Not as silly as she sounds

It really doesn’t help that Bunting is an idiot, and that (to be fair, she admits this) she doesn’t really know what she is talking about.

But nevertheless, the alleged ‘debate’ between something that was, allegedly, termed the ‘Enlightenment Project’ and something that was (presumably) termed ‘the anti-Enlightenment project’ is so vapid, so ill informed, and so much of a waste of time that I don’t really know where to begin.

However…..

‘Everyone’ when beginning this ‘debate’ quotes Kant in his essay ‘what is enlightenment’. But look at the date of publication: 1784. In other words, assuming that we act under the working definition of the Enlightenment: ‘a description of intellectual trends in Europe in the 18th century’ Kant was writing very much at the end of this movement. Kant was writing much closer to the publication of Lyrical Ballads than he was to the writing of ‘A Treatise on Human Nature’. Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ was only five years away. In other words, this was (almost) a retrospective work, on a ‘movement’ that had passed.

But even this doesn’t go far enough. Neither Hume nor Locke, or Diderot ever sat down in a pub and said ‘right lads we’re going to have this thing called the enlightenment so we need to sit down and plan what we all believe in’. In other words, in a very real sense, Bunting was right: there was no ‘Enlightenment Project’ as a unified project with shared aims and goals. For a start there was a huge gap between the Scottish and English Enlightenments (Empiricist) and the French (generally speaking, Rationalist). Then there is the problem of Rousseau. Was he an arch proponent of ‘Reason’ and Enlightenment? Or was he the first Romantic, the first opponent of Enlightenment? Depending on whether or not you include him in the movement, the whole ‘Enlightenment Project’ can look very very different. (Or what about Kant himself? He obviously thought of himself as an Enlightenment thinker, but his major influence was on the Romantics. And what about Goethe? And so on).

The problem is if one is very specific about the ‘enlightenment’ and very ‘tight’ in the definition then the movement starts to look very timebound and very much constricted by 18th century assumptions. But if one ‘broadens it out’ and simply uses it as a euphemism for ‘belief in science’ or whatever, then the name could be applied to many different schools of thought in many different times. Was Kant any more of a fan of science than, say, Francis (or Roger) Bacon? Did the Enlightenment thinkers believe in progress any more than, say, the Humanists a couple of hundred years earlier? Was Hume any more of an atheist than Christopher Marlowe, or any more of a sceptic than Montaigne?

I don’t know much about this (and intelligent comment by people who know what they are talking about is much welcomed) but I could well believe that it wasn’t until the 19th century that belief in an actual ‘enlightenment project’ started to gain ground, in the same way that people who lived in ‘the renaissance’ (or at least, the early renaissance) did not wake up each morning and clap each other on the back and say ‘gordon bennet i’m glad I’m living in the renaissance don’t you think Bob? Better than those bloody middle ages we had a while back, don’t you think?’. Belief that there was an actual event in time called ‘the renaissance’ developed slowly, and the actual ‘movement’ was nearly over before this became a commonplace.

So whereas I think it’s unlikely that the 18th century thinkers (to use a much more neutral phrase) were particularly anti-Muslim (most of them loathed imperialism and european supremacism, and in fact frequently used Chinese culture and Islam as an excuse to bash Europe) it may well be the case that the semi-mythical ‘Enlightenment Project’ as codified in the 19th century has been so used.

Needless to say, not one post at Harry’s Place, or one column by Nick Cohen has ever suggested or implied that any of the commentators at HP, nor Cohen (nor Aaronovitch) have ever actually read a word by Hume or Kant or Diderot let alone any of their critics.

The fact is, of course, that far from being advocates of the kind of cosmopolitan universalism championed by Kant, most of the “decent” left are actually advocates of or apologists for some form of 19th-century ethnic nationalism.

That seems sufficiently bizarre and contrary to typical usage of the words involved that I think you need to explain it before I can even disagree properly.

As I see it, the right says ‘my country is great’, the standard left says ‘my country is far from being the great thing it should or could be’, and the other side (‘decent’ left) says ‘this is not about countries, it’s about people and systems of government’.

The ‘decent’ left says: ‘my country is the greatest’.

Wait, who on the “decent left” is a proponent of “ethnic nationalism” that in any way denies “the common humanity of all persons”? Aggresive promotion of universal human rights and democracy has always seemed to be their calling card. Or are we defining “ethnic nationalism” as any belief that justifies a certain attachment to your own country and its history? If the latter, is it really ruled out automatically as a vicious prejeudice by Enlightenement thought? Do we really think Hume, say, had no tincture of it? Furthermore, it seems precisely wrong to say that ninteenth century nationalism abandoned the enlightenment and brought in the era of the “age of the passport, the permit, etc” since of course it was the golden age of unrestricted travel, only ended by World War One and its aftermath…

‘As I see it, the right says ‘my country is great’, the standard left says ‘my country is far from being the great thing it should or could be’, and the other side (‘decent’ left) says ‘this is not about countries, it’s about people and systems of government’.’

