best ways to eliminate boredom. It’s genuinely compensatory as opposed to say, video games, cell phones and television. IMO.
KT- I think we have to place our faith in the future. Kids are idealistic and ‘activistic’ !
If they refuse to accept the statusquo, change will come- if not, the distractions will win.
Where is that darn Caru, anyway?!!
Yeah, I would like to get his fix on this. But I have to say, Caru is not really your average young American. He’s got a leg up, if not two of them.
LMAO! He sure does; but I would still like to hear his take on it.. and perhaps someone elses kid would weigh in as well??
I would love to hear many many young people’s views on the Enlightenment. But I have a feeling that many don’t even have a general idea of what the Enlightenment was. I would venture to say that many college kids don’t know, except those that are studying the Humanities. I would love to be proven wrong about this.
Wha- I didn’t know that I was so popular. 😉