"Liberalism used to be dedicated to doubt, cynical about certainty and, above all, suspicious of power. All I am urging is that liberalism should start applying these attitudes as rigorously to its own powers and certainties as in the past it applied them to everybody else's." - Peregrine Worsthorne
The Enlightenment, as a friend told me, cannot be thrown out wholesale - the unfortunate baby and bath water analogy rears its ugly head here. It is a matter of redefining it - recovering the critical aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather than demonizing and rubbishing it. Rubbishing it requires no thought, no effort - it is the easy way out. Rethinking the Enlightenment and recovering aspects of it demands thoughtfulness and worthwhile labouring.
Peregrine Worsthorne is correct in pointing out how unfettered freedom - without respect to what Weber called an ethic of responsibility and conviction - leads to a "ratocracy", a meritocracy where sycophantism is rampant. The turn towards the private individual as the site of freedom - individual rights and freedoms as the end all and be all - feeds this ratocracy in business, in politics, in academia, in activism, and even in matters of the heart.
The courage to act is not natural to some and absent from others. It is not simply a matter of nature over nurture. We all possess that potential to learn, to act freely, to innovate, and to create. Education, hence, cannot simply be an accumulation of knowledge - formulae, facts, fictions, and what else. Education is not, as some contend, weeding out the weak and elevating the "strong" to their rightful place of status - guardians of knowledge, if one believes Plato. Education is between I and Thou, between you and me, between persons and the world they share. This is the legacy of the Enlightenment. May we heed Worsthorne's brief, yet inspired, comment and look to recover what freedom means in an age where liberty seemingly is currency for boundless pursuits of power and triumph - as individuals and as nation-states.
The Enlightenment, as a friend told me, cannot be thrown out wholesale - the unfortunate baby and bath water analogy rears its ugly head here. It is a matter of redefining it - recovering the critical aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather than demonizing and rubbishing it. Rubbishing it requires no thought, no effort - it is the easy way out. Rethinking the Enlightenment and recovering aspects of it demands thoughtfulness and worthwhile labouring.
Peregrine Worsthorne is correct in pointing out how unfettered freedom - without respect to what Weber called an ethic of responsibility and conviction - leads to a "ratocracy", a meritocracy where sycophantism is rampant. The turn towards the private individual as the site of freedom - individual rights and freedoms as the end all and be all - feeds this ratocracy in business, in politics, in academia, in activism, and even in matters of the heart.
The courage to act is not natural to some and absent from others. It is not simply a matter of nature over nurture. We all possess that potential to learn, to act freely, to innovate, and to create. Education, hence, cannot simply be an accumulation of knowledge - formulae, facts, fictions, and what else. Education is not, as some contend, weeding out the weak and elevating the "strong" to their rightful place of status - guardians of knowledge, if one believes Plato. Education is between I and Thou, between you and me, between persons and the world they share. This is the legacy of the Enlightenment. May we heed Worsthorne's brief, yet inspired, comment and look to recover what freedom means in an age where liberty seemingly is currency for boundless pursuits of power and triumph - as individuals and as nation-states.