Oh come ON. This is absolutely about countries: two countries in particular. It is about Iraq, and it is about the United States, and the relationship between them. It is not, and never has been, about the UK or the United Nations (despite Blair’s pious hopes) or for that matter, about France or Russia. (it might soon be about Iran though).

And to return this thread back on topic: the relation of the ‘decents’ to the ‘Enlightenment Project’, insofar as it means anything, is this (I think). The ‘decents’ seem to be arguing that if David Hume or (for that matter) Adam Smith, or Diderot, were put into a time machine and zoomed forward to 2003, and given a bit of background, they, too, would be clamouring for an American led invasion of Iraq. If that’s not their argument, then all the talk about the alleged ‘Enlightenment Project’ is simply so much hot air.

My own view is that the ‘time machine’ scenario is not a likely one, even given the invention of an actual time machine.

I was taking it to mean the view that there nations should have the right to self-determination coupled with a view of what a nation is that employs some more or less ethnic criteria of membership.

That seems to be a argument of the form ‘Decent Leftists use computers, Enlightment-era people didn’t, so …’

Who in contemprary politics is seriously proposing a short-term alternative to nation-states?

This is the flag of Kurdistan in my lapel.

It seems pretty obvious to me. Harry’s Place et al are all fierce defenders of Zionism. Which is fair enough, but you can’t defend a species of Herderian nationalism and claim to stand for Enlightenment values at one and the same time.

There is a difference between sovereign state (organized community) and blut-und-boden-style nation-state. The latter concept certainly does violate the idea of universal justice, but I don’t see how the former does. Am I wrnog here?

sorry misprint: i didn’t mean to turn Chris Bertram into the messiah. Although for all i know he might be.

From Wikipedia: ‘Zionism is a political movement and ideology that supports a homeland for the Jewish People in the Land of Israel, where the Jewish nation originated over 3200 years ago and where Jewish kingdoms and self-governing states existed at various times in history. While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the modern movement was originally secular, beginning largely as a response to rampant antisemitism in late 19th century Europe and Muslim World. After a number of advances and setbacks, and after the Holocaust had destroyed Jewish society in Europe, the Zionist movement culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.’.

HP supports Zionism in this sense, yes?

That brendan chap is a bit up himself, isn’t he?

I mean ‘to form an opinion’, of course.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a supporter of ethnic nationalism.

I am not sure what you regard as constituting apologetics for ethnic nationalism. I certainly do not think that existing regional minorities, in existing nation states, should be merged against their will into other nation states: although of course they are free to choose to do so. I am also inclined to think that nation states tend to break down, economically and politically: although not if their populations are threatened with disempowerment or death if they choose to do so.

Leave it David T – E’s not worth it…

“What distinction is there to get involved in an argument between people you don’t respect?”

To reinforce one’s own sense of superiority perhaps??

You don’t understand.
I have already been told off for suggesting that Ms Bunting has an “agenda” of that sort…despite the fact that a perusal of her articles and interviews will quickly reveal a genuine object the shape of which can all too clearly be perceived.

‘To discern requires thatthere be a genuine object whose shape is being perceived, no?’

Well yeah, obviously. But that doesn’t prove your point.

Everyone knows the feeling when you get beyond a certain age of looking back at decades which didn’t seem to have any ‘theme’ or ‘unity’ at the time, and being able to see with the benefit of hindsight, that everyone shared assumptions and approaches that weren’t obvious at the time.

Likewise, obviously 18th century thinkers had something in common: specifically, that they all lived in the 18th century.

My whole point is that there was and is no such thing as THE enlightenment PROJECT (i.e. a definite movement with shared aims and goals).
It’s not like Futurism or something where you can tell exactly who was a futurist by who signed the manifestos, and where there definitely WAS a shared programme.

Kant on race:

Montesquieu is correct in his judgment that the weakheartedness that makes death so terrifying to the Indian or the Negro also makes him fear many things other than death that the European can withstand. The Negro slave from Guinea drowns himself if he is to be forced into slavery. The Indian women burn themselves. The Carib commits suicide at the slightest provocation. The Peruvian trembles in the face of an enemy, and when he is led to death, he is ambivalent, as though it means nothing. His awakened imagination, however, also makes him dare to do something, but the heat of the moment is soon past and timidity resumes its old place again…

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/03/29/enlightenment-racism/

Can’t we just stipulate that many or most “movements” were defined either retrospectively, or polemically by adversaries, or both?

