March 19, 2025 • 21 mins
It’s a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason.
But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries.
The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of wealth: Compared to economic growth since the Enlightenment, there was almost none during all the millennia before. And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, the philosophy of freedom and equality on which the United States and all liberal democracies are founded.
But ideologues of the MAGA right are openly hostile to the Enlightenment legacy.
So too are the ideologues of the woke left.
So liberals need to decide if they’re going to defend it.
In its commitment to the open exercise of reason, liberalism supports anyone criticizing anything, including liberalism itself.
That can be a severe political weakness. Self-critical, self-doubting liberals are notoriously self-defeating.
So it’s up to liberals to make reason a political strength. That involves defending it as a vehicle not just of amoral productivity and technocratic progress, but the inspiring values liberalism owns but too seldom claims.
You can find this episode's transcript, footnotes, and links at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Dastardly Clevernessin the Service of Good.
I'm Spencer Critchley.
This time, Chapter 8of The Liberal Backbone.
You can find the previous chaptersin previous episodes,
or a dastardlycleverness.com,on the Dastardly Cleverness YouTube
channel, or at Substack —just search there for Spencer Critchley —
(00:20):
and I hope you'll follow me there too.
This chapter is calledDefending Enlightenment.
Here we go.
Of all the potential causesof liberal confusion,
few are more confusing than this (00:33):
Being
reasonable has become controversial.
It's a fundamental assumptionof liberal democracy
that we debate our differenceswith reason.
But now that assumptionlooks like a relic of a bygone age.
— specifically, the Age of Enlightenment
from the late 17thto early 19th centuries.
(00:57):
During the Enlightenment,the ascent of reason defined
what would become the modern era.
The Enlightenment produced
more scientific progressthan all of previous history.
The very idea of progresscomes to us from the Enlightenment.
It had the same impacton the generation of wealth
compared to economic growthsince the enlightenment.
(01:18):
There was almost noneduring all the millennia before.
And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism,the philosophy of freedom and equality,
on which the United Statesand all liberal democracies are founded.
But ideologues of the MAGA rightare openly hostile
to the Enlightenment legacy.
So too are ideologues of the woke left.
(01:40):
So liberals need to decideif they're going to defend it.
When we left off last time, Ibram X.
Kendi had just argued that they can't,because
Enlightenment reasonis inherently oppressive.
Its supposedobjectivity just serves the interests
of the powerful people who devisedit: rich, white, male Westerners.
(02:01):
As we've
seen, that argument is centralto woke Theory.
In this chapter,we get to the liberal response.
But first, let's make sure we understandthe argument.
At its core is the chargethat the assertion
of universal laws of reasonwas an act of domination.
It forced all of natureand all of humanity
(02:23):
to fit within the same rigid,logical framework,
the better to study, manageand exploit them for profit.
The case is often madethe way Kendi makes it,
by pointing to America'shistory of racism and slavery.
You don't have to be woke to recognize
that Enlightenment reasonis implicated in both.
(02:44):
For a start, the white and black races
were essentially inventedduring the Enlightenment.
So were separate races for NativeAmericans, Asians, and other groups.
These new racial identitiesappeared at a convenient time:
when they would helpjustify the mass enslavement of Africans.
Slavery
and indentured servitude had been commonthroughout history
(03:08):
and around the world,including in the colonies of the Americas.
But as the colonial economies grew,
demand for unpaid laboroutstripped supply.
The gap was filled by captivesfrom Africa.
In the 15th century, new sailingtechnologies gave European traders access
to the continent, where they discoveredand developed a new market in slaves.
(03:32):
From the 16th to 19th centuries, more
than 12 millionwould be shipped across the Atlantic.
Not only was the supply bountiful,but it was non-European.
Growing moral qualms about the enslavementof human beings could be allayed.
Africans would be definedas less than human.
(03:53):
One source of authorityfor that definition was the Bible.
Slavery is condoned there,especially if the slaves
are foreigners, as in this passagefrom the Book of Leviticus: “All
of the heathen that are round
about you, of themshall you by bondman and bond maids.
Moreover of the children of the strangersthat do sojourn
(04:14):
among you, of them shall you buyand of their families that are with you,
which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. (04:19):
undefined
Theologians claimed to have discoveredthat the biblical “mark of
Cain” and “curse of Ham”were borne by people with dark skin.
In other words,God wanted Africans to suffer for sins
committed in the Holy Landnear the beginning of biblical time.
(04:42):
Newly ascendant sciencealso provided excuses for slavery.
The early botanist Carl Linnaeus designed
the system of categorieswe still use to classify life forms.
He applied his system to human beingsas well,
subdividing Homo sapiensinto different varieties.
He then ranked the varietiesby intelligence and temperament.
(05:05):
At the bottom was Homo Sapiens Africanus.
According
to Linnaeus, Africanswere naturally lazy, sly,
sluggish, neglectful,and at the mercy of their impulses.
He didn't design his racial hierarchyas a justification for slavery,
but slavers were happy to use it that way.
(05:26):
And countless Europeans and colonistsprospered on the profits.
No small part of the horror of slaverywas the scientific elimination
of compassion through what would cometo be called scientific racism.
In her book These Truths: A History of the United States, (05:41):
undefined
Harvard historian Jill Lepore describesthe dehumanized
economics of slaveryas realized in the cotton industry.
She writes, “Cotton had become
the most valuable commodityin the Atlantic world.
“Slavery wasn't an aberrationin an industrializing economy.
(06:02):
Slavery was its engine.
Factories had mechanical slaves.
Plantations had human slaves.
The power of machines was measuredby horsepower.
The power of slaves by hand.
Power.
A healthy man counted as two hands.
A nursing woman as a half hand.
(06:23):
A child as a quarter hand.
Charles Ball, born in Marylandduring the American Revolution,
spent years toiling on a slave plantationin South Carolina
and time on an auction blockwhere buyers inspected his hands,
moving each finger and the minute actionrequired to pick cotton.
(06:44):
“The standard calculationfor a cotton crop ten acres to the hand.”
In order to drive productivity ever
higher, planters deployed organizedtorture and terror under
what was known as the “pushing system.”Cornell historian Edward E.
Baptist describes it in his bookThe Half Has Never Been Told:
(07:07):
“Enslaved migrants in the fields quickly
learned what happenedif they lagged or resisted.
“In Mississippi, Allan Sidney saw a manwho had fallen behind the fore row
fight back against a black driverwho tried to ‘whip him up’ to pace.
A white overseer on horseback,
dropped his umbrella,spurred up, and shouted, ‘Take him down!’
(07:30):
The overseer pulled out a pistol and shotthe prone man dead.
None of the other slaves,Sydney remembered, said a word
or turned their heads.
“Theykept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.
They had learned that they had to adaptto pushing
or face unpredictablebut potentially extreme
(07:51):
violence.”
The history of this
industrialized cruelty is well documented.
But the most terrible partsare new to many Americans, partly
because some of the scholarship is new,and partly because, until recently,
few history textbooks ever confrontedthe full truth of
what was already known.
(08:13):
This means that many liberalslearn about it for the first time
from popular theoristssuch as Ibram X Kendi.
So it's not surprising that many assumethat Kennedy's conclusion must be right:
The cause of all this inhuman exploitation
was a dehumanizing worldviewbuilt on Enlightenment reason.
(08:33):
What happened to enslavedAfricans was monstrous
and yet scientifically reasonable.
And where that kind of reason rules,it suppresses everything that makes us
human beings instead of machines,or slaves to machines.
The victims are not only black people,but all people who are “other”
than the dominant group that constructedthe Enlightenment worldview.
(08:58):
This is
why Kendi writes, “I knewabout the equation of the Enlightenment
and ‘reason’ and ‘objectivity’and ‘empiricism’
with whiteness and Western Europeand masculinity and the bourgeoisie.”
So why wouldn't liberalscome to the same conclusion?
Because it contradicts other thingswe know about the Enlightenment.
(09:21):
There is no doubt that science
was used to justify and enable slavery,as well as the expulsion
and killing of Native Americans,and many other evils.
In the 20th century,it would effectuate death and suffering on
a previously unimaginable scalein the trenches of World War One,
the death camps of WorldWar Two, the Soviet gulags and elsewhere.
(09:45):
But that doesn't mean Enlightenment reasonwas the source of those evils.
Throughout all of history,people have committed
terrible acts using any tooland any justification available.
There is evidenceof slavery dating to thousands of years
before the Enlightenment,not only in Europe,
but across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
(10:08):
Also commonplace were human sacrifice
and other practices we now find abhorrent.
