Flickering Enlightenment

The true enlightenment arose through the implimdentation of universal literacy as a basis to society.  this allowed all rare talent to be identified and then supported.  That was the enlightenment and suddenly plougboys could read the bible and by extension create and sell new knowledge.

Recent manipulation of the universal knowledge base can only choke in its own contradictions.  Recall feminism and eugenics and climate change.  really!  The top tier intellect never bit.

Those todays are merely promoted intellectual fashion and will all die natuaral deaths.

Flickering Enlightenment

Attacked by the Left and Right, the Enlightenment can only be saved through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique

https://aeon.co/essays/lets-save-the-enlightenment-baby-from-its-muddied-bathwater?

The Enlightenment is going through a dark time. Critical race theorists on both sides of the Atlantic are following the philosophers Emmanuel Eze and Charles W Mills in holding the Enlightenment responsible for modern racism. In The Age of Empire (2021), the British sociologist Kehinde Andrews says that it is time to stop revering ‘dead white men’ such as Kant, Locke and Voltaire. Last year, the University of Edinburgh, which is widely seen as having had an ‘outsized’ historic role in promulgating racist scientific theories, undertook an excoriating process of self-examination, publishing a Race Review that acknowledged that the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were responsible for propagating ‘some of the most damaging ideas in human history’, including the idea that human societies exist on a hierarchical ‘ladder’, from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’, with Europeans at the top. The Review highlighted the role of David Hume, who, in a notorious footnote to the 1753 version of his essay ‘On National Characters’ (1748), stated that non-white races are ‘naturally inferior to the whites’. The university admits that it still has bequests totalling many millions of pounds from donors linked to the slave trade and other colonial conquests. At the same time, the city is embroiled in a long dispute over what to do with a statue of Henry Dundas, who most historians hold responsible for delaying the progress of abolition through UK Parliament.

Censured by the Left for its philosophy-washing of Empire, the Enlightenment is further under fire from the populist Right who see the long arm of its influence in the foundations of our established political institutions and the traditional architecture of representative democracy and professional expertise: those who stand up for Enlightenment values are liable to find themselves castigated as members of a ‘complacent liberal elite’. Writing in The Observer in 2025, Will Hutton bemoaned the fact that, in an era of populist autocracy, what were once taken-for-granted goods – ‘justice, accountability, social fairness, scientific progress, international order’ – have become associated with a ‘Brahmin class – who are the new civilisational enemy.’ Attacks on this new enemy are fuelled, Hutton wrote, by ‘the need for vengeance on the standard-bearers of Enlightenment values.’ Right-wing critics of the Enlightenment are supported by Silicon Valley tech bros. In fact, the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ pioneered by the far-Right software developer Curtis Yarvin, championed by the likes of J D Vance and Peter Thiel, seeks to obliterate the Enlightenment values of equality and democracy.

Famously, the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has rushed to defend the Enlightenment, subtitling his 2018 book on the subject: ‘The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’. These core values, says Pinker, have led to measurable improvements in human health, prosperity and peace. Although it’s good to see prominent commentators stand up for agreed facts and the pursuit of knowledge, especially at a time when scholarship, politics and the media are being eroded by post-truth, conspiracy theories and a mistrust of experts, I cannot align myself wholeheartedly with this big-beast bandwagon. In the midst of glaring economic inequalities, climate breakdown and widespread poverty in the Global South, Pinker’s faith in civilisational progress seems optimistic to say the least. Besides, I believe there is something to the Leftist critique of the Enlightenment as either intrinsically or circumstantially racist. If we don’t engage with the Enlightenment’s complexities, it will continue to be weaponised by the culture wars, and for extremist polemical ends. Leftists can cancel, wholesale, the Enlightenment’s reminder of the need for intellectual rigour and a commitment to truth, while conservatives can use it as a tub-thumping defence of the West that marginalises the vital campaign for social justice.

In consequence of this pincer-movement attack, the Enlightenment’s legacy is existentially vulnerable. It makes me deeply worried as someone whose entire career has been built on trying to understand and analyse the world around me – especially a world that still tries to confine thinking women to the realms of emotion and ‘personal experience’.

