"To the eighteenth-century thinkers—and to the perhaps profounder philosophers of the seventeenth—we owe the relative freedom that we enjoy in our thought and speech and creeds; we owe the multiplication of schools, libraries, and universities; we owe a hundred humane reforms in law and government, in the treatment of crime, sickness, and insanity. To them we owe the immense stimulation of mind that produced the literature, science, philosophy, and statesmanship of the nineteenth century. Because of them our religions can free themselves more and more from a dulling superstition and a sadistic theology, can turn their backs upon obscurantism and persecution, and can recognize the need for mutual sympathy in the diverse tentatives of our ignorance and our hope. Because of those men we, here and now, can write without fear, though not without reproach. When we cease to honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of freedom. " (from “The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume IX” by Will Durant, Ariel Durant)
Well, we’ve already reached that point, that we’re “unworthy of freedom”, because now people can lose their job and/or be arrested for disagreeing with the tenets of the “woke” cult.
Thanks for the reminder, Cogito.
The Enlightenment above all taught the supremacy of the values of freedom, reason, justice, equality before the law. To the Enlightenment we owe the Industrial Revolution, the revival of scientific enquiry, and the principles and governing system (particularly from British and French ideas, specifically of Locke and Montesquieu) of the United States of America.
Glory to Western Europe to which alone the Enlightenment belonged. There are legions of bien-pensants, sentimental virtue-signalers, full of good-will but uninformed, who would like this not to be true, insist that it isn’t true. But true it is.
The Enlightenment is one of the best things that ever happened (arguably the best thing) in all history.
Now it is being cancelled. And Western Europe and the United States of America are leading the destruction.
I’m reminded of something Paul Johnson said about America - something to the effect that the founding of the United States was the greatest achievement of mankind. I don’t have the precise quote,
The founding of the United States is the pinnacle of the glorious Enlightenment. The decline and fall of the American experiment will rank as the great catastrophe of Civilization.
I think a truer statement could not be made!
To which statement do you refer, his or mine?
Oh, yours! Both, actually - I thought you were re-phrasing his! Anyway, very true.