I woke up from a nice restful weekend (the first in a while), to read this crap in today's NY Times. In reference to Dawkins', Dennet's and Harris' books, Richard A. Shweder writes:
...the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.
...
Unfortunately, as a theory of history, that story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero. At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had rather little to do with religion. Much to everyone's surprise, that great dance on the Berlin Wall back in 1989 turned out not to be the apotheosis of the Enlightenment.
So all those ideologies ... Naziism, Communism, were all due to the Enlightenment. WTF? What does a dictator like Stalin or crazy ideologues like Hitler and Mao have to do with the Enlightenment? They replaced one religion with another. (Some Chinese expats even have little portraits of Mao hanging in their car, just like some Catholics carry little portraits of their favorite saint.) And to write as Shweder does ("Science has not replaced religion") misses the point. Science is not a religion ... it is not a dogma ... and to equate the two shows little understanding of modern, secular, hummanist society.
Sure, the Enlightenment hasn't permeated ALL of American society, but it had affected quite a bit of it, including academia, most industrial leaders and professionals in the US. For the first half of the twentieth century, those individuals made America the most profitable equitable society known to man. Apart from the South and rural America, most of the US and Western Society has been transformed by the Enlightenment. Western countries and many Asian countries are now more prosperous and to a certain extent more tolerant than they have ever been. Sure tolerance is not absolute and universal, and ideologies of nationalism and xenophobia still exist in Western society, but within the Western world (and parts of Asia), the second half of the twentieth century was one of the most peaceful ever. Currently, parts of the Third World (mostly in Asia) are developing and imitating the west in hopes of reproducing that peace and prosperity.
But ignorance and ideology are not dead. They are still alive, and the fire burns brightest in the part of the world that wasn't affected by the Enlightenment, the Muslim world. And since 9-11 humanists have been watching as reactionaries in the the US have used hysteria and hubris as an excuse to gain more power in the US. They then used their new support to "punish" the heathens. Sure the administration tried to equate Iraq with al Qaeda, but for most American war supporters this became a clash of civilizations and of world religions. These are the same parts of America who are fueling the cultural wars. The other parts of America, who had been most affected by the Enlightenment, shuddered.
Yes Mr Shweder, academia and parts of secular America have felt threatened. The peace, prosperity and tolerance that we fought hard to promote are all being attacked on multiple fronts -- by religious zealots in the middle east, by anti-humanist cultural-warrior reactionaries within the US, and by a horrible US foreign policy. And yes, we feel that the world is drifting away from the ideals of the Enlightenment.
But parts of the US that have been most affected by the Enlightenment are starting to say "enough is enough". (Read the paper Mr Shweder, and you'll find that the GOP is loosing support in the North East. I wonder why?
So please Mr Shweder, do not try to rewrite history, instead try to understand it.
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Okay, I hate it when they do this. Yes, in many ways the 20th c sucked. But I think it mainly sucked "worse" because we had bigger, stronger, faster weaponry and are thus able to do more damage. But was there a 30-years' war? No. Were the rights of citizenry extended, around the globe, to women and minorities? Yes! If you had to throw a dart at the map of the world in the 20th century, you'd have a better chance of hitting a non-shitty time and place than in, say, the 18th century. I do not accept this "worst century yet" premise, not at all; I mean, look at the Middle Ages. They totally sucked worse! And the fall of Rome - equally not fun, but with less firepower. The entire argument collapses. It's always the freaking End Times, in some people's opinion.