The cash value of this stipulation would be that every time someone says “There really was no X”, everyone in the room will give them a loud raspberry, or make gagging sounds.

Exceptions should be allowed in cases when a reasonable claim is made that certain groups or movements or events or activities did not exist at all or never happened — e.g., “No Jews were poisoning wells in XVIc Poland.”

I entirely agree wtih Jacob T. Levy, #32 above.

I would also note that the philosophes — in France at least — were primarily defined by what they opposed, not by what they believed in.
They saw themselves as united in their opposition to religious tolerance, cruelty, and superstition. Other issues were for the most part secondary.

To the extent that these were real issues at the time, and that an identifiable cohort intervened in them in relatively predictable ways, I have no problem with speaking of the Enlightenment, even if this term was mostly applied retrospectively. (It should be noted that in France, the contemporary enemies of this movement certainly saw it as a coherent project; they almost uniformly spoke of the “philosophical party” with contempt, and they identified all the usual suspects as members of it.)

Err… Opposed to religious intolerance.

Brendan,

That’s the whole point. The HP people do very little positive work – it is almost all carping and attacks on their erstwhile comrades (their work on the Iranian bus drivers excepted). A lot of heat and little light.

But why defend the likes of Bodi, Galloway, and Bunting? They aren’t leftist or liberal in any meaningful sense, having dispensed with both leftist antipathy to religion and belief in religious freedom, not to mention democracy and human rights. Only the economic orientation remains, and is that really enough?

Oh Christ. I do apologise to the readers here and, in fact, the rest of the human race for raising this subject, but my point was not to start a pointless and endless debate about whether the enlightenment ‘existed’ or not. My point was that it’s basically impossible to ‘abstract’ a series of propositions that would constitute the ‘Enlightenment Project’ that all those thinkers would agree with, without coming up with a list of truisms. So Jason weighs the scales by only discussing the French ‘enlightenment’ and then coming up with their ‘project’ as being to be ‘united in their opposition to religious tolerance, cruelty, and superstition.’ Well, yes, but if that was all the Enlightenment was about then it was hardly very innovative was it? There were hundreds of thinkers in Europe (not to mention across the world) who could have claimed the same. Almost every thinker in the Buddhist tradition, for example, could and would have described themselves as being against ‘cruelty’ (so would most Christians for that matter). Protestants described themselves as being against superstition. Religious tolerance has deep roots in, for example, Poland (cf the Warsaw Confederation). According to Wikipedia ‘Freedom of worship in India was encapsulated in an inscription of Asoka:

King Piyadasi (Ashok) dear to the Gods, honours all sects, the ascetics (hermits) or those who dwell at home, he honours them with charity and in other ways. But the King, dear to the Gods, attributes less importance to this charity and these honours than to the vow of seeing the reign of virtues, which constitutes the essential part of them. For all these virtues there is a common source, modesty of speech. That is to say, One must not exalt one’s creed discrediting all others, nor must one degrade these others Without legitimate reasons. One must, on the contrary, render to other creeds the honour befitting them.’

Islam always had a much more profound tradition of religious tolerance in (e.g.) the middle ages than Christian countries. And so forth.

If on the other hand, instead of talking about ‘the Enlightenment Project’ one wants to talk about the theories of specific individuals then THAT makes perfect sense (better still, making reference to specific works). Unfortunately, neither Hume nor Kant nor even Rousseau ever wrote books advocating an invasion of Iraq, so there you go.

Defend the invasion of Iraq if you want. But don’t pretend that you decided on the efficacy of military action after a long period of study of the works of Diderot or Voltaire.

Brendan,
I find this claim:
“there was no ‘Enlightenment Project’ as a unified project with shared aims and goals. For a start there was a huge gap between the Scottish and English Enlightenments (Empiricist) and the French (generally speaking, Rationalist). ” odd.

Are you not here confusing a difference in methods (one which breaks down on close examination) with aims and goals. Surely, those who wrote about necessary reforms, even if the basis for arriving at the reforms differed, agreed in the aims (to reform) and goals (to make things better). Lance Armstrong pedals at high rpm Jan Ulrich at low both have the same aim and goal; they just use different methods.

The Enlightenment was not a “movement” in the sense that early Christianity, abolitionism, feminism, etc were or are movements. The Enlightenment was a historical period identified by a collection of events and ideas that share a period in time and space – in the same way that the Bronze Age, the Renaissance, the “long 19th Century,” and the 60’s are historical periods. Certainly the Enlightenment contained movements, but it was much broader and a different category of event than that described by the word “movement.”

Attack, Chris, attack ’em bastards; don’t hold any punches. It makes interesting threads here.

