There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds. The age of reason did not produce the age of Aquarius, but it put claims that were ungrounded in fact on the back foot for the best part of two centuries.
By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out.
And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.”
-- Douglas Murray, “The War on the West”
In the pre-Enlightenment times, the Word of God was authoritative. How he could know was through divine wisdom, inaccessible to no one. God knew everything, and his word was not to be questioned or doubted.
As we lurch towards the risk of a post-Enlightenment era, the Word of Me becomes authoritative. How “Me” could know is through “lived experience,” inaccessible to no one else. The subjective is the way to know everything, and “my truth” is not to be questioned or doubted.
This is not progress, this is regression.
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