Theory is founded on
the axiom that oppression is not natural,but the artificial result
of an oppressive social structure,in particular, the Western one.
Liberalism originates in a more skepticalview of human nature, summarized by James
Madison (10:31):
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
There's an important argumentabout human nature here,
which we'll pick upwhen we look at identity politics.
For now, I'll notethat a great deal of evidence indicates
that human nature containsboth good and evil.
We are naturally cooperative,kind, and peaceful,
(10:54):
but also naturallypredatory, cruel and violent.
And to conclude
that Enlightenmentreason is a source of oppression,
we have to ignore everyone who has used itto fight oppression.
That fight has includedusing liberal religion to counter racist
religion and sound scienceto discredit racist pseudoscience.
(11:16):
To support his caseagainst the Enlightenment, Kendi,
like other theorists, can listracist statements and actions
by leading Enlightenment figures,like the philosopher David
Hume or the slave-owning FounderThomas Jefferson.
But he leaves out the manycounterexamples.
One is a foundational documentof the Enlightenment,
(11:36):
the French Encyclopedia, published between
1751 and 1772.
The mission of the Encyclopediawas to equip every person
with the knowledgethey would need to live in freedom.
Here is part of the entry on slaveryby the main editor, Denis Diderot.
It's based on the Enlightenmentconcept of universal, natural rights.
(12:01):
“This buying of
Negroes to reduce them toslavery is one business that violates
religion, morality, natural laws,and the rights of all human nature.
If commerce of this kind can be justifiedby a moral principle,
there is no crime, however atrociousit may be, that cannot be made legitimate.
(12:21):
“Men and their libertyare not objects of commerce.
They can neither be sold, nor bought,nor paid for at any price.
There is not, therefore,a single one of these unfortunate people,
regarded only as slaves, who does not havethe right to be declared free.
This Negro does not divest himself,and can never divest himself
(12:42):
of his natural right.
“He carries it everywhere with him,and he can demand everywhere
that he be allowed to enjoy it.”
Theorists often chargethat the true purpose of Enlightenment
universalism,including the concept of universal rights,
was to erase the cultures of peoplesubjugated by white European men.
(13:03):
The Enlightenment scholar SusanNeiman refutes that claim in her book
Woke Does Not Equal Left,published in 2023.
She writes, “It's now an article of faith
that universalism,like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham
that was invented to disguise Eurocentricviews supporting colonialism.
(13:25):
When I first heard such claimssome 15 years ago,
I thought they were so flimsythey'd soon disappear.
For the claims are not simply ungrounded,
they turn Enlightenment upside down.
Enlightenment thinkersinvented the critique of Eurocentrism
and were the first to attack colonialismon the basis of universalist ideas.
(13:47):
“To see this, you don't need the moredifficult texts of the Enlightenment.
A paperback edition of Candide is enough.
For a succinct diatribe againstfanaticism, feudal hierarchy, slavery,
colonial plunder, and other Europeanevils, you can hardly do better.”
Here's an excerpt from Candide, writtenby one of the most
(14:09):
celebrated enlightenmentphilosophers, Voltaire:
“As they drew near to the city,they came across a negro
stretched out on the groundwith no more than half of his clothes
left, which is to say,a pair of blue canvas drawers.
“The poor man had no left legand no right hand.
‘Good God,’ said Candide to him in Dutch.
(14:32):
‘What are you doing there, my friend,in such a deplorable state?’
‘I'm waiting for my master,Monsieur Vanderdendur,
the well-knownmerchant,’ answered the negro.
‘And was itMonsieur Vanderdendur?’ said Candide,
‘who treated you like this?’ ‘Yes,monsieur,’ said the negro.
‘It is the custom.
Twice a year we are given a pair of blue
(14:53):
canvas drawers,and this is our only clothing.
When we work in the sugar millsand get a finger
caught in the machinery,they cut off the hand.
But if we try to run away,they cut off a leg.
I have found myself in both situations.
‘It is the pricewe pay for the sugar you eat in Europe.’
(15:14):
Enlightenment
arguments against slavery and racismwere advanced by the most effective
anti-racists in history,like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B.
Dubois,Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
And as it happens, Kennedy'santi-Enlightenment
argumentsalso depend on Enlightenment reason.
(15:34):
He uses it to construct each of hissentences and to link one to the next.
He citesempirical evidence for his claims.
He expects readers to trustthat this evidence is objective.
