Go back in time a few years, and you would never have believed what the Democratic Party was about to become. Who would have predicted the Democrats becoming the War Party or embracing censorship, be it direct or indirect? Not only are the principles of the US Constitution being overthrown, but it is as if Western Civilization is out to reverse the era of Enlightenment.
Maybe we shouldn't be so shocked by this. After all, is the mindset of Enlightenment inheritable and cumulative in the same way as scientific knowledge and technical expertise?
The era of Enlightenment was a process -- a struggle -- that took a century. There was nothing easy, obvious, or inevitable about it. How can a modern person "inherit" the experience they had then? They were reacting against the era of religious wars, the Inquisition, a parasitic clerical establishment, and the crude superstitions of earlier times.
All it takes is some new new form of certainty, secular religion, promised utopia, powerful Authority, or holy cause. Then a disease of the public mind gets started. Everything becomes a battle of Good versus Evil. People become susceptible to apocalyptic predictions of the latest crisis. The mind will drown in fear, hysteria, and suspicion. People who won't go along with the new program become the new heretics. Maybe being burned at the stake is not their fate, but their careers can be ruined, their bank accounts can be seized, and they can be silenced in the media.
Consider this quote from Gilbert Murray, a classicist in the early 20th century:
...the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions.
...the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.
["The Five Stages of Greek Religion," Ch. 4, The Failure of Nerve.]
Another relevant quote:
there is much reason to doubt whether the modern age as a whole is much more indifferent to the appeal of religion than the centuries of the past. The so-called Age of Faith, when every man gave lip-service to the Church…probably contained not much larger a proportion of genuinely religious souls...than are to be found in our Western world today…
The gropings and yearnings of so many of the “unchurched” today, not only the spread of various cults deriving their inspiration from Oriental sources, but even more the intense religious fervor with which men throw themselves into socialism, patriotic nationalism, etc., seem to indicate the continued presence in men of the needs and the aspirations which formerly were expressed in terms of traditional religion.
[ J.H. Randall, "The Making of the Modern Mind," Ch. 20, Religion in the Growing World.]
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| Bergman's classic movie, The Seventh Seal |
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