Good history book: A Revolution of the MInd.

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  • November 18, 2020 at 9:46 am #124511
    Avatar photoBilly_T
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    Got a lot from it, and it provoked a ton of thought.

    A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy Jonathan Israel

    Israel’s premise is that the Enlightenment should be seen as a split movement, radical and moderate (primarily), and he does a great job showing the differences between the various factions and their evolution (It’s clear his sympathies are with the radicals). My only quibble with the book is that he tried to pack the book with too many people and thoughts for its size. He had to run through a lot of them too quickly, etc. Intelligently written at all points, it’s still in some ways an intro, rather than an in-depth discussion, but since I hadn’t heard of several of the people he mentioned, I need(ed) both.

    Key members of the radical group were Diderot, Baron D’Albach, Paine, Helvetius . . . with Spinoza and Bayle being their main precursors. Voltaire, Rousseau and countless angry religious leaders were in the moderate camp.

    Big takeaway for me is that the Postmodern critique of the Enlightenment sounds way too dismissive in the light of Israel’s book, though he doesn’t mention that. It also strikes me that, perhaps, it’s time we rethink the impact of roughly a century — give or take — of tearing down “universals,” and consider the possibility that we may well need them now more than ever before in human history.

    Of course, we need “universals” that have been carefully vetted through the best minds and hearts across the entire globe, rhetorically battle-tested, so to speak, and not just in one corner of it. But, yeah, universal human rights and a universal belief in conserving nature sound a hell of a lot better to me than a Hobbesian war of all against all, because there is supposedly no such thing as truth, only various interpretive communities, etc.

    I think that the rise of Trump and the oxymoron, “populist right,” greatly benefited from that undercurrent. If there is no such thing as truth, then Trump’s lies aren’t really lies, and we’re forever stuck in a monstrous ground-hog day of “contested theories,” or some such something something.

    (Of course, I’m generalizing like crazy about PoMod theories too, to try to save time and millions of lives, as they said in Animal House. But I think in-depth re-evaluations of its re-evaluations would at least to similar points of departure.

    Anyway, the Israel book got me interested again in Diderot, so I’m reading Allan Curran’s recent Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. Very good so far.

    November 18, 2020 at 10:07 am #124514
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    The latter bit reminds me also of Zooey’s tweet from Daoud(sp?), who disagrees with Obama’s claim that the Internet is the biggest threat to democracy (?).

    My quick read on that is Obama and Daoud are both correct, in their own way, perhaps for wildly different reasons.

    Oligarchy is a massive threat, obviously. Though I’ll put on my scratched up broken record and say, yet again, that capitalism is the bigger threat cuz it contains oligarchy, generates it, guarantees it. No previous economic system has produced it at such high rates or so quickly.

    And, the Internet itself is oligarchy’s/capitalism’s wet-dream vehicle for propaganda, indoctrination, deflection and distraction. Never before in human history have plutocrats controlled such a powerful weapon to shape minds, or dumb them down, and never before have they had one with this reach.

    They own it. They control it. They can shut it down if they want to. And I wonder if the small “d” democratic opposition it’s enabled hasn’t been, on balance, so overwhelmed by anti-democratic forces — establishment, establishment-backed (overt and covert), “organically” grown reactionaries, astro-turfed reactionaries . . . and so on . . . . Is it really a net positive for leftists and our allies?

    I’m conflicted about its net effects — pun not not intended.

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