He has little choice.
If we couldn't rely on sharedreason, empiricism,
and objectivity,all arguments could end in stalemate.
(15:55):
So an anti-racist would asserttheir lived experience and personal truth,
a racist would asserttheir lived experience
and personal truth,and that would be that —
except that whoever had more powerwould be even more likely to prevail,
since there wouldbe no viable alternative.
This is another paradox of Theory.
(16:17):
It's a version of what philosopherscall the Liar's Paradox.
Let's say we accept the Theoretical claim
that there are no objective truths,but only assertions of power.
Then we have no reason to trust anything
a Theorist says over anythinganyone else says.
It's just another assertion of power.
(16:37):
In order for Theorists to persuade anyone,they have to abandon Theory
for what looks a lot like EnlightenmentReason.
Or rather, it looks like a kind of
Enlightenment reasonthat Theory usually ignores.
There is a kind that reduces everythingto amoral facts and logic.
Philosophers call it “instrumentalreason.” Instrumental reason
(17:00):
is non-normative,meaning it has no moral norms.
It can tell you how to cure diseasesor build bombs, but not which is better.
Instrumental reason is supremely useful.
But if it were to take over our mindscompletely, we would churn out
rational but immoral decisionswithout ever being troubled by conscience.
(17:22):
This, in fact, does happen to some people.
It's one way of understanding the behaviorof Adolf Eichmann,
who efficiently and dispassionatelymanaged the logistics of the Holocaust.
At his postwar trial in Jerusalem,Eichmann appeared to feel no guilt,
arguing that he had only done his duty.
Reporting on the trial,the political theorist
(17:44):
Hannah Arendt described what she witnessedas “the banality of evil.”
But instrumental reasonisn't the only kind.
There's also such a thing as moral reason,the medium of moral philosophy.
One of the most importantbreakthroughs of the Enlightenment
was to free moral reasoningfrom control by
priests and princes,and offer it to ordinary people.
(18:08):
“Dare to know!” as Immanuel Kant wrotein his essay “What is Enlightenment?”
Kant was
probably the mostinfluential Enlightenment philosopher.
He's often accused by theoristsof embedding Eurocentric oppression
in his universal principles of reason.
Like many people of his time, Kant
did make Eurocentricand racist assumptions.
(18:31):
And yet, the basis of his philosophywas that it applied to all people.
And late in life, he applied it tohimself, renouncing his earlier biases.
At the age of 71,he wrote this in his book Toward
Perpetual Peace (which Susan Neimanalso quotes):
“Comparethe inhospitable actions of the civilized,
(18:51):
and especially of the commercial statesof our part of the world.
The injusticethey show to lands and peoples they visit
(which is equivalent to conquering them)is carried by them to terrifying lengths.
America, the lands inhabited by the Negro,
the Spice Islands,the Cape, etc., were at the time
of their discoveryconsidered by these civilized intruders
(19:15):
as lands without owners, forthey counted the inhabitants as nothing.
They oppress the natives, excitewidespread wars
among the various states,spread famine, rebellion, perfidy,
and the whole litany of evilswhich afflict mankind.”
Without moral reasoning,the religious justifications for slavery
(19:36):
and racism would have gone unchallenged,and so would the pseudo scientific ones.
With moral reasoning,we got liberal societies that,
for all their faults,have become the most free
and egalitarianin the history of civilization.
Reasondoes not have to be amoral or oppressive.
It can be the shared languageof the “public sphere,”
(19:59):
where people of all kinds can communicate,debate, learn, solve problems,
and pursue justicewithout anyone forcing anyone else
to adopt any particular beliefor ideology.
This kind of reason is whatthe sociologist and philosopher
Jürgen Habermascalls “communicative rationality.”
In his
youth, Habermaswas a student of Horkheimer and Adorno,
(20:23):
the Critical Theoristswho wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment.
But he concluded thattheir critique of Enlightenment
reason was based on a reductive mistake:
It assumed that all of Enlightenmentreason is instrumental.
It isn't.
Habermas has since emerged
as a leading defenderof the Enlightenment and liberalism.
(20:44):
And he defends them
even as he frequently criticizesliberal democracies from the left.
He can do thatwithout paradoxical self-contradiction,
because in its commitmentto the open exercise of reason, liberalism
supports anyone criticizing anything,including liberalism itself.
