David Brooks, "The Enlightenment Project"
David Shasha
David Brooks, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and American Religious Humanism
David Brooks is having a great deal of difficulty dealing with Donald Trump, the new Ronald Reagan.
His discussion of the Enlightenment is interesting for the way it problematizes religion, a subject that usually animates his discussions in a positive way:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-enlightenment-project.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
In his words:
The Enlightenment project gave us the modern world, but it has always had weaknesses. First, Enlightenment figures perpetually tell themselves that religion is dead (it isn’t) and that race is dead (it isn’t), and so they are always surprised by events. Second, it is thin on meaning. It treats people as bland rational egoists and tends to produce governments run by soulless technocrats. Third, Enlightenment governance fails from time to time.
Though it does not specifically identify religious fundamentalism as the culprit, the following passage from the column shows us just how anti-rational ideas serve to undermine our Liberal political values:
Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements don’t think truth is to be found through skeptical inquiry and debate. They think wisdom and virtue are found in the instincts of the plain people, deep in the mystical core of the nation’s or race’s group consciousness.
His characterization of “anti-Enlightenment movements” describes Reagan Republicanism perfectly.
It also describes the Da’as Torah mentality.
It was Reagan who brought Jerry Falwell and the so-called “Moral Majority” into the American political arena.
A 2014 article from Salon called Reagan the “Evangelical President” for good reason:
It was also Reagan who championed a lawless Wall Street and corporate sector by deregulating the financial markets, suppressing labor rights, and encouraging untrammeled greed and selfishness in our culture.
The unleashing of atavistic forces was a hallmark of the Reagan administration, as the Religious Right merged with an unbridled and unregulated economic system in ways that refused the most basic religious ethics and a rational view of the Capitalist system.
Today’s Republican Party continues to beat the drum of deregulation, tax reduction, and the sacredness of greed under its venerable new leader Donald Trump.
And let us not forget the xenophobia and racism that is essential to nativist populism was also central to Reaganism and has been resurrected by Trump with a vengeance.
It is thus interesting to note Brooks’ inability to see how his beloved Conservative political ideology has rejected a pluralistic America which would be inclusive of non-White, non-Christian cultural identities under the umbrella of Multiculturalism.
Reagan’s pseudo-populism ruled in the name of White Christian hegemony in a way that can rightly be seen as the precursor of Trumpworld.
In point of fact, it was Reagan who began this whole “Make America Great Again” meme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again#History
Underlying the discussion on the Enlightenment is Brooks’ complete ignorance of the tradition of Religious Humanism that can be found in the classical Sephardic Jewish heritage, as well as in eminent Ashkenazi thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Emmanuel Levinas.
It was Religious Humanism that led to the Anti-Slavery movement, the Civil Rights movement, and other movements for freedom and tolerance in our culture.
Even though he name-checks Immanuel Kant, Brooks does not seem to be able to take the extra step to get to Mendelssohn, a disciple of Kant, whose philosophical-political model is actually closer to the American tradition than the Enlightenment thinkers he cites.
Indeed, early American political thought was influenced by the principles of figures like Gershom Mendes Seixas and Jonas Phillips who brought the values of Iberian Judaism to these shores.
George Washington’s famous letter on Religious Tolerance shows us how Sephardic Jews were actively involved in the earliest stages of American pluralism as they provided the values of Religious Humanism to the fledgling nation:
http://www.tourosynagogue.org/history-learning/gw-letter
But rather than present the matter in terms of American history and its legacy of Religious Humanism, Brooks provides a rather stale rehashing of a very Eurocentric reading of civilization. This reading embodies the very soullessness and mechanistic monolingualism that got us into the Trump problem to begin with.
We have seen Brooks’ ignorance before, when he presented the great French moralist Michel de Montaigne in a decidedly negative light:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/opinion/brooks-ease-and-ardor.html
I discussed the matter in the following Jerusalem Post article:
Brooks’ blindness to Religious Humanism and its illustrious historical pedigree serves to confuse his understanding of the American political tradition, which successfully preserved the pluralistic values that were embodied in the old Maimonidean system.
It was this critical adjustment to the rigid Enlightenment values that allowed this country to avoid the many pitfalls that have plagued the European system for so many centuries.
And it has not at all been helpful that American Judaism is currently run by Ashkenazim who have emphatically rejected the Sephardic tradition and silence those who dare speak in its name.
We can certainly count Brooks as one of those Ashkenazim who have sown the seeds of factionalism and contentiousness.
The old Sephardic model once acted as a unifying factor in American Judaism, but as we see today the situation is a mess, as the warring extremes of assimilation and Orthodox fundamentalism have taken hold of a community in tatters. The Jewish flexibility embodied in the classical Sephardic heritage is a thing of the past.
