The Debate About Enlightenment
A funny thing happened to the Enlightenment on
the way to the 21st Century: it became the object of scathing critique
as the generator of what is most wrong with modern Western culture. A broad
range of thinkers, from Adorno and Horkheimer (The Dialectic of Enlightenment
to Foucault (Discipline and
Punish, The History of Sexuality), developed a harsh challenge
to the way the “age of Enlightenment” had seen itself, and the way others
had understood it. I offer this critique, not because I accept it, but because
it will offer a salutary way to question the idealistic concept of enlightenment
embedded within our study of the several developers of “enlightenment communications”:
Newton and Kant, Milton and Jefferson, Addison and Steele. It also will allow
us to understand the dark side of Enlightenment evident in part II of our
course, that devoted to “Colonial Correspondence.”
Critique of Enlightenment
According to these critics, the Enlightenment brought change
all right—a change for the worse:
- Enlightenment
science passes itself off as a disinterested search for the truth about
nature, but in fact, by disenchanting Nature of her mysteries, nature
becomes nothing more than a “standing reserve” of natural resources to be
exploited.
- The
Enlightenment political narrative is cast as a story of the movement toward
freedom and democracy, but in fact, the modern state develops
systems of control and bureaucratic administration that extend greater and
greater control over the individual.
- Enlightenment
economics glories in overcoming local and political obstacles to the free
flow of labor, capital, and goods, but the enclosure of common lands
and the improvements in agricultural production in 18th century
England empties villages of their ancient inhabitants, and fill the cities
with rootless workers who must turn their labor into a living wage.
- Western
countries glory in spreading enlightened religion, knowledge and technology
to the backward native cultures, but this sense of the West’s enlightened
superiority becomes an alibi for conquest and subjection of native peoples
and cultures.
- Finally,
while Enlightenment thinkers promised a steady progressive improvement
in manner, morals, technology, and general social well-being, while
the 19th and 20th century experienced unprecedented
levels of state sponsored violence and economic exploitation.
For the critics of Enlightenment, the Enlightenment
is most essentially about power: by making a succession of others (nature,
religion, the self, other cultures) the object of Enlightenment knowledge, the
Enlightenment subject-position subjects others to itself. When, for example,
English farmers occupy Native American lands upon arrival at Plymouth, they
strip Nature of the aura of mystery, the sacredness with which Native Americans
invested it. The grid of Enlightenment rationalism is the crucial precondition
for those techniques of surveying, map-making, and legal property division with
which the English farmer divide and take possession of the American land.
The Example of The Declaration of Independence
How would this critique of Enlightenment allow
us to “read” The Declaration of Independence?
The critique of the Declaration:
- The
preamble to the Declaration
speaks of its “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” and addresses
itself explicitly to “the Supreme judge of the world”. However, the drafters
of this document, and the leaders of the American Revolution were a relatively
small group of white, tax-paying, literate, voting property owners, attempting
to speak for all (servants, laborers, slaves, women, etc.).
- The
crucial second paragraph outlines a universalist political philosophy around
the notion that “all men are created equal” and have “unalienable rights”
to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But both “equality” and
these rights were claimed and extended to relatively few; and the high idealism
of these values is actually motivated by the concrete economic benefits
that independence would bring to the signers.
- The
third paragraph claims to offer a list of facts; but the biased perspective
asserted against King George III and the intemperate tone of the charges,
suggests that this is a family feud, or Oedipal rebellion of the brothers
against the father. The excessive anger of the signers suggests their disillusionment
with a once idealized Father/ Country (England).
- While
the Declaration presents itself as a rational response to particular
grievances, it is also producing a new mythology around an emerging nation—the
united States of America. The Declaration is the new secular scripture
for a country that will become the new object of veneration for the People.
In other words, the myth the Enlightenment claims to expel or surpass a
primitive or benighted form of government (monarchy, with a child-like adoration
of the King’s body), returns in new forms (President George replaces King
George). Such a return of an apparently surpassed myth is suggested by the
change way the new American Republic rewrites the patriotic strains of “God
Save the King” as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
Short
Rejoinder in Defense of the Enlightenment strand in the Declaration
This
text’s radical claims for equality and the rights to life liberty and the
pursuit of happiness were first made by and on behalf of a privileged minority
of the population. However, they became a verbal and conceptual model for
subsequent efforts to expand the rights of slaves (in the Massachusetts’s
Slave Petition, 1777), of Frenchmen (Declaration of Rights, 1789) and women (Seneca Fall Resolution, 1846). Viewed in this light,
the Declaration
helps to invent the terms for on ongoing, never completed, process of claiming
legitimate rights. Even those who
critique the historical effects of Enlightenment, accept the Enlightenment
ideals of rational scrutiny, public exchange and personal liberty that ground
the critique of Enlightenment.