10 Membranes

The Enlightenment and the Tea Party

Modern right wing movements have almost completely rejected the Enlightenment, which has provided the back bone to economic growth, political stability and general well-being for 300 years. This manoeuvre has catastrophic consequences not just for the waning powers of the West, but for the world as a whole.

The Enlightenment is difficult to nail down and define – scholars have deconstructed it, broken it up into national flavours, teased out inherent and glaring contradictions (empiricism versus rationalism, the noble savage versus the bureaucratic state etc) and noted how this loose movement can be broken into successive and ruptured temporal phases.  We can accept all of this while still maintaining that there is such a thing as the Enlightenment, whose fundamentally principles are better understood in retrospect than at the time, and whose fundamental principles are drawn out collectively from amidst the differences of the movement.

These might be seen as a commitment to the idea of reason, and to being able to solve problems with reason, upheld with a disinterestedness, founded in experimental method and on dialogue. From this attitude came about the scientific revolution, the economic revolution, and from a combination of both the industrial revolution, democratic government, modern technology and prosperity and understanding of the world more widely dispersed than at any time in history.

A great debate rages about the Enlightenment – many, notably of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno and Horkheimer, and counter-Enlightenment post-structuralists like Foucault and his many followers, have critiqued the Enlightenment has being responsible for the horrors of modernity, tracing a thread from the salons of the intellectuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth century to the rationalised and industrialised mass murder of the Holocaust. Moreover the Enlightenment is in fact a facade, the presentation of reason founded on irreason, as a means of domination and control, logic a fig leaf to despotism of a newly evolved, capitalist, more overtly materialist, consumerist and ultimately totalitarian form.

My problem with this argument is simple: in arguing this point, which has some force, the critics of the Enlightenment fail to specify that criticism of the Enlightenment is a product of the Enlightenment, that without the free thinking, closely reasoned and progressive points of view engendered therein, and without the concomitant institutions it spawned, the conditions of possibility of a critique of the Enlightenment would never have been there. This is precisely the strength of the Enlightenment, that it provides us with the legacy and with the tools that are free to do as they will, including reflexive auto-critique.  The counter-Enlightenment is not just the child of the Enlightenment, but is fully encompassed within it, as an extension of it.

There are also contemporary, trenchant defenders of the tradition, amongst whom I count Jonathan Israel as the leader. Israel’s towering scholarship has produced a powerful and vast view of the Enlightenment as springing from the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, and he draws a strong line from Spinoza to many of the best hallmarks of modernity: freedom of religion, speech, conscience, action; the idea of human rights; the liberal-democratic nation state. Israel fiercely argues that without the Enlightenment, we would have none of these things, and the positives stemming from the Enlightenment are not so much out balancing the negatives, as being completely indispensable to any conception of a decent world, a view to which I subscribe.

We are currently witnessing the wholesale dismantling of the legacy of the Enlightenment, a destruction that is most apparent in the startling ignorance and aggressive tactics of the Tea Party. Here are three examples of how they constitute a grave threat to this legacy:

• Global warming. The complete rejection of the link between global warming and man is a denial of science, of the efficacy of the experimental method, of the entire edifice of scientific knowledge and the institutions to which it has given rise. Denial of global warming is a retreat into “magic”, wishful and paranoid thinking. There is essentially no difference between the global warming deniers and those doing rain dances in the hope it will save them from drought.
• The deficit, tax cuts and small government: There are two strands to this. The first involves the Party-ers approach to politics, the blackmailing of a nation, the refusal to negotiate or compromise in any form.  This is a denial of not just of a basic element of all human (and primate) interactions, give and take, but also a refusal to enter dialogue and try and work through disagreements in a rational manner. It is the equivalent of the child putting their fingers in their ears. Secondly the belief that tax cuts for the rich are innately good, and that small government is innately better, shows to my mind, both a lack of evidential reasoning and an inability to change one’s mind. There is little evidence that tax cuts for the very rich are good for an economy; arguably such tax cuts have caused much of the recent turbulence in global markets, as imbalances have been created, forcing excessive and widespread borrowing amongst large portions of society as a means of growth, which has turned out to be illusory. Moreover as the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang amongst others has convincingly argued, there is little evidence of the so-called “trickle down” effect, whereby wealth percolates from a small upper base into general society. In fact, the opposite seems to occur – the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else, and the overall economy suffers in the long term. To my mind the total and utter disavowal of any tax cuts and any kind of government represents a complete rejection of the Enlightenment stance on the nation, on economics and on reason.
• God: The Enlightenment is not innately anti-religious, but it was responsible for producing the instruments of religious scepticism.  Christian fundamentalism is not monopolised by the Tea Party, but they are probably its most vocal and powerful proponents. Ergo avowal of religion is not anti-Enlightenment as such; profession of uncritical, unnuanced and scientifically inaccurate religious beliefs is. Two consequences of this can be felt in the matters of gay rights and the study of evolution in schools. On the first, as epitomised by Michelle Bachmann, gays are often regarded as being mistaken, wrong in their “choice” and fundamental immoral. This denial of their identities and rights is by extension a denial of a plurality of models for humanity that was not articulated in the Enlightenment, but can be seen as stemming from the liberating effects of regarding humanity as being its own lawmaker, as being self defined and self defining. Secondly the anti-Enlightenment attitude of teaching Creationism in schools could scarcely be more obvious to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with rational thought.

Ideologies are really constellations, composites of different but aligned positions, that collectively produce the general tenor of the beliefs, which in the case of Tea Party conjoins a fundamentalist (I would say bizarre and inaccurate) interpretation of Christianity, a hatred of Obama, rampant paranoia of Muslims, socialists and terrorists, tacit racism, religious faith in the power of unfettered free markets, denial of global warming, anti-abortion etc etc.  Characteristic of this noxious brew is both the absence of reason presented as reason (witness Fox News, which uses the word balance repeatedly, while offering no such thing, something seemingly unapparent to, or wilfully suppressed by its viewers) and a denial of the contradictions involved in the thought process. 

Let us look at such a contradiction. Firstly we have seen there is a consistent anti-science but “pro-business” streak to the Tea Party. Putting aside that pro-business is a position held by all major parties, and is here meant as being total freedom of company, even to the detriment of the populous and the nation, it is seems to me that a) most growth in the West will come from innovation, technology and the knowledge economy. B) that these depend pre-eminently on a well educated scientifically literate work force. C) that the well spring of a modern economy, is precisely the same as the things which claim evolution is true and man causes global warming. If you believe in airplanes, why don’t you believe in the greenhouse effect?  

To sum up, I want to conclude several things. Firstly that the Tea Party is fundamentally anti-Enlightenment. Secondly that this is bad, as the Enlightenment is the foundation of prosperity and security, and is the only reasonable basis the world can function at a high level in the face of numerous threats and difficulties. Lastly I want to suggest that many of the anti-Enlightenment facets of the US right, can also be discerned elsewhere in right wing factions. I will examine this last claim in another post. My contention will be that, with Jonathan Israel, the Enlightenment is radical, and implies a radical politics; that the anti-Enlightenment of the right is a mechanism of forestalling this radicalism so that inequalities and quirks of the system may be maintained by those who benefit most from them, and that there is a very clear axis between anti-Enlightenment thought, the modern Right and the artificial and unjustified maintenance of privileges of the few; that to a large extent this axis can explain the parlous economic situation of the West, will serve the continued decline of the West and will ultimately lead the world into environmental and conflictual disaster.