Andrea Widburg has written a lot of articles for American Thinker, and I have read some of them and I have liked some of those Iâve read. I also like her pro-Jewish passion, necessarily and bravely expressed in this era of antisemitism and pogroms. (One does not have to embrace their religion to side with the Jewish people as you and I know well, Cogito.) But in this article she has got something wrong - the nature of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a repudiation of religion. Its philosophers argued for reason and against superstition. The movement destroyed the power of the churches. The outcome was twofold, a stream of good ideas and a stream of bad ideas. The good outcome was the founding of the USA on the principle of individual freedom. Also the revival of doubt and so of scientific investigation. The bad outcome was the rise of Romanticism, out of which came the French Revolution and the Terror. (Rousseau was a romantic, Voltaire a philosophe.)
Widburg writes: âThe Enlightenment valued ⌠the Jewish Bible because Enlightenment thinkers recognized that it contained within it the most profound concept in the entire Bible: Individuals have value, and that value comes because God created them in his image.â
Not so. Absolutely not.
Enlightenment thinkers valued individualism (she got that right) and therefore tolerance of difference. And so - logically - emancipation of the Jews.
Communism was and remains a romantic idea. (As I explain in my series of essays under the overall title The Darkness of This World, listed under Pages in the margin of our TAC website.) The perfect society without private ownership. Economic equality. Fraternity. Heaven on earth. (And if anyone disagrees, he/she does not deserve to live.)
Far from being âan aberrationâ, the Enlightenment was the best thing that ever happened. Our values are Enlightenment values. They will probably continue to clash with the values of superstition until the end of time.
It is important to remember that more people voted for Marine Le Penâs conservative party than for any other.
Yes, she (and so many other religious thinkers) gets it wrong crediting the Bible with the concept that âindividuals have valueâ. If they did, it was still not enough to prevent both Jews and Christians from thinking - just, as you note, communists do now - âthat if anyone disagrees, he/she does not deserve to liveâ.
This is evident in the Bible itself, in the punishments laid out in the O.T. such as stoning, for any disobedience to the Law. And of course Christians burned heretics at the stake.
Only after both religions were âdeclawedâ by the Enlightenment did they become tolerant.
The only reason for the ârenewalâ of anti-semitism now is due to the forced introduction into the civilized world of 7th century barbarians whoâs religion is still pure and undiluted by the Enlightenment! In which, of course, as with all pure religions, disagreement will not be tolerated.
Aside from that one disagreement, the article as a whole is a great recounting of the history of the Jews, and in relation to them, both the positive force of the Enlightenment and the destructive forces of Communism and Islam.
Itâs so ironic - the Jews, who, being the first âmonotheismâ, were both exploited (plagiarized from) and persecuted by their religious successors Christianity and Islam; after the Enlightenment, when Communism and Nazism emerged, the Jews were both exploited and persecuted by each of them, also. Communists, who never fail to exploit a âvictimâ, exploited these true victims of the Nazis by convincing them that Communism was the antidote to Nazism.
And now they have been thrown under the bus by the the Communists in favor of their latest (bogus) âvictimâ group, Muslims, who still hate them with greater religious zeal than those they escaped after the defeat of Hitler.
Thank you, Liz and Jillian, for your comments. I agree, Jillian, with your condemnation of Widburgâs celebration of the Hebrew Bible. That sentence stood out like a sore thumb. The Age of Reason was characterized by three fundamental ideas - 1) that man should focus on natural rather than supernatural explanations of our world. 2) Man should focus on this life rather than any afterlife. 3) Man should focus on reason rather than faith or revelation. She misunderstands this, apparently.
Beyond that, I thought the article decent enough. As to her remark about the Enlightenment being an aberration, I think she meant that rationalism and individualism made the Enlightenment an aberration in history, insomuch as it was a brief interlude separating the centuries of Christian persecution from the secularized persecution of Communism and Nazism.
Yes, thatâs the opinion she conveys. But she is mistaken.
Atheism is very old - no one knows how old; but until the Enlightenment it was considered wicked, an insult to feared divinity.
The Enlightenment was not a brief interlude. It permanently established reason as the light of the mind. The light cannot be lost as long as humankind exists. It provided the values on which this Constitutional Republic was founded - freedom, rule of law, tolerance ⌠and, for many, the innumerable rewards of skepticism, including atheism.
And science. Or what a scientist I know calls âsuck it and seeâ. AI is the next giant step of enlightened humanity.
Nazism was defeated. Communism always fails sooner or later. Islam is the new Nazism. There will be more tyrannies.
But the battle of mental light against emotional darkness will (probably) be fought through all time.
Yes, I think what she meant was that the Enlightenment was a brief interlude of history in which Reason grew so much in influence that it was respected rather than persecuted by religion, as it had been in the past, or distorted and abused as it was later by irrational ideologies like Marxism.
Ah! Perhaps that is what she meant.
There seems to be a vogue these days, going back many years now, for denigrating the Enlightenment (as the source of âmodernityâ, which is also frowned upon). I think that was probably initiated by the postmodernists, critical theorists, and the like. But from what I read in the comments here, it does not sound like Widburg is of that ilk.
I have only been reading her for a few months, but I agree with you.
So true that the battle is âmental light versus emotional darknessâ!
Conversion to, and belief in religion is largely based on emotion. When the âmental lightâ of Reason increases, primitive superstitions diminish.