Veritas et Sapientia-We Are Witness To The Enlightenment’s Funeral

Mandeville, LA – [Editor’s note: I cut and pasted from this essay to select the points James Davis Hunter makes on the death of the Enlightenment and the futility of performing CPR on it. – MC ]

As Hannah Arendt observed, the moral and political authority of the Enlightenment project and the Western tradition more extensively was simply too frail to counter the challenge of totalitarianism. 

A common cultural logic is unlikely to return because there is no credible foundation of authority upon which to rebuild it. For all of its continued vitality in personal lives and local communities, religious faith has been thoroughly weaponized on behalf of partisan interests.

The remnants of ascetic Protestantism, not to mention Christianity more broadly, as well as the Jewish faith, continued to endure over generations in the personal lives of individuals and the bounded lives of local communities, but as a cultural logic of the public sphere, these attenuated faith traditions were mostly discredited intellectually and marginalized culturally. Their conceptions of the good and the just became associated not with a healthy morality but with small-minded and mean-spirited moralism; their conceptions of legitimate authority, with authoritarianism. As to reason, for all of the remarkable discoveries of science, science itself failed spectacularly to deliver a grounding for a common ethics and everyday morality. Neither faith nor reason, nor their early Enlightenment synthesis, could make sense of the horrors of two world wars or the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation. Neither faith nor reason could resolve the concrete political questions made pressing by the advance of modernity: Who can enjoy the benefits of freedom? Equality for whom? What are the limits of tolerance? And, hovering above all the others, On what grounds do we reconcile various personal and private interests with the public good?

What followed were successive attempts to rework the Enlightenment project for a world it no longer accounted for and for which it had less and less credibility. On what foundation could cultural and civic authority be established? On what grounds could any solidarity in a contentious, fragmented population be found? On what basis could civil society, upon which democratic life is built, be renewed?

A common cultural logic is unlikely to return because there is no credible foundation of authority upon which to rebuild it. For all of its continued vitality in personal lives and local communities, religious faith has been thoroughly weaponized on behalf of partisan interests. In the civic or political realm, it speaks no universal truths. And for all of the achievements of science in so many different realms of inquiry, the credibility of science as an enterprise has been undermined by both the skepticism of postmodern theory and the weaknesses of “peer review.” Even in the popular mind, many believe that science itself is biased toward personal and political interests—that facts don’t matter. [Emphasis mine – MC] – James Davison Hunter – The Unraveling of The Enlightenment Project

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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