How did reason, science, and humanism come into such disrepute? It happened because they are not friendly to any dogma, and dogmas are everywhere. We associate them with religion, but they are just as characteristic of political and other philosophies, especially when applied collectively. There are few ideological tribes that can depend on them to support everything for which they stand. By dogma, I refer to any proposition in which belief is in some sense mandatory. To deny a dogma is to commit some offense against some authority, whether moral, epistemic, or tribal.
Enlightenment values are about how to think, not about what to think, and so they tend not to support claims about the superiority of one tribe over all others. As the U.S. Constitution prohibits any religious test for public office, so too a great deal of Enlightenment thinking prohibits any doctrinal test for proper thinking. No ideological conclusion is indefensible in principle, although many conclusions are indefensible in practice because the reasoning that defends them is inconsistent with Enlightenment values. If, in order to defend their political or other principles, advocates must disregard reason, science, or humanism, then they are left with little defense beyond, "These things are true and you had better believe them because we say they are true." People like that are more likely to be thugs than thinkers.
One such principle is the enshrining of emotions, including a devotion to individualism. I often heard, during my formative years, certain intellectuals encouraging people, "Believe in yourself. Ignore any disapproving opinions expressed by other people." Then I noticed, in due course, that advocates of such independent thinking were a bit selective about how this advice should be applied. The advocates seemed to actually mean, "Ignore any opinions that differ from ours." This observation is in no way an endorsement of popular opinion or a disparagement of freethought. The Enlightenment rather was about finding better reasons for believing something than either consensus or personal gratification.
The American Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were two of the Enlightenment's most famous products. In his latest book, The Conservative Sensibility, the conservative journalist George Will has much to say about how the nation has come to disregard many of the key ideas in those documents. He has more to say about the symptoms of that disregard than about its origins, except to note that it is rooted in human nature, particularly the human craving for wealth and power. We may note, though, that the political trends to which conservatives object have had to be rationalized somehow, and that the rationalizations need to either ignore or disparage the Enlightenment values embedded in our nation's founding documents. In drafting those documents, the nation's founders applied reason to some scientific observations of human nature — an exercise in humanism. Those Enlightenment values seem to have fallen into some disrepute.
That has happened because those values are not friendly to dogmas, either religious or secular. Those values are about how to think, not about what to think. There are few tribes that can depend on reason, science, or humanism to support every idea for which they stand. As the Constitution allows no religious test for public office, so the Enlightenment allows no doctrinal test for enlightened thinking. Racism, to pick just one example, is not per se unenlightened, but two centuries of careful analysis have shown it to be contrary to reason, science, and humanism, and that is all the justification we need for rejecting it. That we also judge it to be immoral is, or ought to be, almost beside the point.
Almost as soon as the Constitution was adopted, some factions began trying to reinterpret it into irrelevance. They looked for some way to construe it so as to justify the exercise of greater power than was granted to the government according to a plain reading of its text. According to George Will and other conservatives, this process was considerably accelerated during the 20th century. This was probably related, I suspect, to the 19th century rise of Romanticism, which was a reaction against the Enlightenment.
Romanticism enshrined emotions. The Enlightenment accepted them but would not privilege them. Did the Enlightenment disparage emotion, as some have alleged? No doubt some thinkers did. The Enlightenment was never a uniform intellectual movement. But we should remember too that to some people, anything other than submission is opposition. The mere assertion that something is not right just because it feels right is taken to disparage the feeling.
Many of the progressive policies to which some of us object are motivated by feelings, usually justified as moral feelings. The progressives' rationale is that they are right because they are morally right, and if the Constitution has a problem with them, then that is just too bad either for the Constitution or for the way conservatives interpret the Constitution. As a conservative myself, I make no claim to infallibility. That would be inconsistent with what I regard as a fundamental conservative principle. On the basis of that same principle, though, I just reject anybody's claim to moral infallibility.
Oliver Cromwell is famous mainly as a leader of the movement that deposed King Charles I and set up the commonwealth government (1649-1653) during the interregnum. In 1650, according to the British historian Thomas Carlyle, Cromwell wrote a letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which was contemplating some military action against him, ostensibly justified on some theological grounds. The letter included an admonition often quoted: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,* think it possible that you may be mistaken." Some statisticians have even adopted this principle under the name Cromwell's Rule. It is characteristic of thugs that they will not think it possible that they could be mistaken, that their entitlement to tell the rest of us how to live is infallibly justified. As long as the various factions currently vying for political power maintain this attitude, it is hard to see how we will avoid a conflict very much like the first American Civil War.
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* The phrase "bowels of Christ" is jarring to the modern ear but would not have been so to 17th-century English speakers. The word "bowels" had a figurative meaning at the time of "the seat of pity or the gentler emotions." (freedictionary.org)
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(This page last updated on November 28, 2019.)