Why is the Enlightenment seen as the pinnacle of Western Civilization when it clearly has nothing to do with the material progress we've made and has destroyed our traditional conceptions of freedom, virtue, and other values.
This is a good one that I've recently been delving into. Consider the timing of the reformation and the enlightenment. They call this time period "the scientific revolution." Also consider that the Catholic church (I'm not talking Christianity here) was in reality one-world ruled, despotic, communism. Once this rule was broken all these discoveries and paradigm shifts happened.
This kind of paradigm shift has happened many times in science and culture in our history. So, it's more likely (and and adequate) to explain the Enlightenment as a blip in time among many blips in time, and that there was no "evolution of man" for this process or that we're any different physically that humans on the planet 20,000 years ago.
I agree with you that our concept of freedom and virtue are perverted. These are fundamental natural orders that have been subverted with the concept of money and slow drip of dopamine. We can achieve these things in a more pure way when people are awakened to this natural order.
It will require another paradigm shift to do it though.
The Scientific Revolution was prior to the Enlightenment. People tend to claim that the Enlightenment birthed the Scientific Revolution, but what the Enlightenment did was birth political values that led to liberalism and communism among other ideologies. My point is that I think the Enlightenment did a lot less good than people, such as Steven Pinker, think it did.
I agree with every point you made here.
I believe many of these ideas are abstracted theories given too much weight distracting from real truth. Adding concepts like libertarianism for example gets people stuck on how we can set up legal systems to make it OK to burn wood because the neighbors can smell the smoke. It's like all systems, if you add too many variables entropy becomes unmanageable. If taken too far on any of these avenues we can get so much liberty that we're paralyzed. And what is liberty without empowerment? If we favor one variable over another, we often get things messed up and forget about the importance of managing ... virtue, or even survival.
It's interesting that we as humans seem to have a problem with getting stuck on the details and the more "ideas" out there we can forget about the point of things. This is why in the protocols they claim to use gold to subvert the population and their morality.
In this way, I think your point about the enlightenment is dead on. It's a great idea to explore all the different styles and methods, but eventually we have to move forward as a population. The enlightenment made many of us forget about our carnal natures and now systems are in place to mask such problems. In short, we have "enlightenment" but without "truth." We've become distracted from that simple idea.
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