‘Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! –‘(Wittgenstein)

‘The idea of family resemblance is Wittgenstein’s answer to the idea of fixity of meaning….In order to show the error in this way of thinking, Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of family resemblance. If we gather together five members of the same family, they probably look alike, although there is no distinctive feature that they all share in comm on. A brother and a sister might have the same dark eyes, while that sister and her father share a slightly turned-up nose. They have a group of shared features, some of which are more distinctly present in some members of the family, while some features are not present at all. Wittgenstein argues that the different uses of one word share the same family resemblance. There is no single defining characteristic of all uses of the word “understanding”; rather, these uses share a kind of family resemblance with one another.’

Chris,

Here’s how your post seems to have played out so far:

1. Defining the Enlightenment is a legitimate historical and philosophical exercise, indeed rather entertaining.
2. Bunting tries to subvert “hard” liberals’ invocation of the Enlightenment against contemporary Islamism by pretending it was/is either a) a European weapon against Islam, or b) a social construct.
3. You have long been irked by the positions of some prominent “hard” liberals on the Iraq invasion, Iran, the motoons, etc. and see another opportunity to snap at their heels.
4. So (with a gesture of faux contrarianism) you try to defend 2. in order to achieve 3.
5. Your effort falls flat and you end up sounding, well, as silly as Bunting.
6. You try to salvage some dignity by insisting it was all about 1. and that we should head over to Chris Brooke’s blog.

Tom
I’m more than happy to continue this debate over at the Virtual Stoa, which has an excellent discussion of these issues. But I think we are getting off topic (which was about Bunting at least to begin with). However, here’s some questions from Stoa that I think are apposite.

If you are going to argue that there really was an Enlightenment Project, then you should be prepared to deal with these points:

‘When do you think the Enlightenment happened?

Even those contemporary historians who are happy to talk of a single “Enlightenment” disagree about what the key period we’re talking about actually is. For Jonathan Israel (Radical Enlightenment), it’s the late C17th and early C18th. As he writes, “even before Voltaire came to be widely known, in the 1740s, the real business was already over”. Is he right, or not?

For a long time, when people wrote of the Enlightenment, they were thinking about France in general, Paris in particular, and – even more particularly – the small group of people clustered around the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Lots of people want to make “Enlightenment” a broader category than that, but how broad should it go, in geographical terms? Does it include Eastern Europe (apart, perhaps, from Königsberg)?

Was there one Enlightenment, or several?

As we make “Enlightenment” include more than just Paris, we can still ask whether Paris remains a privileged centre or not? Are you “Enlightened” insofar as you are reading the same books as the people in Paris and arguing about them in a language they would understand, or are there alternative ways of being “Enlightened” in the eighteenth century that bypass Paris altogether?

If you talk about the “Scottish Enlightenment”, for example, as people in the last fifty years have quite often done, is this in order to distinguish it from the “French Enlightenment” or the “German Enlightenment” or the “Neapolitan Enlightenment”, or is it to indicate that Scotland was participating in a much broader set of international developments? ‘

Etc. etc. etc.

Link here: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2006_03_01_archive.html#114363269204153837

Hektor:

1. Bunting’s piece has a polemical slant, but given the generally polemical environment of contemporary “discussion” about the so-called “clash of civilizations” it’s hard to particularly fault her on that score.

2. I’m not going to argue that the piece linked here is her strongest writing or anything, but your complaint that it’s “confused” seems, ummm, confused to me. The column takes confusion as its overt theme — basically saying “here are a bunch of conflicting views about the Enlightenment, and I’m not sure who’s right but I’m troubled by people who invoke ‘the Enlightenment’ too readily to defend ‘muscular liberalism'”. Obviously it doesn’t succeed as a thoroughgoing critique of “the Enlightenment,” but this strikes me as irrelevant, since it makes to pretense to being such.

3. I completely agree with you that her statement “why do people think an understanding of rationality which is over 200 years old is useful now” is silly and sloppy. In context with her prior commentaries, though, it seems to me that what she was probably trying to get at is that it’s questionable to what extent 18th-century philosophy should be invoked for moral authority and as a defense of ideological narrowness today. And that basic point is valid enough.

4. I’m not familiar with her positions on the EU and therefore can’t comment on them. However, in gneral it wouldn’t seem to me to follow that a disagreement with this or that potential form of the EU inherently constitutes rejection of “the Enlightenment.” (I think it can be fairly said that much anti-EU sentiment does take advantage of crude nativism, but there’s more going on than that.)

5. Indeed it does not follow that opposing Islamophobia and attacks on the Muslims world means that one must “give up human rights, democracy, and religious freedom” — and nor does it follow that Bunting belongs to a “group” that advocates any such thing.

