The Enlightenment and its Demise

Bhante BodhidhammaBewildered. Anxious. Rudderless.‘Cometh the hour, cometh theman’We live in an age of multiple crises: climate crisis, wars, immigration, authoritarianism to name a few.  Each impinges on the other. Everything is intertwined. Here I am taking one strand of a chaotic situation. The idealism of Liberalism and how this ideal is now profoundly undermined and indeed it may be terminal.While I am not in any sense of the word an academic, it’s important to get to grips with the history of ideas that has produced this chaos in which the West now finds itself.President Donald Trump is the man of the hour, the embodiment of this decline with its moral sleaze, self-serving corruption and disregard for the law. He has thrown all the cards into the air and no one knows where they will land. How could such a person with such an obvious narcissistic personality end up in charge of the richest and most powerful nation on earth?Just as the Medieval Ages were in thrall to Christianity and Grecian science, so we have been in thrall to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution of the 17thcentury onwards. The period of the Scientific Revolution spawned Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin that placed God out of his creation – a deus ex machina. Philosophers John Locke and Immanuel Kant made reason the saviour of mankind: the Rational Self.  It also gave us capitalism, an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. According to Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics (2017) the ideal person is ‘Homo Economicus … solitary, calculating, competing, insatiable’. And the Industrial Revolution manifestedman’sbrilliance in harnessing nature and would eventually produce everything for everybody. Coupled with capitalism and liberal ideology,man’shappiness was assured.The intellectual dryness evoked the Romantics who sought to put the heart back into the mix. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Schleiermacher encouraged a return to nature as beauty and as a place to return the intuitive emotional soul suffocated by the intellect. The French Revolution, a rational project infused with romantic idealism, expressed this longing with its slogan: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, only to be severely undermined when Napoleon became emperor. The disillusion did not crystallise till after the first World War.Then Modernism arose with an effort to break away from old structures and understanding that had brought such suffering and destruction, expressed most obviously in the work of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali where art moved towards personal experience and subjectivity. Again a rejection of the purely rational.The Wall Street Crash 1929 dragged the whole capitalist financial edifice down into the Great Depression. And then, of course, came the second World War. This only aggravated the sense of disillusionment and alienation that expressed itself in the Existential philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and in literature with Samuel Beckett. By the late 1950s even this dried up and Post-Modernism began to evolve.An essential tenet of Post-Modernism was the absence of objective truth, a consequence of individualist, rational thought. Society, culture and religion were constructed by individuals and each individual was creating their own reality. Margaret Thatcher expressed the view that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. It meant everything was relative. Hence post-truth. Each person had their own ‘take on reality’. You may remember in President Trump’s first term the expression ‘alternative truths’. And how easy it is to tell lies as truths. Boris Johnson was a past master!Running alongside all this were the political ideologies, the secular religions. Communism was based on the criticism of Karl Marx who saw clearly the destructiveness of the market, the capitalist system that exploited workers to the benefit of the middle classes and rich.  Paradoxically, the system was realised fully only in pre-industrial Russia and China, but power corrupts and as George Orwell pointed out in Animal Farm some became ‘more equal than others’. Even so, socialist ideas did take root in the West.A similar idea of equality rose out of the competition of nations against each other. For instance, National Socialism put the nation first and when mixed with the toxic pseudo-science of racism it produced Nazism.After the second World War, there was perhaps the only flowering of liberalism: welfare liberalism, where for 30 some years an effort was made to raise ordinary workers’ standards and rights as Europe emerged from the ruination and impoverishment of the Depression and war. Most Western countries instituted some form of national health system, free education including tertiary education and welfare programmes for the disadvantaged. Trade unions became powerful in their demands for worker rights. The sixties and seventies, with the arrival of pop music and hippies, were expressions of what heaven on earth might look like.  It was short lived and by the eighties, US President Ronald Reagan and UK’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ushered in neoliberalism.Neoliberalism, a super-charged capitalism, was a conscious ideology brought about by right wing think tanks to take back the wealth, using the economics of Friedrich Hayek and the Chicago School led by Milton Friedman. It took us right back to the origins of capitalism. The market was to rule everything. And the ‘invisible hand’ would, in theory, ensure it would work to everyone’s benefit. This metaphor, used by Adam Smith, described ‘how individual self-interest, within a competitive market, can lead to beneficial societal outcomes, even without centralised planning or government intervention’.Under Reagan and Thatcher this process was rebranded as trickle-down economics – the rich had to get richer first before the wealth could trickle down to everyone else.So anything that hindered the free market was to be undermined and if possible, got rid of. This meant unions, social welfare programmes, charities and even governments were to be subjugated to the market and commodified. This had all been tried before with laissez-faire capitalism in the 19thcentury in Britain. It created such poverty, so well described by Charles Dickens, that eventually the government had to intervene with the Poor Laws to give financial support and care to the impoverished.The neoliberal free trade of globalisation was to generate a new Shangri la. But as we now witness it has only created huge disparities in wealth and given power to the super rich: instead of trickling down over the last 50 years wealth has been siphoned up.  Donald Trump has 13 billionaires in his administration.So the Liberal man depending on reason has ended up being alienated from others and self-seeking at the expense of others.  It is believed that people are fundamentally greedy and excel in competition. And the one type of personality that might be completely at home in this culture is the narcissist. The not-for-profit Mayo Clinic, one of the world’s top hospitals, describes the narcissistic personality disorder as: ‘… a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them. People with this disorder may lack the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others.’ The prognosis is not good. This present ideology, neoliberalism, fell apart in the 2008 financial crisis and we suffered the Great Recession. The world is still limping along because no other ideology or economic system has risen to replace it.This is because the Enlightenment project is exhausted. The hope that reason might lead to well-being and happiness has failed. Various efforts to reevaluate and reform by way of Modernism and Post-Modernism and the three idealisms centring on community, nation and the individual self, have all failed. Such is the Enlightenment’s sorry end.Unfortunately the hardship of the growing cost of living and a global rise in people on the move to escape the outcomes of poverty, climate change and oppressive regimes plays into the hands of the far right which threatens the end of democracy and the institution of fascist regimes. We are, in fact, beginning to see this clearly in the US where Trump is completely discarding the law.Another hallmark of authoritarianism is corruption.Corruptionis the use of public office to enrich oneself and so ‘consolidate power, maintain support and suppress dissent’ (https://protectdemocracy.org). Trump is in the process of making the rich even richer with his latest financial bill while also creating a huge personal wealth fund for his family and cronies. The same play book as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Nigel Farage is coming up right behind them.All this should not blind us to the many benefits of Liberalism such as democracy and universal suffrage, internationalism, the rule of law, civil rights, property rights, free speech and The United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights which went onto spawn many international treaties. It is the crumbling of this order, both national and international that causes us to be bewildered, anxious and rudderless.Can the 2500-year-old Buddhadhamma offer some guidance? Hopefully, I’ll have some pointers next Newsbyte.As always, comments, corrections, criticisms are welcome.Many thanks to Denis, Martin, Jim and Therese for their comments and a special thanks to Therese who also edited the essay.