This is not the mega-thread on the Enlightenment I promised but a quick response to this from @NoahCRothman:
commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas…
commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas…
I think there are obvious dangers in anti-Enlightenment thought, whether it takes right-wing or left-wing or some overlapping far-left/far-right form. At the same time the scenario where @jbouie and I team up to take down Lockean liberalism seems pretty remote at the moment.
What seems less remote is the scenario we're actually inhabiting, where liberalism is 1) still basically unchallenged, Viktor Orban notwithstanding and 2) manifesting many of the problems (alienation, stratification, etc) that critics on the left and right identified in the past.
So it seems like a good time to listen to those critics, while also maintaining an awareness of the evils to which their politics are sometimes heir, in order to figure out a way forward that doesn't just end in opioids and gated communities, soma and VR.
Also, and relatedly, American conservatives in particular need to recognize that the national story -- very Protestant and very Enlightenment-friendly -- that bound our country together in the past has a lot less resonance for an emerging America.
So any new national story (if such a story can be written) needs to incorporate insights from the old story's skeptics even as it retains a basic admiration for our past. Which, again, sometimes requires putting reactionary and radical ideas together, risky as that might be.