I believe that Enlightenment values are essential, but that we have largely forgotten how to make a good case for them: we need to rely on shared facts, tested by experiment; a public sphere where open discussion can take place; and the belief that discussion should be founded on reasoned argument. We need, moreover, to cherish the more political values of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the common good. Advocates for artificial intelligence have the temerity to claim that large language models are ushering in a ‘second Enlightenment’ (a claim that was uncritically echoed in a paper published by the World Economic Forum last year) when what we are in fact seeing is the destruction of the Enlightenment legacy under the false banner of its name. As the historian David Bell argued in The New York Times in 2025, AI is actually ‘shedding Enlightenment values’ by simply reinforcing ‘what we already think we know.’ In The Guardian, the journalist and geopolitical risk consultant Joseph de Weck warned that ‘AI is taking us back to the dark ages’, making us lazy, and stymying independent thinking.

Reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool

The evidence suggests that we are going through a rapid de-enlightenment. Newspaper circulations, attention spans and trust in forms of agreed knowledge are in freefall. Misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes are gaining ground. If we let go of the valuable aspects of the Enlightenment project, we open ourselves up to a world of AI blather, ‘my truth’ pronouncements, wobbly sentiment and unchecked power.

My unease with this parlous state of affairs has provoked me to go back and rethink the Enlightenment and what it has to offer. But, rather than unthinkingly recouping it as a mission, I want instead to tease out and weigh up its merits, to discern with nuance what is still fit for our times. I want to ask if it is possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rallying power, and if it’s worth defending what the combined forces of Left and Right are coming together to attack. Are the Enlightenment’s deficiencies barnacles on an old ship, or integral to its design?

Ironically, in critiquing the Enlightenment, the postmodern Left has deconstructed the basis of its own belief systems, and now liberal intellectuals no longer know what to defend outside of demands for affirmation, or the assertion of the individual right to be who you want to be. In the midst of intolerant purity spirals, reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool, and writers and thinkers such as Kate Clanchy or Slavoj Žižek are cancelled rather than engaged with. Yet what is more dangerous: holding to a set of Enlightenment values that might be flawed, or opening the floodgates to a post-truth world in which any authoritarian agenda might well hold sway? I believe that it’s possible to conserve intellectual standards and be politically radical at the same time. Because there is another side to the Enlightenment that is not surfacing in the culture wars, and which is the opposite of centrist complacency: namely, intellectual humility and political challenge.

The difficulty with any discussion of the Enlightenment is that it’s not clear what the word actually means. Broadly speaking, it was a philosophical project that grew out of the establishment of the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries: Francis Bacon and his circle had pioneered the rejection of alchemy, mysticism and superstition in favour of the empirical study of the physical world, and this became the basis of philosophical positivism. If you visited the National Gallery’s exhibition devoted to Joseph Wright of Derby, you might have seen An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) – a tribute to natural philosophy that offers stark contrasts of darkness and light to dramatise the impact of scientific discovery.

In 18th-century France, a group of thinkers emerged known as the philosophes. Led by Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot and Montesquieu, they championed the secular pursuit of knowledge. Over the course of 20 years, Diderot and d’Alembert produced a 28-volume Encyclopédie, a ‘systematic dictionary’ to be passed on to future generations for the improvement of mankind. Voltaire championed the primacy of mathematical logic. And Montesquieu argued for the division of power within government to ensure that no one group could exert tyranny. Enlightenment was also pursued in Scotland by figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hutton and Thomas Reid, and in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, who sought to bring together human rationality and an exploration of the world around us.

What these thinkers had in common was a belief in the power of reason to liberate us from inherited custom and received wisdom. The Encyclopédie defined the philosophe as someone who, ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself’. In 1784, a Berlin periodical invited readers to respond to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant sent in an essay, defining it as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity’, which he identified as ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’

Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones

This rejection of dogma is inspiring. But the Enlightenment was a diverse, even contradictory movement, which is partly why it can now be deployed as a political football by those who occupy very different positions (see also liberalism). ‘I’m really not at all convinced that there was such a thing as Enlightenment,’ the historian Dorinda Outram, author of several books on the Enlightenment, told me. The philosophes declare that they’re ‘producing universal categories that apply to all human beings, like universal humanity’, but then they ‘repeatedly exclude people from being under the aegis of those universal categories’, such as ‘Black people, women and the poor’. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft lambasted the Enlightenment for claiming universality while excluding women from the realm of rationality. ‘She really takes it and shakes it and says, look, this is all wonderful, but it’s not real unless you include everybody,’ Outram said. Critics of the Enlightenment don’t necessarily reject universalism as an ideal, but point out that the commitment to universalism was selective.

Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones. Angela Saini is a science journalist who has written about the origins of race science. ‘I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment,’ she told me. ‘It gave us so much of the world as we know it today,’ in terms of ‘rationality and the scientific method’. Carl Linnaeus’s system of biological classification, however, one of the main artefacts of Enlightenment science, divides people up by skin colour, which is ‘incredibly arbitrary’, Saini told me: he’s ‘essentially taxonomising humans in the same way that he’s drawing up taxonomies of the natural world.’ Voltaire believed that different ethnic groups had fundamentally different origins – a theory known as polygenism – and that the age of reason had arrived at maturity only in Western Europe. ‘Humanity,’ wrote Kant in 1802, ‘has its highest degree of perfection in the white race.’

The standard defence of Enlightenment figures, Kehinde Andrews told an Open University seminar, is that ‘yes, they were racist, but that’s separate from their moral philosophy … so why would we throw the baby out with the bathwater?’ That is the wrong way to think about it, Andrews said, since Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant ‘all had these beliefs that Europe was superior, that whiteness was better, that Black people were inferior’, and that this is ‘not a coincidence’, it’s actually the ‘premise of where they come from’.

Saini points out that these racist attitudes were also a product of their time, and were economically and politically expedient: the Enlightenment’s cherished notions of ‘freedom and equality and reason and secularism’ were forged alongside ‘these ideas about some people being inferior to others’. The hierarchies that were described as ‘natural’ were ‘self-serving’, Saini explained, because they not only justified colonial expansion but also ‘reinforced the social order’.

Enlightenment was invoked by anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century

The experience of colonisation nonetheless mitigated racist attitudes as Westerners came into contact with cultures that were evidently intellectually and culturally sophisticated. For example, ‘they get more and more interested in China,’ Outram told me, and ‘the confrontation there is clearly not between reason and unreason. It’s just different sorts of reason.’ The Enlightenment was inconsistent because it was changing over time. ‘It’s a very different thing at the beginning of the 18th century from what it is at the end,’ Outram said, ‘when the focus is on a new sort of humanitarianism’ and new forms of ‘altruism’, such as ‘the philanthropic founding of lifeboat stations’, which is inspired by the idea that ‘people will willingly go out in dangerous conditions to try and rescue people who they have no links with, who are total strangers.’

As the historian Jonathan Israel argued in Radical Enlightenment (2001), in contrast to negative images of pale, male, wealthy elites with direct or indirect links to slavery, prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Nicolas de Condorcet were in fact passionate abolitionists: Diderot contributed some stridently anti-slavery arguments to the Histoire des deux Indes (1770), a polemic against colonial rule, and bemoaned the treatment of ‘Negroes’ in the Encyclopédie (although he simultaneously describes them as having ‘little intelligence’), writing that ‘We have reduced them, I wouldn’t say to the conditions of slaves, but to that of beasts of burden; and we are reasonable! And we are Christians!’ Condorcet wrote in 1795 that the gains of the ‘Age of Discovery’ counted for nothing unless Europeans ‘acknowledge men of other climates, equals and brothers by the will of nature, have never been formed to nourish the pride and avarice of a few privileged nations’. Enlightenment was invoked by later anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century, and by later anticolonial thinkers such as W E B Du Bois, who drew on its assertion of a common humanity and emancipation through reason.

I spoke to Richard Whatmore, a historian and author of The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (2023), who cited Voltaire writing in 1764 that ‘Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.’ For Whatmore, Enlightenment is ‘any strategy that prevents wars of religion from breaking out.’ In the 18th century, ‘diversity means disagreeing without wanting to flatten your rivals. As soon as you want to ostracise and exile, that’s the end of Enlightenment. That’s fanaticism.’ The difficult thing, he said, ‘is living together with people who think completely differently to the way that you do.’ Whatmore believes the Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution and its desire to create ‘an exclusive community’, which he likens to ‘our culture wars’. As soon as you descend into culture war, ‘that shows you’ve lost to an 18th-century mind’. Whatmore identifies this tendency on both the Trumpian Right and the identitarian Left. To oppose prejudice but cancel those who disagree with you is – arguably – a particularly modern form of hypocrisy.