That can be a severe political weakness.
(21:06):
Self-critical, self-doubting liberalsare notoriously self-defeating.
So it's up to liberalsto make reason a political strength.
That includes defending it as a vehiclenot just of amoral
productivity and technocratic progress,
but the inspiring valuesliberalism owns but too seldom claims.
(21:29):
At the same time,it involves recognizing that in politics,
reason isn't enough — not nearly enough.
We'll start there next time.
Welcome to Dastardly Clevernessin the Service of Good.
I'm Spencer Critchley.
This time, Chapter 8of The Liberal Backbone.
You can find the previous chaptersin previous episodes,
or a dastardlycleverness.com,on the Dastardly Cleverness YouTube
channel, or at Substack —just search there for Spencer Critchley —
(00:20):
and I hope you'll follow me there too.
This chapter is calledDefending Enlightenment.
Here we go.
Of all the potential causesof liberal confusion,
few are more confusing than this (00:33):
Being
reasonable has become controversial.
It's a fundamental assumptionof liberal democracy
that we debate our differenceswith reason.
But now that assumptionlooks like a relic of a bygone age.
— specifically, the Age of Enlightenment
from the late 17thto early 19th centuries.
(00:57):
During the Enlightenment,the ascent of reason defined
what would become the modern era.
The Enlightenment produced
more scientific progressthan all of previous history.
The very idea of progresscomes to us from the Enlightenment.
It had the same impacton the generation of wealth
compared to economic growthsince the enlightenment.
(01:18):
There was almost noneduring all the millennia before.
And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism,the philosophy of freedom and equality,
on which the United Statesand all liberal democracies are founded.
But ideologues of the MAGA rightare openly hostile
to the Enlightenment legacy.
So too are ideologues of the woke left.
(01:40):
So liberals need to decideif they're going to defend it.
When we left off last time, Ibram X.
Kendi had just argued that they can't,because
Enlightenment reasonis inherently oppressive.
Its supposedobjectivity just serves the interests
of the powerful people who devisedit: rich, white, male Westerners.
(02:01):
As we've
seen, that argument is centralto woke Theory.
In this chapter,we get to the liberal response.
But first, let's make sure we understandthe argument.
At its core is the chargethat the assertion
of universal laws of reasonwas an act of domination.
It forced all of natureand all of humanity
(02:23):
to fit within the same rigid,logical framework,
the better to study, manageand exploit them for profit.
The case is often madethe way Kendi makes it,
by pointing to America'shistory of racism and slavery.
You don't have to be woke to recognize
that Enlightenment reasonis implicated in both.
(02:44):
For a start, the white and black races
were essentially inventedduring the Enlightenment.
So were separate races for NativeAmericans, Asians, and other groups.
These new racial identitiesappeared at a convenient time:
when they would helpjustify the mass enslavement of Africans.
Slavery
and indentured servitude had been commonthroughout history
(03:08):
and around the world,including in the colonies of the Americas.
But as the colonial economies grew,
demand for unpaid laboroutstripped supply.
The gap was filled by captivesfrom Africa.
In the 15th century, new sailingtechnologies gave European traders access
to the continent, where they discoveredand developed a new market in slaves.
(03:32):
From the 16th to 19th centuries, more
than 12 millionwould be shipped across the Atlantic.
Not only was the supply bountiful,but it was non-European.
Growing moral qualms about the enslavementof human beings could be allayed.
Africans would be definedas less than human.
(03:53):
One source of authorityfor that definition was the Bible.
Slavery is condoned there,especially if the slaves
are foreigners, as in this passagefrom the Book of Leviticus: “All
of the heathen that are round
about you, of themshall you by bondman and bond maids.
Moreover of the children of the strangersthat do sojourn
(04:14):
among you, of them shall you buyand of their families that are with you,
which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. (04:19):
undefined
Theologians claimed to have discoveredthat the biblical “mark of
Cain” and “curse of Ham”were borne by people with dark skin.
In other words,God wanted Africans to suffer for sins
committed in the Holy Landnear the beginning of biblical time.
(04:42):
Newly ascendant sciencealso provided excuses for slavery.
The early botanist Carl Linnaeus designed
the system of categorieswe still use to classify life forms.
He applied his system to human beingsas well,
subdividing Homo sapiensinto different varieties.
He then ranked the varietiesby intelligence and temperament.