While you say you dislike HP-style “decent leftists,” your attempted broadsides against Bunting as a suppoed Islamist “apologist” seem to me to be cut from much the same intellectual cloth. For isntance, you appear to view the mere act of interviewing a controversial Muslim figure* as somehow “instructive,” presumably about her supposed apologetics for theocracy. This, to me, is very reminiscent of a “muscular liberal” rhetorical milieu that tends to thrive on accusing such-and-such party of failing to demonize such-and-such Muslim sufficiently for their tastes, which failure is supposed to make them an “apologist” or “appeaser.”** If in fact this is not your grounds for your accusation against Bunting, then you’ll need to get a lot more specific about what your actual objection is.

[* I mean, really, what do you imagine this demonstrates? Are we supposed to remain carefully ignorant of the views of someone like Qardawi because they don’t paint inside the lines of Western liberal sensibility? People do interview members of groups like the Gush Emunim, the American Patriot movement and European neo-Nazi groups (all of which strike me as being considerably more extreme than Qardawi in various ways), without the need to demonize them — would you rather this didn’t happen? Does the fact that some of the journalists who interviewed such groups haven’t interviewed such-and-such Muslim militant mean that they’re “apologists” for those groups?]

[** It’s a specific example of a more general type of argument that’s familiar from, for instance, critiques by various groups about putative “media bias,” usually adapting some form of “How dare [X media outlet] comment on [X group that author despises], and completely fail to call them [X appropriately disparaging term] and talk about all the ways they’re just like [Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot/The Dark Lord Sauron]? Coddlers!”]

chris, any evidence for the claims you make in your concluding paragraph?

If one assumes by “decent left” you mean those on the left who supported the war in Iraq then it’s hard to see how that position is in any way inconsistent with Enlightenment principles.

It’s hard to know what you mean by “advocates of or apologists for some form of 19th-century ethnic nationalism” as you give no specifics.
(Do you mean that supporting Kurdish or Bosnian self-determination is antithetical to the Enlightenment?). It seems to me that in the cases were the decent left have supported some for of ethnic nationalism, such as with the Kurds and in Bosnia, that was in the context of primarily opposing tyranny. But it’s not a support of nationalism but support exactly for “cosmopolitan universalism championed by Kant” since it is premised on the international community’s obligation to over-ride the principle of national sovereignty for humanitarian purposes.

It’s mildly surprising to see you use this piece by Bunting to make a case against the decent left when she concludes with the pomo attack on reason which would be more pertinent to the current CT theme of defending science.

‘In short, the existence and use of the networks indicates the existence of a project designed to control the nature, pace, and direction of change of the 18th state and society with the ultimate aim (misguided though it may have been, which is only to say that bad things happened)of improving the condition of mankind, which is to say a project dedicated to the progress in perfection of the human race through the use of reason.’

I’m sorry but I just don’t agree, and again I invoke the idea of a family resemblance. You can only make that case if you include some thinkers (and not others) in your list of ‘Enlightenment Thinkers’. And by what criteria do you do that?

On the other hand if you really want to include ALL ‘enlightenment’ thinkers, then you end up with a definition that is so broad as to be meaningless. Your attempted definition above is an example. It has two sections: ‘ a project designed to control the nature, pace, and direction of change of the … state and society with the ultimate aim …of improving the condition of mankind.’

But that could be said of almost any movement, including Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam (or ‘Mohammedism’) etc. Hardly anyone actually sets out to make the condition of mankind WORSE.

The second part is: ‘project dedicated to the progress in perfection of the human race through the use of reason.’

But what about Hume in that case? ‘Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions’ (which some people have thought to be the basic statement of Romanticism). Or what about Rousseau? Or Kant? Or Goethe? You could define any of these thinkers as being ‘of the Enlightenment’ or proto-romantics. As I pointed out before, Bertrand Russell thought that Hume was the origin of modern irrationalism. Kant has been posited as the originator of romanticism and (yes!) cultural relativism (look at the Wikipedia entry on cultural relativism).

As for the existence of networks, so what? I’m part of a ‘network’ by being part of this site. I’m also part of many other social/intellectual networks, via email, inernet discussion groups, blogs, seminars, conferences, unions, and so forth. Doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with many (or any) of these people, let alone that we have a shared approach to anything. And what about as it were ‘anti-networks’ i.e. people who hated each other? Rousseau had a spectacular falling out with Hume (and with almost everyone else). Reid and Hume quarelled bitterly about ‘commmon sense’. Despite Berlin’s heroic attempts, almost every one of the thinkers who he defines as ‘anti-Enlightenment’ have been defined as ‘enlightenment thinkers’ by other thinkers.

