The Enlightenment thinkers of Western Europe rescued that continent from the relative intellectual stagnation in which it had languished for more than a thousand years. Invoking the rationalism of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, they saw Reason as the chief means by which Man might both improve his plight on the planet and transcend the baser instincts by which he is beset. Their prescription of the Rule of Law as a fundamental necessity in any civilized society was a direct result of that belief. While certainly, as the Socratic notion of “dialectic” implied, all laws and social conventions need to be held up to constant scrutiny, they are not, as the Post Moderns seem to believe, merely a way of controlling and indeed oppressing the so-called underclasses. The notion that they are so simply eliminates morality from the human narrative.
The Nineteenth Century Romantics saw Enlightenment Rationalism as utterly oppressive. For William Blake Man’s disgust with his animal nature had caused him to invent Sky Gods whose various proscriptions robbed life of its joy. Blake’s poetry never stops asserting that Man is in fact God, that his natural instincts are inherently innocent, that “exuberance” is Divine and that repression is the cause of most human evil. Such ideas percolated underground throughout Nineteenth Century Western Culture and no doubt would have emerged into the general consciousness a hundred years ago had it not been for the two World Wars and Great Depression which marred the first half of the Twentieth Century. It was at Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969 that they would ultimately assert their presence, Woodstock signalling the widespread acceptance of a new definition of Man, a new way of looking at the world, indeed a revised notion of the very concept of civilized behavior which had informed Western societies for over 2000 years.
Blake’s vision of the world basically endorsed the concept of radical personal freedom, a limitless sense of entitlement impervious to what John Locke, Adam Smith et al had deemed to be Man’s fundamental need to confront the world rationally, productively, with discipline. I am glossing over dozens of artists and philosophers for the sake of brevity, but let us jump ahead to Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 work “Eros and Civilization” in which he derides the “oppressive” demands of Capitalism which keep Man from that ultimate state of fulfillment which he defines as “polymorphous sexuality,” that wondrous state of completion in which all our physical desires have been satisfied. If you think I have gone out of my way to focus on some peripheral, Leftist loonie, Google Marcuse’s fellow Frankfurt “social theorists.” Antonio Gramsci derides what he sees as the bourgeoisie’s subservience to the dictatorship of “common sense.” In “Historical Consciousness” George Lukacs impugns Science as “the kind of sacred cow which theology was five hundred years ago.” Science and Theology granted the same degree of credibility! Really! One is reminded of David J. Flynn’s 2004 work “Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas.”
I believe in freedom and have no problem with those who do not subscribe to the pragmatic approach to Reality endorsed by the Enlightenment. Indeed I have dozens of articles before me by those of Black and Indigenous origin which declare the rational orientation of the West to be but one of many valid ways of approaching life. Yet these very people at the same time have the audacity to declare the wonderful lifestyles of the countries of Western Europe and North America to be merely a matter of White Privilege. It is insane! Human beliefs and behavior have been severed from their inevitable impact in the real world. Marcuse and indeed Socialists in general subscribe to a moral/intellectual relativism which exonerates even the most degenerate of lifestyles while then claiming that those whose have failed to prosper are somehow the victims of oppression! It is an unconscionable violation of logic which “progressive” commentators, beleaguered by their vacuous ideological assumptions, impose upon us day after day after mind-numbing day.