Tolerance – applied to both people and opinions – is a slippery virtue. I can see both sides of the debate between universalism and particularity. So I mistrust the warm embrace St Paul extends to the Jews, inviting them into the Christian fold while simultaneously erasing the boundaries of Jewish identity, and also the disingenuous republicanism of France, where claims to a level playing field between religious groups are disputed by members of the Muslim community. But I do subscribe to a genuinely egalitarian universalism that prioritises the capacity for peaceable disagreement over narrow demands for recognition by either identitarians or nationalists.

Universalism was hotly debated by members of the Jewish Enlightenment, including Moses Mendelssohn, who – like Kant – contributed an essay to the Berlin magazine essay call. Mendelssohn was in favour of Jewish assimilation, but the preservation of Jewish identity remained a fraught issue – coming to a head with the Nazi Holocaust and the widespread conclusion that the assimilationist ‘experiment’ had failed. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the foremost historians of the Enlightenment were postwar Jewish scholars, among them Peter Gay, who looked back to the Enlightenment to provide a model for how to avoid fascism. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has also argued against ethnocentrism and in favour of a universal morality that transcends national or cultural particularity.

Curators, book editors and academics hold some power but not compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen

Critics of Enlightenment universalism are right to uncover the power dynamics that too often underlie claims to ‘objectivity’. But the key point for me is that most attacks on Enlightenment values fail to take account of the power disparity actually in play: the fact that the so-called ‘liberal elite’ is actually in timid retreat. The populist Right taking aim at the ‘mainstream media’, experts, professionals and especially the apocryphal exclusive cabal called the ‘illuminati’ is essentially targeting embattled remnants or phantom ghouls. Meanwhile, the Left trains its sights on cultural ‘gatekeepers’ whose influence is also either fictive or on the wane. Relative to the most downtrodden members of society, curators, book editors and tenured academics hold some power but, compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen who are ruthlessly undermining them and everything they stand for, they really don’t.

When Eleanor Roosevelt drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, she took great care to include representatives from other countries and cultures, including the Chinese philosopher and diplomat P C Chang. Chang was a pluralist and supported the Declaration, but there remained a particularist challenge: namely, that the Declaration emphasises individual rights and liberties whereas, according to the Confucian tradition, the self is defined by communal ties. We should remember challenges like these, but we must not let them contribute to the destruction of those universalist institutions that were built on the philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment. The entire international order is currently teetering on the edge, threatened by neo-totalitarian leaders and undermined in turn by its former allies on the Left for being Western-centric and exclusionary. We let them perish at our peril, as it is these institutions that support the less powerful and hold the real elites to account.

Reason is the compass I look to in my work and in my interactions with others – especially when there is conflict to resolve. But we should also recognise its limitations: its sometimes stolid sidelining of qualities like habit, cognitive dissonance and ineffable experience. An over-insistence on rationality can look like arrogance if it is not checked internally, and an unfortunate consequence of the attack on experts is that they can become more dogmatic in self-defence. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment’s rigid insistence on reason led inevitably to totalitarianism. They believed that the suppression of alternative value systems such as religion or tradition was a ‘disenchantment’ that was always underpinned by the threat of violence. ‘The fully enlightened earth,’ they wrote, ‘radiates disaster triumphant.’ Outram thinks that Adorno and Horkheimer put their finger on something important: ‘the way in which Enlightenment values and Enlightenment thinking were very likely to tip over into their opposites.’

Enlightenment reason has always had its critics. Rousseau believed that it corrupted innocent human nature. Michel Foucault didn’t like its tendency to stigmatise those who don’t fit society’s definition of the ‘reasonable’: vagabonds, criminals and the mentally ill. The philosopher John Gray thinks that its faith in progress is quixotic. Saini told me that, as a journalist, she is focused on the end goal of changing people’s minds for the good, and simply stating what is ‘reasonable’ as self-evident truth is not always the best way of achieving that. ‘If I’m trying to convince someone who is hesitant about taking a vaccine to take it, it doesn’t work to hit them over the head with this idea that vaccines are safe and scientists have proven this,’ she said. After all, their fears often ‘come from a rational place. It could be a fear of losing bodily autonomy, a genuine fear of vaccine injury, or doubts that have been seeded by some information that they’ve read.’ Categorising someone’s mistaken position as irrational tends to entrench them in it further, ‘because they feel they’re under attack.’

