Rescuing the Enlightenment from its exploiters

Many of today's self-styled 'Enlightened thinkers' actually have little regard for the freedom of conscience and principle of autonomy that underpinned Enlightenment thought. Tzvetan Todorov gives them their comeuppance.

By Tim Black

While the Enlightenment, 'one of the most important shifts in the history of man' as one recent account put it, has certainly had its detractors, who blame it for anything from the Holocaust to soulless consumerism, it now also has a veritable army of self-styled heirs. Militant secularists, New Atheists, advocates of evidence-based policy, human rights champions… each constituency in their turn will draw justification from the intellectual emanations of that period beginning roughly towards the end of the seventeenth century and culminating – some say ending – in the 1789 French Revolution and its aftermath. And each in their turn will betray it.
   
It is not deliberate treachery. This is no reactionary dissimulation – it is more impulsive than that. Still, in the hands of the neo-Enlightened, from the zealously anti-religious to the zealously pro-science, something strange has happened. Principles that were central – albeit contested – to the Enlightenment have been reversed, turned in on themselves. Secularism, as we have seen recently in the French government's decision to ban the burqa, has been transformed from state toleration of religious beliefs into their selective persecution; scientific knowledge, having been emancipated from theology, has now become the politician's article of faith; even freedom itself, that integral Enlightenment impulse, has been reconceived as the enemy of the people. As the Enlightened critics of Enlightenment naivete would have it, in the symbolic shapes of our ever distending guts and CO2-belching cars, we may be a little too free.

Published in France in 2006, but only recently translated into English, philosopher Tzvetan Todorov's In Defence of Enlightenment is, in short, a corrective. And insofar as it offers a polite but stern rebuke to those who distort the Enlightenment project, often in its own specious name, it is a welcome corrective at that.

So, when taking militant secularism to task, despite its claims to lie within the Enlightenment tradition, Todorov points out that the attacks launched against religion by thinkers like John Locke or Voltaire were not targeted at its content – they were targeted at its form as part of the state. For such fundamentally liberal thinkers, temporal and spiritual authority made for an unholy alliance. That the enemies of the secular ideal, the would-be enslavers of the individual's conscience, were indeed religious does not invalidate this assertion. The problem was not faith itself, but the assumption of state power by a particular faith in order to persecute those with different beliefs. What may have taken a Catholic form in seventeenth-century Spain too often possesses a secular guise today.

Or take the current fetishisation of The Science, or as Todorov calls it, 'scientism', 'a distortion of the Enlightenment, its enemy not its avatar'. We experience this most often, although far from exclusively, through environmentalist discourse. Here, science supplants politics. Competing visions of the good are ruled out in favour of that which the science demands, be it reduced energy consumption or a massive wind-power project. This, as Todorov sees it, involves a conflation of two types of reasoning, the moral (or the promotion of the good) and the scientific (or the discovery of truth). In effect, the values by which one ought to live arise, as if by magic, from the existence of facts. In the hands of politicians this becomes authoritarian: 'Values seem to proceed from knowledge and political choices are passed off as scientific deduction.' There need be no debate, no reasoned argument, because the science tells us what to do.

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2010: Humanity’s Choice As Foreseen by Rudolf Steiner

By: Richard C. Cook

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher and esotericist and founder of one of the key modern spiritual movements in the West. He is best known for his books and lectures before and after World War I, when he founded the Anthroposophical Society with its present-day headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland. After World War I, Steiner and his work were criticized viciously by right-wing nationalists in Germany, which caused him to give up his residence in Berlin. Among the critics was Adolf Hitler, who attacked him in print as a traitor to Germany for his efforts to promote peace.

The work of prophetic thinkers like Rudolf Steiner makes clear that the history of humanity proceeds through the evolution of consciousness, where changes take place in the psyche of people well in advance of their outward manifestations. Thus an understanding of what is happening before our eyes is never simple, nor can it be taken at face value. Discernment requires a level of knowledge that can only be achieved through study and insight.

But only an approach that penetrates deeply into human nature allows us to see the real inner causes of events. Such causes can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. It is the genius and dilemma of man that we can choose which influences we serve. As Steiner prophesied almost a century ago, we appear today to be at a pivotal point where how we make such choices can determine the fate of the world.

It is perfectly clear that we are living in an era of technological achievement that, historically speaking, began just a short time ago. Steiner said what today is accepted as a truism: that the present era arose from discoveries in the 15th century that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, when the intellect of Western man became able systematically to apply the scientific method to phenomena of motion and matter.

The invention that made all else possible was operational by the 1450s: the printing press, first made practical by Johannes Gutenberg of Germany. Over the next four-and-a-half centuries, until the dawn of the 20th, technology surged in every field, but exploded with the near-simultaneous harnessing of electricity and the widespread exploitation of fossil fuels.

The latest phase took place long after Steiner's death: the use of electrical impulses for high-speed data processing, such that computers are rapidly taking over the human workload. With only slight exaggeration, it can be said that humans are needed less all the time, except to program the computers and keep them humming or to carry out the leftover menial labor that machines cannot yet perform.

