Defending Enlightenment: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 8

Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good

It’s a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason.

But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries.

The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of wealth: Compared to economic growth since the Enlightenment, there was almost none during all the millennia before. And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, the philosophy of freedom and equality on which the United States and all liberal democracies are founded.

But ideologues of the MAGA right are openly hostile to the Enlightenment legacy.

So too are the ideologues of the woke left.

So liberals need to decide if they’re going to defend it.

In its commitment to the open exercise of reason, liberalism supports anyone criticizing anything, including liberalism itself.

That can be a severe political weakness. Self-critical, self-doubting liberals are notoriously self-defeating.

So it’s up to liberals to make reason a political strength. That involves defending it as a vehicle not just of amoral productivity and technocratic progress, but the inspiring values liberalism owns but too seldom claims.

You can find this episode's transcript, footnotes, and links at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack.