Good history book: A Revolution of the MInd.

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.