Brooks’ constant vacillation on Trumpworld Fascism is thus a product of his deeply-rooted Conservative values which have now come face to face with a form of bald-faced racism and ignorance that serve to expose the illusions of Reagan’s greatness.
Indeed, Donald Trump is the logical product of the Reagan Revolution as he embodies the vulgar Capitalism, callous self-interest, and anti-intellectualism that was the hallmark of the Gipper; a man who opened the door to the very religious fundamentalism and racist nativism that Brooks now seeks to excoriate.
Brooks needs to rethink his adoration of Reagan and look to the pluralistic values of Religious Humanism in order to mount a prudent critique of Trumpworld.
David Shasha
The Enlightenment Project
By: David Brooks
Being around a college classroom can really expand your perspective. For example, last week we were finishing off a seminar in grand strategy when one of my Yale colleagues, Charles Hill, drew a diagram on the board that put today’s events in a sweeping historical perspective.
Running through the center of the diagram was the long line of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment included thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority for how to live. Instead, they should think things through from the ground up, respect facts and skeptically re-examine their own assumptions and convictions.
Enlightenment thinkers turned their skeptical ideas into skeptical institutions, notably the U.S. Constitution. America’s founders didn’t trust the people or themselves, so they built a system of rules, providing checks and balances to pit interest against interest.
De Tocqueville came along and said that if a rules-based democratic government was going to work anywhere it was going to be the United States. America became the test case for the entire Enlightenment project. With his distrust of mob rule and his reverence for law, Abraham Lincoln was a classic Enlightenment man. His success in the Civil War seemed to vindicate faith in democracy and the entire Enlightenment cause.
In the 20th century, Enlightenment leaders extended the project globally, building rules-based multilateral institutions like the European Union and NATO to restrain threatening powers and preserve a balance of power.
The Enlightenment project gave us the modern world, but it has always had weaknesses. First, Enlightenment figures perpetually tell themselves that religion is dead (it isn’t) and that race is dead (it isn’t), and so they are always surprised by events. Second, it is thin on meaning. It treats people as bland rational egoists and tends to produce governments run by soulless technocrats. Third, Enlightenment governance fails from time to time.
At these moments anti-Enlightenment movements gain power. Amid the collapse of the old regimes during World War I, the Marxists attacked the notion of private property. That brought us Lenin, Stalin and Mao. After the failures of Versailles, the Nietzscheans attacked the separation of powers and argued that power should be centralized in the hands of society’s winners, the master race. This brought us Hitler and the Nazis.
Hill pointed out that the forces of the Enlightenment have always defeated the anti-Enlightenment threats. When the Cold War ended, the Enlightenment project seemed utterly triumphant.
But now we’re living in the wake of another set of failures: the financial crisis, the slow collapse of the European project, Iraq. What’s interesting, Hill noted, is that the anti-Enlightenment traditions are somehow back. Nietzschean thinking is back in the form of Vladimir Putin. Marxian thinking is back in the form of an aggressive China. Both Russia and China are trying to harvest the benefits of the Enlightenment order, but they also want to break the rules when they feel like it. They incorporate deep strains of anti-Enlightenment thinking and undermine the post-Enlightenment world order.
Hill didn’t say it, but I’d add that anti-Enlightenment thinking is also back in the form of Donald Trump, racial separatists and the world’s other populist ethnic nationalist movements.
Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements don’t think truth is to be found through skeptical inquiry and debate. They think wisdom and virtue are found in the instincts of the plain people, deep in the mystical core of the nation’s or race’s group consciousness.
Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements believe less in calm persuasion and evidence-based inquiry than in purity of will. They try to win debates through blunt force and silencing unacceptable speech.
They don’t see history as a gradual march toward cooperation. They see history as cataclysmic cycles — a zero-sum endeavor marked by conflict. Nations trying to screw other nations, races inherently trying to oppress other races.
These movements are hostile to rules-based systems, multilateral organizations, the messy compromises of democratic politics and what Steve Bannon calls the “administrative state.” They prefer the direct rule by one strongman who is the embodiment of the will of the people.
When Trump calls the media the “enemy of the people” he is going after the system of conversation, debate and inquiry that is the foundation for the entire Enlightenment project.
When anti-Enlightenment movements arose in the past, Enlightenment heroes rose to combat them. Lincoln was no soulless technocrat. He fought fanaticism by doubling down on Enlightenment methods, with charity, reason and patience. He worked tirelessly for unity over division. He was a hopeful pessimist who knew the struggle would be long but he had faith in providence and ultimate justice.
We live in a time when many people have lost faith in the Enlightenment habits and institutions. I wonder if there is a group of leaders who will rise up and unabashedly defend this project, or even realize that it is this fundamental thing that is now under attack.
From The New York Times, February 28, 2017