Traitors to the Enlightenment<Excellent>
DoD
explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone.
Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much
of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem
self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the
beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience
empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking.
The second European Enlightenment of the late 18th century followed from the
earlier spirit of the Renaissance. For all the excesses and arrogance in its
thinking that pure reason might itself dethrone religion - as if science
could explain all the mysteries of the human condition - the Enlightenment
nevertheless established the Western blueprint for a humane and ordered
society.
But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new
enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the
Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the
Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public
that caves to barbarism - dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants,
and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their
own cowardly sense of accommodation.
What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present
decay in Europe - that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a
great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?
Just think: Put on an opera in today's Germany, and have it shut down, not
by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.
Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman
Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats - in the heart of
Europe no less.
Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in "liberal"
Holland.
Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into
hiding.
Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may
come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no
refuge.
There are three lessons to be drawn from these examples. In almost every
case, the criticism of the artist or intellectual was based either on his
supposed lack of sensitivity or of artistic excellence. Van Gogh was, of
course, obnoxious and his films puerile. The pope was woefully ignorant of
public relations. The cartoons in Denmark were amateurish and unnecessary.
Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he
sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels
adaptation of Mozart's Idomeneo was silly.
But isn't that precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they
produce works of genius that do not offend popular sensibilities - Da Vinci'
s Mona Lisa or Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws - but not so when an artist
offends with neither taste nor talent. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and
scholastic; he lacks both the smile and tact of the late Pope John Paul II,
who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of
Byzantine scholarship. But isn't that why we must come to the present Pope's
defense - if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak
his convictions when others might not?
Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical
Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings,
improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth,
petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and
fist-chanting mobs.
In contrast, almost daily in Europe, "brave" artists caricature Christians
and Americans with impunity. Why?
For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they
can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when
trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush
in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by
a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.
Second, almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come
under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis. Somehow
Europeans have ever-so-insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment
that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better.
So the present generation of Europeans really is heretical, made up of
traitors of a sort, since they themselves, not just their consensual
governments or some invader across the Mediterranean, have nearly destroyed
their won freedoms of expression - out of worries over oil, or appearing as
illiberal apostates of the new secular religion of multiculturalism, or
another London or Madrid bombing.
Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and
routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount,
but it simply won't stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a
ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in
everything turns out to believe in nothing.
Third, examine why all these incidents took place in Europe. Since 2000 it
has been the habit of blue-state politicians to rebuke the yokels of
America, in part by showing us a supposedly more humane Western future
unfolding in Europe. It was the European Union that was at the forefront of
mass transit; the EU that advanced Kyoto and the International Criminal
Court. And it was the heralded EU that sought "soft" power rather than the
Neanderthal resort to arms.
And what have we learned in the last five years from its boutique socialism,
utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism? That it was
logical that Europe most readily would abandon the artist and give up the
renegade in fear of religious extremists.
Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern
Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns,
"fundamentalist" religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and
increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West.
Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its
vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the
very un-Europeans who fight in it.
We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And
so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future,
but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson100306.html
Day Brown
> We may be only 30 years behind Europe, but we are not quite there yet. And
> so Europe has done us a great favor in showing us not the way of the future,
> but the old cowardice of our pre-Enlightenment past.
> http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson100306.html
disease that Nietzsche, in "The Genealogy of Morals" dealt with over 100
years ago. Which arises out of Native Europeans having a Jewish
religion, namely 'Christianity'.
"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, to god what is god's." (?) NO!
As an exponent of Native European values, the Stoic Epictetus would have
put it, it is blasphemy to put your duty to god in the same class with a
thief like Caesar, who *stole* the power he had.
Good grief. the grief which came of it was the tyranny justified by a
cosmic model of the divine as a tyranny.
But part of the reason we have all sunk so far from the *stoic* deist
values of the Founding Fathers is that we've a couple generations now
who were raised on sugar cereals and junkfood. Which did not, as much
dietary research has shown, provide the essential trace minerals and
micro nutrients that were present in the Western diet when food was
grown on family farms with basic organic methods.
Rather than agribusiness, which doses the land with Nitrogen, Phosphorus
and Potash. Which raises the tonnage, and therefore the profits. But
after decades of this, all the trace minerals and micronutrients that
were created by microbes in the soil are gone. Family farmers, using
compost and manure replaced these every year.
The resulting mental impairment damages the ability to handle ambiguous
data, and results in a preference for simple, dualistic cosmologies with
everything being either good or evil. No shades of gray to consider.
Thus also we see the shift to the political extremes with the common
ground needed to run a democratic system constantly shrinking. I dunno
if the electorate is rational enough to turn it around. We may see some
financial crisis instead that spreads panic like wildfire over the Net.
which will be uncontrollable. The corruption and ineptitude is obvious,
but the path to a rational solution is hidden by media hype.
If financial crisis destroys the profits of agribusiness, we'll see a
global famine. Which mite wake people up. Without the high tech support
system of agribusiness, people will try to grow food with whatever they
have on hand, which will result in organic methods, better nutrition as
they get a handle on it, and maybe some degree of reason will return.
DoD
"Day Brown" <dayb...@wildblue.net> wrote in message
news:joHUg.133$lb3.9...@news.sisna.com...
Did you write all that with all your sensibilities in tack?