(05:05):
At the bottom was Homo Sapiens Africanus.
According
to Linnaeus, Africanswere naturally lazy, sly,
sluggish, neglectful,and at the mercy of their impulses.
He didn't design his racial hierarchyas a justification for slavery,
but slavers were happy to use it that way.
(05:26):
And countless Europeans and colonistsprospered on the profits.
No small part of the horror of slaverywas the scientific elimination
of compassion through what would cometo be called scientific racism.
In her book These Truths: A History of the United States, (05:41):
undefined
Harvard historian Jill Lepore describesthe dehumanized
economics of slaveryas realized in the cotton industry.
She writes, “Cotton had become
the most valuable commodityin the Atlantic world.
“Slavery wasn't an aberrationin an industrializing economy.
(06:02):
Slavery was its engine.
Factories had mechanical slaves.
Plantations had human slaves.
The power of machines was measuredby horsepower.
The power of slaves by hand.
Power.
A healthy man counted as two hands.
A nursing woman as a half hand.
(06:23):
A child as a quarter hand.
Charles Ball, born in Marylandduring the American Revolution,
spent years toiling on a slave plantationin South Carolina
and time on an auction blockwhere buyers inspected his hands,
moving each finger and the minute actionrequired to pick cotton.
(06:44):
“The standard calculationfor a cotton crop ten acres to the hand.”
In order to drive productivity ever
higher, planters deployed organizedtorture and terror under
what was known as the “pushing system.”Cornell historian Edward E.
Baptist describes it in his bookThe Half Has Never Been Told:
(07:07):
“Enslaved migrants in the fields quickly
learned what happenedif they lagged or resisted.
“In Mississippi, Allan Sidney saw a manwho had fallen behind the fore row
fight back against a black driverwho tried to ‘whip him up’ to pace.
A white overseer on horseback,
dropped his umbrella,spurred up, and shouted, ‘Take him down!’
(07:30):
The overseer pulled out a pistol and shotthe prone man dead.
None of the other slaves,Sydney remembered, said a word
or turned their heads.
“Theykept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.
They had learned that they had to adaptto pushing
or face unpredictablebut potentially extreme
(07:51):
violence.”
The history of this
industrialized cruelty is well documented.
But the most terrible partsare new to many Americans, partly
because some of the scholarship is new,and partly because, until recently,
few history textbooks ever confrontedthe full truth of
what was already known.
(08:13):
This means that many liberalslearn about it for the first time
from popular theoristssuch as Ibram X Kendi.
So it's not surprising that many assumethat Kennedy's conclusion must be right:
The cause of all this inhuman exploitation
was a dehumanizing worldviewbuilt on Enlightenment reason.
(08:33):
What happened to enslavedAfricans was monstrous
and yet scientifically reasonable.
And where that kind of reason rules,it suppresses everything that makes us
human beings instead of machines,or slaves to machines.
The victims are not only black people,but all people who are “other”
than the dominant group that constructedthe Enlightenment worldview.
(08:58):
This is
why Kendi writes, “I knewabout the equation of the Enlightenment
and ‘reason’ and ‘objectivity’and ‘empiricism’
with whiteness and Western Europeand masculinity and the bourgeoisie.”
So why wouldn't liberalscome to the same conclusion?
Because it contradicts other thingswe know about the Enlightenment.
(09:21):
There is no doubt that science
was used to justify and enable slavery,as well as the expulsion
and killing of Native Americans,and many other evils.
In the 20th century,it would effectuate death and suffering on
a previously unimaginable scalein the trenches of World War One,
the death camps of WorldWar Two, the Soviet gulags and elsewhere.
(09:45):
But that doesn't mean Enlightenment reasonwas the source of those evils.
Throughout all of history,people have committed
terrible acts using any tooland any justification available.
There is evidenceof slavery dating to thousands of years
before the Enlightenment,not only in Europe,
but across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
(10:08):
Also commonplace were human sacrifice
and other practices we now find abhorrent.
Theory is founded on
the axiom that oppression is not natural,but the artificial result
of an oppressive social structure,in particular, the Western one.
Liberalism originates in a more skepticalview of human nature, summarized by James
Madison (10:31):
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
There's an important argumentabout human nature here,
which we'll pick upwhen we look at identity politics.
For now, I'll notethat a great deal of evidence indicates
that human nature containsboth good and evil.