The unsolved problem lies in the fact that no one knows how, with declining need for employment, to continue to deliver purchasing power to the jobless masses that businesses require for them to purchase the products which machines can increasingly manufacture on their own. Until now, such purchasing power was delivered through debt-based money creation—consumer lending, mortgages against inflated home prices, etc. The collapse of this system is the cause of the current global recession and has set the stage for the huge disruptions that may come next.

[ ... ]

The new revelation shows up wherever people are aspiring to assure that what is produced in the area of economics does not belong just to the money-masters but to all people.

It would show itself when the world of law and government minds its own business except to assure equal rights for all, along with fairness and competition in the marketplace.

It manifests through spiritual, intellectual, and cultural striving, where the highest goal is unfettered individual expression of Self- and God-consciousness.

Again, according to Steiner, it is the spiritual sector that should give guidance to the economic and legal ones. Someday it will. A sign this is happening is the rapid growth of instantaneous communication through the internet. Whether spiritual revelation can prevent more disasters from taking place remains to be seen and may depend on how many individuals eschew despair and choose to respond to the signs of the times in new and positive ways.

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Germany Gave Names to Secret Taliban Hit List

The Afghanistan war logs obtained by WikiLeaks revealed the existence of Task Force 373, a secret US unit assigned with eliminating Taliban leaders. Now SPIEGEL has learned that the German government provided names to the hit list used by the unit. At least one of the men is now dead. By SPIEGEL staff.

Omid Nouripour, a member of the German parliament for the Green Party, was wearing the German national team's jersey in honor of the Germany versus Serbia match scheduled that afternoon at the World Cup in South Africa. It was 7:30 a.m. on June 18, and Nouripour and his nine colleagues were expecting the match to be the most exciting event of the day.

In Room 04/100 at the German Defense Ministry, a windowless, bugproof space nicknamed the "U-Boot" ("submarine"), representatives of the defense and foreign affairs committees of the German parliament, the Bundestag, soon discovered that the day would turn out to be much more eventful than they had anticipated.

After a brief introduction by Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Volker Wieker, the inspector-general of the German armed forces, stood up to give his presentation. By the time Wieker had shown his first few slides, the delegates realized that they were attending a premiere. But this time they weren't being regaled with accounts of the supposed achievements of German reconstruction teams. Instead, they were being given a brief glimpse into the most secret facets of the war in Afghanistan: NATO's ominous list of enemies and "the operations of US special forces units" within the zone controlled by the German military, the Bundeswehr.

The sensitive terrain had been a no-go area for members of the German parliament until then. Until that June morning, the so-called Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) for Afghanistan was mainly a source of speculation in Germany, even among elected representatives. But now Wieker was explaining to them, using simple Bundeswehr diagrams, the procedure in which the Germans "nominate" candidates for the "Capture or Kill" list. He also told them how Germany adds names to the JPEL, which ranks targets according to their relative importance and lists up to 3,000 Taliban, Al-Qaida fighters and drug dealers targeted to be eliminated, if necessary by killing them.

K for Kill

JPEL, Capture or Kill, Task Force 373. Since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 secret US documents (out of a total of almost 92,000 that it has in its possession), and since SPIEGEL, The Guardian and the New York Times reviewed and wrote about the material, the world now knows what these abbreviations and phrases mean. It also has a more detailed understanding of how the allies in the war in Afghanistan compile hit lists, which are then handed over to American elite units to process.

Thanks to the WikiLeaks revelations, war-weary Germany now knows that German officials added names to the JPEL at least 13 times. On this list, 13 names translate into 13 potential death warrants. The Germans only mark their candidates with a C for "capture," and not with a K for "kill." But in fact all International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops are authorized to shoot and kill candidates on the JPEL list if, for example, they attempt to avoid capture by fleeing. In other words, although German elite troops do not use the kill option themselves, Germany does provide its tacit approval of the killing of candidates in the zone under its control in northern Afghanistan.

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Neil Reynolds: Still a tempest

We don't have a Dan Brown blockbuster this summer. For readers who need a conspiracy-theory fix, here's the subversive history that connects The Da Vinci Code (the secret descendants of Jesus) with The Lost Symbol (the cult practices of Freemasonry). The secret knowledge is all right there in The Tempest, Shakespeare's story of a marooned magician who conjures a shipwreck to confront and confound his antagonists. Though celebrated this year at the Stratford Festival (in Christopher Plummer's extraordinary turn as the sorcerer Prospero), Shakespeare's clandestine revelations lurk – in full public view – in suppressed lore known only to the cognoscenti.

Here (maybe) is the astonishing truth: Shakespeare's Prospero was a 16th-century nobleman, pagan in practice, who conjured a series of storms at sea to take the life of Scotland's King James VI – who (as England's King James I) sat in the audience for the premiere of The Tempest in 1611. The historical sorcerer: Francis Stewart, fifth Earl of Bothwell, Lord High Admiral of Scotland and cousin of the king.

This revelation comes from an improbable scholar: a retired English policeman whose work as an amateur historian led to a reasonably credible identification of one of Shakespeare's few protagonists who lacked a real-life antecedent. Brian Moffatt went public last year in a self-published book, Death, Resurrection and the Sword, but his findings caused scarcely a ripple in the tempest of establishment Shakespearean forensics.

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