Brendan,

You are too brainy. Something certainly went on circa 17th/18th c and it made a difference to how we live now. It could reasonably be summarised by the Gallilaen revolution, when idiotic church placemen refused to look through a telescope. It was around about then that evidence based thinking started to replace faith. The world, as it is, owes a debt to folk like Gallileo, Copernicus, and every great thinker who came after them. It is perhaps difficult for you to appreciate that your very ability to join networks is part and parcel of a scientific revolution which was as much of a revolt against consensus belief systems, such as God worship. However the benefits are here for you to see. Descent health care, descent communications, an interest in what the Universe actually is, etc, etc. You have inherited these ideas, whether you are aware of it or not.

Brendan,

There are several possible answers here. One is that in terms of specifics each author regardless of how tightly bound he may be intellectually or otherwise to a movement is going to produce a text that differs, almost as a matter of necessity, from other members of that same movement. It is not only Enlightenment figures who differed on issue large and small or argued with one another at the drop of various hats. Even so, the Enlightenment figures, as Wolker points out, shared a basic set of ideas that allow them to be grouped together.

The same is true of, for example, the Reformers, no? Melancthon and Luther did not agree on everything but worked, nonetheless, hand in glove to promote the work of reformation. The same is true of Pascal and Nicole or Calvin and Beza. But you wouldn’t argue that these duos didn’t belong to the Evangelical confession, Jansenism, or the Reformed confession, would you?

Why I would bet dollars to donoughts that the American “Founding Fathers” tore at one another hammer and tongs yet they belonged to an identifiable movement with practical outcomes based on shared assumptions. The fact that a movement is sprawling and produces contradictory texts within a shared intellecutal orientation does not mean that it is not a movement.

One would expect to find in a movement dedicated to open intellectual inquiry a great deal of conflict and controversy and among a large or small group of the like-minded great personal hostility.

In terms of Rousseau’s quarrel with Hume, didn’t it result from an invitation from Scot to the Swiss to come and find a safe harbor during a particularly stormy time in the Genevan’s complicated life? Wouldn’t this suggest, at the very least, that the Scot extended to the Genevan the hand of comradeship despite the realization that they differed on key issues? Furthermore, did not Rousseau have some sort of a mental as opposed to intellectual crisis on arriving and it was this precipitated the quarrel? Are not the concrete causes of the tiffs and shenanigans as important as you claim the intellectual difference between the thinkers to be?

Speaking of which, did not Rousseau defend Helvitius, when his book was burnt, even though the Genevan disagreed violently with the Helvetious’ materialism? Where there not as many cases, in other words, of Englightenment thinkers acting in solidarity when confronted with outside pressure as there were internal fissures?

Surely there is a difference between an informal network designed to circulate ideas and patron-client network designed to find consequential employment for fellow travelors. Or that other movements in the past and present rife with internal disagreements did not pursue a similar path in the hope of gaining control of the levers of power in the search of a shared outcome.

You cannot mean to argue that unions do not seek to find employment for fellow memebers and once so employed all do not seek to leverage those positions to the greater advantage of their fellows. Even if they disagree on specifics or have personality conflicts. The one union to which I belonged was riven by internal strife, on a wide array of issues, yet presented to the world a more or less united front and worked to protect and expand its influence.

In other words, individuals can disagree on specifics and yet still undertake a project designed to bring about a shared vision of the future.

Hey, to skew the discussion a bit, there is a distinct, early 18th century Arabic (or North African) view of what was going on in Europe. Go to a nice little article in the Journal of Early Modern History (Spring, 05) by Nabil Matar entitled: Confronting Decline in Early Modern Arabic Thought — which has an overview of the reaction to Early modern science and the first budding of the European Enlightenment by Arabic thinkers of the time Matar starts with a dialogue in a book to teach french that appeared in Egypt in 1701. It has some great dialogues between a party attended by French Capuchin, Egyptian Christians and Moslems.

“The speakers discuss topics such as the baking of bread, shopping for jubn
ifranji (French cheese), and the after effects of wine. A saqqa (wine-server),
by the name of Nasir, complains that “before the war of the Muslims with the Venetians, we used to import wine from Crete; now it comes only from Cyprus and Syracuse.” Still, despite the poor quality of that wine, the saqqa praises it for dilating the mind; if the water of the Nile were wine, he says, I would turn myself into a fish and swim there forever— words that bring a firm reprimand from the qissees (priest).”

However, after a while the dialogue turns to — underdevelopment. Or, why are the Europeans monopolizing the production of wine? So the speakers start speaking about wisdom. “Murad declares that mankind’s ancient wisdom began among the Chaldeans, then moved to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Arabs, and finally to the Latins, “I mean the ifranj [French, Europeans] among whom there are now more learned scholars than in the past.”