We are naturally cooperative,kind, and peaceful,
(10:54):
but also naturallypredatory, cruel and violent.
And to conclude
that Enlightenmentreason is a source of oppression,
we have to ignore everyone who has used itto fight oppression.
That fight has includedusing liberal religion to counter racist
religion and sound scienceto discredit racist pseudoscience.
(11:16):
To support his caseagainst the Enlightenment, Kendi,
like other theorists, can listracist statements and actions
by leading Enlightenment figures,like the philosopher David
Hume or the slave-owning FounderThomas Jefferson.
But he leaves out the manycounterexamples.
One is a foundational documentof the Enlightenment,
(11:36):
the French Encyclopedia, published between
1751 and 1772.
The mission of the Encyclopediawas to equip every person
with the knowledgethey would need to live in freedom.
Here is part of the entry on slaveryby the main editor, Denis Diderot.
It's based on the Enlightenmentconcept of universal, natural rights.
(12:01):
“This buying of
Negroes to reduce them toslavery is one business that violates
religion, morality, natural laws,and the rights of all human nature.
If commerce of this kind can be justifiedby a moral principle,
there is no crime, however atrociousit may be, that cannot be made legitimate.
(12:21):
“Men and their libertyare not objects of commerce.
They can neither be sold, nor bought,nor paid for at any price.
There is not, therefore,a single one of these unfortunate people,
regarded only as slaves, who does not havethe right to be declared free.
This Negro does not divest himself,and can never divest himself
(12:42):
of his natural right.
“He carries it everywhere with him,and he can demand everywhere
that he be allowed to enjoy it.”
Theorists often chargethat the true purpose of Enlightenment
universalism,including the concept of universal rights,
was to erase the cultures of peoplesubjugated by white European men.
(13:03):
The Enlightenment scholar SusanNeiman refutes that claim in her book
Woke Does Not Equal Left,published in 2023.
She writes, “It's now an article of faith
that universalism,like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham
that was invented to disguise Eurocentricviews supporting colonialism.
(13:25):
When I first heard such claimssome 15 years ago,
I thought they were so flimsythey'd soon disappear.
For the claims are not simply ungrounded,
they turn Enlightenment upside down.
Enlightenment thinkersinvented the critique of Eurocentrism
and were the first to attack colonialismon the basis of universalist ideas.
(13:47):
“To see this, you don't need the moredifficult texts of the Enlightenment.
A paperback edition of Candide is enough.
For a succinct diatribe againstfanaticism, feudal hierarchy, slavery,
colonial plunder, and other Europeanevils, you can hardly do better.”
Here's an excerpt from Candide, writtenby one of the most
(14:09):
celebrated enlightenmentphilosophers, Voltaire:
“As they drew near to the city,they came across a negro
stretched out on the groundwith no more than half of his clothes
left, which is to say,a pair of blue canvas drawers.
“The poor man had no left legand no right hand.
‘Good God,’ said Candide to him in Dutch.
(14:32):
‘What are you doing there, my friend,in such a deplorable state?’
‘I'm waiting for my master,Monsieur Vanderdendur,
the well-knownmerchant,’ answered the negro.
‘And was itMonsieur Vanderdendur?’ said Candide,
‘who treated you like this?’ ‘Yes,monsieur,’ said the negro.
‘It is the custom.
Twice a year we are given a pair of blue
(14:53):
canvas drawers,and this is our only clothing.
When we work in the sugar millsand get a finger
caught in the machinery,they cut off the hand.
But if we try to run away,they cut off a leg.
I have found myself in both situations.
‘It is the pricewe pay for the sugar you eat in Europe.’
(15:14):
Enlightenment
arguments against slavery and racismwere advanced by the most effective
anti-racists in history,like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B.
Dubois,Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
And as it happens, Kennedy'santi-Enlightenment
argumentsalso depend on Enlightenment reason.
(15:34):
He uses it to construct each of hissentences and to link one to the next.
He citesempirical evidence for his claims.
He expects readers to trustthat this evidence is objective.
He has little choice.
If we couldn't rely on sharedreason, empiricism,
and objectivity,all arguments could end in stalemate.
(15:55):
So an anti-racist would asserttheir lived experience and personal truth,
a racist would asserttheir lived experience
and personal truth,and that would be that —
except that whoever had more powerwould be even more likely to prevail,
since there wouldbe no viable alternative.
This is another paradox of Theory.
