M&D related: the Line from the Enlightenment to the present

[pynchonoid]

Sweep of reason
Critics say the Islamic world needs its own
Enlightenment. But just how enlightened was our own?
By Darrin M. McMahon, 6/22/2003

[...] The publication several months ago of the
''Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment'' (Oxford), edited
in four volumes by the University of Pennsylvania
historian Alan Charles Kors, is in this respect
extremely well timed. [...] 

To 19th-century socialists or 20th-century Marxists,
on the other hand, the Enlightenment seemed a rather
tepid affair. Its vaunted liberal freedoms and
individual rights, they argued, were really the false
freedoms of the few, merely used to promote the rising
bourgeoisie's ascent to power. By contrast, in the
aftermath of World War II, critics of a variety of
political persuasions came to see the influence of the
Enlightenment as all too vast.

In an infamous case for the prosecution, the
left-leaning German philosophers Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno argued that the Enlightenment was
responsible for the Holocaust. Incapable of defining
absolute moral ends, the Enlightenment's
''instrumental reason'' could define only means. A
tool of power, it encouraged human beings to see their
fellows as objects to be exploited like the natural
resources of the earth. ''Enlightenment behaves
towards things,'' Horkheimer and Adorno affirmed, ''as
a dictator toward men.'' In a grim pun, they added,
''The fully enlightened earth radiates the triumph of
destruction.''

Looking on from a quite different perspective, leading
defenders of the West during the Cold War, such as the
Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin, leveled
similar charges regarding the allegedly totalitarian
tendencies lurking in the Enlightenment. In their
view, however, the end product was not the Holocaust
but the Gulag. The Enlightenment's will to
intellectual mastery, they charged, and its attempt to
link all values-moral, political, and aesthetic-to a
uniform rational system was akin to the perverted
force that drove communist tyranny, stamping out
genuine pluralism and difference in the name of
reason.

More recently, a number of postmodern scholars have
given their own spin to such interpretations.
Frequently drawing on the work of the late French
philosopher Michel Foucault, they tend to be
suspicious, even contemptuous, of the Enlightenment's
claims on behalf of reason. Such critics point out,
for example, that so-called ''enlightened'' scientists
developed dubious and ultimately insidious ways to
classify gender difference and racial inferiority in
the 18th century, basing their conclusions on the
alleged authority of reason. And they press the
uncomfortable fact that good enlightenment figures
like Jefferson, Kant, and Hume had what by today's
standards are extremely distasteful views on
''inferior'' (e.g., nonwhite) peoples. Far from being
a movement of freedom, enlightenment was a tool of
hegemony and social control.

[...] There is even an entry on ''coffeehouses and
cafes.'' 

[...] This story ran on page D4 of the Boston Globe on 6/22/2003.

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