The story of Eve eating the apple expresses a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance

Saini also cautions against dismissing the populist turn in our politics as wholly irrational. ‘There’s been a kind of block in politics for a long time, where people felt that nothing was happening; it didn’t matter who they elected.’ When populist candidates promise wholesale change, ‘it is very appealing to people,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily retreating from reason. It just means that they’re frustrated.’ Outram likewise stresses the importance of maintaining a pluralistic view of what reason and knowledge mean. ‘The attack on expertise is, in fact, a struggle between different forms of knowledge … I am an expert,’ she acknowledges, ‘so I have some skin in the game,’ but the expertise that ‘going through the Cambridge History School gives you is as valid as the tacit knowledge of, say, brewers of beer.’

For Outram, promoting morality is a more pressing priority than defending reason, because ‘unreason, misinformation and disinformation are all used in the service of cruelty … If you lie to somebody, you show that you don’t respect them.’ Lying – by governments or corporations, say – is invariably carried out ‘in defence of projects which are morally indefensible, otherwise you wouldn’t have to lie about them.’ It is the later Enlightenment value of care for others – articulated by Adam Smith and Edmund Burke – that Outram believes we should remember now: ‘the idea that we’re linked to all other human beings by sympathy and empathy,’ that ‘we can’t see other people suffer without feeling pain ourselves.’ (This recalls Kant’s moving statement, made in the context of advocating a cosmopolitan internationalism, that ‘a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’.) Morality is what stops reason succumbing to hypocrisy.

Of course, the accumulation of knowledge doesn’t automatically lead to human progress. But there is an alternative, counter-Enlightenment narrative that is hardly preferable: the narrative of Pandora opening her box, or Eve eating the apple. These stories express a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance. We must maintain epistemological humility, but we must also keep our cognitive bearings as the reality around us dissolves into White House-generated memes, clickbait advertising and AI slop.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s reputation for high-minded entitlement, its proponents aimed above all to promote critique that was both unassuming and restless. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume wrote that if those who are ‘dogmatical in their opinions’ could become ‘sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state’, this realisation would ‘naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve’ and ‘diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists’. Intellectual modesty was intimately linked to tolerance of others: since ‘we are all formed of frailty and error,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature’. Kant emphasised the inescapable limits of human knowledge. I am not the first to note that our own age of increasing ignorance is characterised, ironically, by people holding trenchantly to what they think they know.

Like Kant, Foucault also asked ‘What is Enlightenment?’ – the title of a 1984 essay. He defined it as ‘the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’. Seen in this light, the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the social sciences: the conviction that our ‘historical era’ is endlessly readable. This is my favourite definition of the Enlightenment: a commitment to ‘permanent critique’: of our world, and also – crucially – of ourselves. It is the best remedy for both manipulation and self-delusion.

In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful

Neither the identitarian Left nor the flag-waving Right is currently very good at self-critique. The Left is too self-righteous and the Right too wedded to an illusion of ‘balance’ to acknowledge its own ideological agenda. As for political radicalism, the Left’s narrow focus on identity prevents it from examining big-picture, socioeconomic power dynamics, and the Right’s rose-tinted nostalgia for Western greatness leads it to defend the status quo. Neither side is remotely ‘enlightened’. We need to be humble and self-questioning, to be sure, but that should not stop us speaking truth to power, and challenging financial and technological elites. With the tech bros laying claim to a new Enlightenment (when, really, it’s the same white, male and Anglophone-centric old guard in new clothes), there’s all the more need to bolster the good in our intellectual inheritance.

The Enlightenment may have been a mixed, paradoxical project, but its critical attitude was bound up with revolutionary intent: to lay the intellectual foundations for a better world. We must save the Enlightenment baby from its muddied bathwater by remembering its own teaching of discernment; advocating for rationality as an ambition rather than an absolute; and above all rejecting attempts to link expertise, cultural capital and high intellectual standards with power and privilege at a time when they are so gravely imperilled.

In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful. ‘There was a great deal of plurality in the way that people thought, even at that time,’ Saini said. ‘And that’s why I think, when we look at the past, we should hesitate from being too judgmental, because we ourselves will be judged by future generations for the way we live now.’ Refusing to consign people or ideas in history to wholesale categories of good or bad allows us to say, she told me: ‘We know the kind of world that we want and, if anything is possible, which is I think the lesson of history, then we can take what we know is useful.’ About the rest of it, Saini concludes, ‘We can say that was fine for you, it’s not fine for us. And that’s OK.’