1. This @jbouie piece on the whitewashing of the Enlightenment is, as expected, excellent: slate.com/news-and-polit…
2. A few footnotes. As Bouie notes, the recent advocates of the Enlightenment are conservatives & centrists (Pinker, Goldbeg, Jordan Peterson) creating a usable past. It's worth noting how badly their own commitments fit their fictional intellectual history.
3. If Jordan Peterson's talk of Female Chaos & Male Order really Enlightenment? Nope. it draws on mythologists (Jung, Eliade, Campbell) rooted in Germanic romanticism (a mystical & anti-Enlightenment tradition).
4. And Jonah Goldberg is heir to National Review conservatism, a tradition whose leading intellectual lights (Burnham, Chambers, various Straussians) were decidedly outside the Enlightenment.
5. Whittaker Chambers (a huge figure in National Review's history) once suggested Enlightenment was like the apple that Satan got Adam & Eve to eat.
6. Pinker has more right to claim an Enlightenment linage but his critique of Blank Slate-ism sits uneasily with his echoes of Enlightenment ideas of perfectibility. 
7. Which is all to say that the current enthusiasts of the Enlightenment are (like the rest of us!) not really 18th century thinkers but engaged in a complex with past. The problem is they want to claim full ownership of a what is in fact public domain thought.
7. Which is all to say that the current enthusiasts of the Enlightenment are (like the rest of us!) not really 18th century thinkers but engaged in a complex dialogue with past. The problem is they want to claim full ownership of a what is in fact public domain thought
8. Why claim the Enlightenment when you are really in complex argument with it? Because you see the Enlightenment not as a complex historical phenomenon but rather as a brand. "We're Team Enlightenment," the argument goes. "You are Team Tribalist."
9. Team Enlightenment is interesting as a branding exercise. But let's not confuse it with intellectual history.
10. Why does the racism of long dead thinkers like Locke & Kant cause a scandal? Because it hurts the brand of Team Enlightenment. But if you're interested in history, not branding, you can handle fact of checkered history.