(16:17):
It's a version of what philosopherscall the Liar's Paradox.
Let's say we accept the Theoretical claim
that there are no objective truths,but only assertions of power.
Then we have no reason to trust anything
a Theorist says over anythinganyone else says.
It's just another assertion of power.
(16:37):
In order for Theorists to persuade anyone,they have to abandon Theory
for what looks a lot like EnlightenmentReason.
Or rather, it looks like a kind of
Enlightenment reasonthat Theory usually ignores.
There is a kind that reduces everythingto amoral facts and logic.
Philosophers call it “instrumentalreason.” Instrumental reason
(17:00):
is non-normative,meaning it has no moral norms.
It can tell you how to cure diseasesor build bombs, but not which is better.
Instrumental reason is supremely useful.
But if it were to take over our mindscompletely, we would churn out
rational but immoral decisionswithout ever being troubled by conscience.
(17:22):
This, in fact, does happen to some people.
It's one way of understanding the behaviorof Adolf Eichmann,
who efficiently and dispassionatelymanaged the logistics of the Holocaust.
At his postwar trial in Jerusalem,Eichmann appeared to feel no guilt,
arguing that he had only done his duty.
Reporting on the trial,the political theorist
(17:44):
Hannah Arendt described what she witnessedas “the banality of evil.”
But instrumental reasonisn't the only kind.
There's also such a thing as moral reason,the medium of moral philosophy.
One of the most importantbreakthroughs of the Enlightenment
was to free moral reasoningfrom control by
priests and princes,and offer it to ordinary people.
(18:08):
“Dare to know!” as Immanuel Kant wrotein his essay “What is Enlightenment?”
Kant was
probably the mostinfluential Enlightenment philosopher.
He's often accused by theoristsof embedding Eurocentric oppression
in his universal principles of reason.
Like many people of his time, Kant
did make Eurocentricand racist assumptions.
(18:31):
And yet, the basis of his philosophywas that it applied to all people.
And late in life, he applied it tohimself, renouncing his earlier biases.
At the age of 71,he wrote this in his book Toward
Perpetual Peace (which Susan Neimanalso quotes):
“Comparethe inhospitable actions of the civilized,
(18:51):
and especially of the commercial statesof our part of the world.
The injusticethey show to lands and peoples they visit
(which is equivalent to conquering them)is carried by them to terrifying lengths.
America, the lands inhabited by the Negro,
the Spice Islands,the Cape, etc., were at the time
of their discoveryconsidered by these civilized intruders
(19:15):
as lands without owners, forthey counted the inhabitants as nothing.
They oppress the natives, excitewidespread wars
among the various states,spread famine, rebellion, perfidy,
and the whole litany of evilswhich afflict mankind.”
Without moral reasoning,the religious justifications for slavery
(19:36):
and racism would have gone unchallenged,and so would the pseudo scientific ones.
With moral reasoning,we got liberal societies that,
for all their faults,have become the most free
and egalitarianin the history of civilization.
Reasondoes not have to be amoral or oppressive.
It can be the shared languageof the “public sphere,”
(19:59):
where people of all kinds can communicate,debate, learn, solve problems,
and pursue justicewithout anyone forcing anyone else
to adopt any particular beliefor ideology.
This kind of reason is whatthe sociologist and philosopher
Jürgen Habermascalls “communicative rationality.”
In his
youth, Habermaswas a student of Horkheimer and Adorno,
(20:23):
the Critical Theoristswho wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment.
But he concluded thattheir critique of Enlightenment
reason was based on a reductive mistake:
It assumed that all of Enlightenmentreason is instrumental.
It isn't.
Habermas has since emerged
as a leading defenderof the Enlightenment and liberalism.
(20:44):
And he defends them
even as he frequently criticizesliberal democracies from the left.
He can do thatwithout paradoxical self-contradiction,
because in its commitmentto the open exercise of reason, liberalism
supports anyone criticizing anything,including liberalism itself.
That can be a severe political weakness.
(21:06):
Self-critical, self-doubting liberalsare notoriously self-defeating.
So it's up to liberalsto make reason a political strength.
That includes defending it as a vehiclenot just of amoral
productivity and technocratic progress,
but the inspiring valuesliberalism owns but too seldom claims.
(21:29):
At the same time,it involves recognizing that in politics,
reason isn't enough — not nearly enough.
We'll start there next time.
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