Mick Hartley

With the enlightenment came the idea of universalism: that everyone was of equal value. Now, though, progressives reject the enlightenment as some kind of Eurocentric power grab, and are pushing identitarianism – which is basically tribalism by another name. What's going on? 

Susan Neiman at UnHerd:

Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally, it was the Right who focused on the first, and the Left who emphasised the second. This tradition has been inverted. It’s not surprising, then, that theories held by the woke undermine their empathetic emotions and emancipatory intentions. Those theories not only have strong reactionary roots; some of their authors were outright Nazis. Ideas influenced by Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger and their epigones take up plenty of room on the progressive syllabus. The fact that both men not only served the Nazis but defended doing so long after the war is old news. Outrage, today, is reserved for racist passages of 18th-century philosophy.

In fact, many of the theoretical assumptions which support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they most despise. The best tenets of woke, such as the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective, come straight from the Enlightenment. Contemporary rejections of this period usually go hand in hand with not much knowledge of it. But you can’t hope to make progress by sawing at the branch you don’t know you are sitting on.

It is now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was designed to disguise Eurocentric views which supported colonialism. These claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn the Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism — on the basis of universalist ideas. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they are echoing a tradition that goes back to 18th-century thinkers, who risked their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, to defend those ideas.

This is not merely a historical matter: we need Enlightenment ideas if we have any hope of moving forward against what are politely called the authoritarian tendencies of the present. But there is no time for politeness when many elected leaders around the world are openly undermining democracy.

One of the most concerning aspects of modern progressive thought, in its dependence on postmodernism, is the dismissal – ironically – of the actual possibility of progress. If objective truth is unknowable, and, pace Foucault, every new step forward is in fact illusory and represents merely a more sinister form of repression, then progress itself is illusory. It's all a matter of competing power structures.

And now see where that's got us.

Raymond Tallis's prescient Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism, from 1997, was a fine demolition of "the comfortable self-congratulatory cynicism of modernist and post-modernist cultural critics", but they don't seem to write books like that any more. Though perhaps Susan Neiman's forthcoming Left Is Not Woke will take up the slack.