Because It Works

It shouldn't really need saying, but with thinkers of the calibre of Madeleine Bunting around, it obviously does. Andrew Anthony on the importance of the enlightenment (via b&w):

Enlightenment thinkers make an intellectual case against fundamentalism which you can take or leave. Islamic fundamentalists make the case against freedom and rationality by issuing death threats to - and sometimes killing - anyone with whom they disagree. It's a tough one, but I think I know which system I prefer.

What's obvious is that principles that were once taken for granted - freedom of expression, rule of law, secularism, rationality - are now being questioned. Fair enough. Nothing is set in stone. But the questions posed, and the visions offered - censorship, mob rule, religious law, superstition and the privileging of emotion - were adequately dealt with by Enlightenment thinkers. They, after all, had to contend with religious literalism, so it makes perfect sense to refer back to them. "They see the light infused into their understandings, and cannot be mistaken," Locke wrote of religious fundamentalists,"'it is clear and visible there, like the light of bright sunshine; shows itself, and needs no other proof but its own evidence: they feel the hand of God moving them within, and the impulse of the Spirit, and cannot be mistaken in what they feel." Sound familiar?

Furthermore, much of Enlightenment thought has grown to be more relevant. Empiricism, for instance, is an innately democratic idea. Kant argued that an action is right for one person only if it is right for any and all. This is the basis of democratic justice and, indeed, universal human rights. We can engage in debate on what that justice and those rights might entail but out of that debate we can agree, for example, that if it's right for us not be slaves, it is right for all humans not be slaves.

So when Bunting asks why we still hold to an understanding of rationality that is over 200 years old, the answer is that it works. Just as the understanding that the Earth revolves around the Sun works, even though - gulp - it's an even older idea. Rational debate and free expression allow for - indeed positively encourage - new and better ideas and hypothesis, while never settling on a definitive truth. All ideas are permitted but rationality also offers a means of testing their worthiness through open and vigorous debate.

Comments

[SnoopyTheGoon]

I read Ms. Bunting's contribution to free thought in its entirety. Please forgive me, but I have decided to focus only on the beginnig one and a half sentences:

"I need some help. I've been getting increasingly disturbed..."

Yep. Help, and pronto. Unless we want her to join the new Islam Reformation movement of Wahabbis.

[Dom]

Did you see her casual reference to "Persian Letters", like she has it sitting on her nightstand? There should be a word for this, a writer's attempt to make us think she is an expert on something she obviously isn't. You can find translations of "Persian Letters" on the web. Why would anyone think it demonstrates that the enlightenment "was shaped in opposition to Islam and hence has an inbuilt anti-Islamic bias".

Unbelievable.