So Ali retorts:

Ali: Hasibtu al-Arab mua’llimeen al-dunya. [I thought the Arabs were the teachers of the world.]
Murad: Keef mua’llimeen al-dunya. Qul wa tusduq fi kalamika in ma baqa baynahum la ilm wa la aalim. [Why do you think they are teachers of the world: say and believe what you say, neither knowledge nor teachers are left among them.]

Ali becomes emotional and draws Murad’s attention to the knowledge of jurisprudence among the Arabs, and to the number of sheikhs whowere masters in preparing talismans, in sand prognostication, and in soothsaying. “Ah, Ah, Ah,” replies Murad, “is this how you prove the
wisdom of the Arabs?! Believe me, this is proof of their ignorance.”

A conversation that has been going on for centuries.

I find this commentary by Bunting disorienting, but then after a generation of postmodernism, it shouldn’t be surprising.
We have lost the ability, it seems, to defend a crucial turning point in history, and get distracted by debates over progress and rationality.

I can only recommend a close look at the eonic effect, http://history-and-evolution.com. There we see that the issue is the modern transition, which includes to total effect of the period of transition starting with the Reformation and leading to the Great Divide, i.e. the period the Enlightenment.
This transition, then, includes The Reformation, The Scientific Revolution, modern philosophy from Descarte to German Classical Philosophy, Hume, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of modern capitalism, the birth of democracy….
That’s a short list.
Does Madeleine Bunting wish this never happened, and prefer to let the status quo ante stand as superior? Yes or no?

Asking why Islam had no Reformation is an excellent question. Here again the question requires perception of the eonic effect.

It is important to understand the immense counterrevolution being attempted against this phase of history. So I think it important to recast the whole issue in a new updated form without the Eurocentric nonsense that has temporarily derailed the question.

In general, debates over rationality can be useless. Such quibbles. We see that the Enlightenment itself includes its own ‘dialectic’ here, and Kant’s ‘critique’ of reason is one of the seminal sources of the very opposition to the Enlightenment we see, as a sort of postmodern backwash.
These issues, then, are dwarfed by the transition factor, which includes a comprehensive, truly massive social transformation that rapidly began to globalize in the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment is just one small aspect of that total transformation.
Part of the problem is the narrow definition of the Enlightenment in terms of ‘reason’. But even this is a small universe of discourse, between the philosophes, Kant, Hegel, and many others. The Enlightenment as a periodized cultural totality inside the still greater totality of the modern transition is beyond definition, being a greater dialectical unity, as Hegel well understood. Thus postmodernism is simply a leaf from the Enlightenment book, a moment in the progression started by Kant.

In short, the existence and use of the networks indicates the existence of a project designed to control the nature, pace, and direction of change of the 18th state and society with the ultimate aim […] of improving the condition of mankind, which is to say a project dedicated to the progress in perfection of the human race through the use of reason.

I think that this idea that a bunch of individual heroes just decided to get together and start working on perfection of the human race through the use of reason and this is what produced the enlightenment – this approach itself is extremely romantic. Here’s an alternative view you may want to consider.

Abb1,

I don’t recall calling anyone a hero or that the use of networks produced the Enlightenment.

Brendan,

Well put, after all I have several times made reference to how I see the Englightenment Project justifying bombing Iraq. Wait, no I didn’t. No I don’t.

In terms of all the “linking” (by contemporary Encyclopedists and unnamed others) of this or that thinker to some later movement or set of ideas raises the question: Are we to judge the meaning of actions and ideas in their context or by their later interpreters? This is a popular strategy among opponents who argue (wrongly) that Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust.

The other oddity in all this is that your rejection of the coherence of the idea of an Enlightenment Project includes the use of other, potentially, ficitive totalizing concepts, like Romanticism. (On the multivocality of which see Lovejoy.) Why is that you accept or seem to accept the existence of one while rejecting another? Surely, if one is undermined by the debates and disagreements among alleged members so too is the other, no?

If that is so, that is if disagreements and disputes between individuals precludes their inclusion in a group, then, given that no one agrees all the time on all things with others in their putative group, are we not forced to discuss only the individuals without ever deploying the dreaded fictive totalizing concept?

No, Soru, it’s not the other side of the same coin. Note that Tom also offers Wikipedia as another ‘project’. Well, this one is a more recent and clear example; think about it: does the Wikipedia exist because some people made it their lifetime-pursuit to educate the masses, or is it a natural, inevitable result of technological and socio-economic develpment? I think the answer is clear.

As far as Rushdie goes, you seem to be generalizing too much and being excessively harsh on “Arabic/islamic culture” (why Arabic?). Islamic culture produced plenty of intelligentsia, from Avicenna to, well, to Rushdie, I guess. Voltaire too spent some years in exile, you know.

“I’m not even going to the next stages of the standard HP argument, that because the so-called ‘Muslim’ (or ‘Arab’) world has not yet had an ‘enlightenment’ therefore blah blah blah.

“Finally: please for God’s sake: if you want to bomb Iraq (or Iran) hey, be my guest. But don’t pretend that it’s what Voltaire would have wanted.”

It is fully possible to believe that the Arab world would benefit from the ideals of the Enlightenment. And one may also believe that those ideals are not best propagated through bombing. Indeed, it seems to me the only sensible position around (and it is, of course, my own).

No, I think under current socio-economic conditions it did become inevitable, statistically speaking. Just like the search engines and internet commerce.

Whereas I think that not everything that is possible is inevitable. In particular, I am pretty sure there are things right now that are economically feasible, but don’t yet exist.

Of course, it is hard to point to an example of something that doesn’t exist yet. Ask again in 5 years.

As I said before, the relationship is that of chemistry and biology – no chemically impossible creature exists, but not every chemically possible one does. In particular, there are no wheeled animals.

‘there are no wheeled animals’ (Soru)

‘It is not true to say that nature hasn’t invented the wheel: bacteria have been using it to get around for millions of years. It is the basis of the bacterial flagellum, which looks a bit like a corkscrew and which rotates continuously to drive the organism along. About half of all known bacteria have at least one flagellum.

Each is attached to a “wheel” embedded in the cell membrane that rotates hundreds of times per second, driven by a tiny electric motor. Electricity is generated by rapidly changing charges in a ring of proteins that is attached to the surrounding membrane. Positively charged hydrogen ions are pumped out from the cell surface using chemical energy. These then flow back in, completing the circuit and providing the power for the wheel to rotate.

The only nutrients that the flagellum needs are protein building blocks to allow it to grow longer. These are forced up through the hollow centre of the flagellum and are assembled into new flagellar material when they reach the end.

It is a very sophisticated piece of nanotechnology and even has a reverse gear that helps the organism find food. So, far from nature not having invented the wheel, given the very large number of bacteria in existence, there are probably more wheels in the world than any other form of locomotion.’

http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg18524852.700

Soru, of course there are things possible that don’t exist; I’m not talking about mobile phones with pizza cutters built in, I’m talking about big things.

All I am saying is that the Enlightenment didn’t happen because Volaire with Kant had a project, industrial revolution didn’t happen because Henry Ford got an idea and the informational revolution didn’t happen because Al Gore took the initiative.

Tom: who was it that claimed the Enlightenment, or if you prefer the “Enlightenemtn,” authorized bombing anyone?

The moral rightness of imposing “Enlightenment” values on this or that part of the world is a very popular theme of the “decent” left in the blogosphere — a sort modern-day adaptation of “white man’s burden” thinking that’s hit on the innovation of claiming that the real racists are liberals and leftists who don’t see such a project as viable. Via the Harry’s Place blog which is part of the subject of this thread, for instance, we have David Thompson, who rather dances around the question of Iraq (though it seems fair to suppose it’s on his mind more than a little) but otherwise strikes all the usual (dis)chords. This sort of commentary tends to be part of a broader enthusiasm for “Clash of Civilizations”-style polemic (if you’re really interested in finding more of it, a quick search for articles related to the so-called “Cartoon Intifida” should turn up plenty more).

More directly, we actually had a case of someone directly invoking an Enlightenment philosopher on behalf of the Iraq War on a recent CT thread. See posts 147 and 168 here. Zdenek isn’t atypical.

One thing, when talking about Harry’s Place, it is important to remember it is primarily a UK blog, and so covers UK political parties and movements like the SWP, Respect, Hizb ut-Tahrir, MaB, etc. None of which, as I understand it, have any direct equivalent in the US, certainly not at the level of contesting elections and winning seats.

Similarly, there is no meaningful religious Christian right in the UK, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably a paranoid loon. But it would be a big mistake to apply that rule of thumb to the US, where they are obviously a significant electoral force. Different countries, different cultures, different politics.

If you don’t like HP, another blog that covers much of the same ground (but without the Iraq war support) is http://www.pickledpolitics.com/.

The main component of Chris B’s inconsistancy criticism of ‘decent left’ is his claim that it embraces suspect type of nationalism ( involves ethnic criteria of membership etc ) together with enlightnment cosmopolitanism ala Kant. Obviously this is powerful criticism ( to show inconsistancy in someones position is seriously criplling ) so is it the case that decent left has this problem ?

Well I doubt that Norman Geras or Hitchens would want to defend nationalism of this sort last time I checked , so Chris B must be talking about HP posters and commenters. But here I have a problem : when David T who is the most outspoken commenter at HP on the subject of national identity queried Chris’s claim @# 27 above , Chris B would not respond.
Its seems that he needs to say something especially since he offered no backing up in his main post but I will not hold my breath.