The Legacy of Enlightenment - Essay Example

?Introduction Enlightenment was a broad, widespread intellectual revolution that rocked western culture from the mid 17th to 18th centuries in regards to the growing scientific innovations, reason, freedom and ideals of cosmopolitan modernity. Also were individual freedom of conscience and expression, equality, human rights, universality, secular values and democracy. The successes and deficits, reactions and responses of the early radical, average and high enlightenment continue to shape the most important issues today. The enlightenment legacy incorporates issues of the urban and cosmopolitan humanistic tradition throughout history. The opposing strand was counter enlightenment which constituted of royal antagonists of the old order and conservative clerical thinkers of both catholic and protestant denominations. Despite reaction, western religious traditions have been deeply enriched by the enlightenment. The mainstream religions have adapted to the enlightenment ethical values of free inquiry, democracy, equality and universality. Religious battles have tended to cease where enlightenment values were most cherished (Zafirovski, 2010). The concept of enlightenment is both a philosophical concept and an historical process. The critical social theory uses enlightenment in the wide sense as advance of thought which has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. The essence of enlightenment is understood as the choice between alternatives. The concept of enlightenment describes a fundamental structure of reason and characterises the historical practices that in modernity have led to rationalization and reification. The modern enlightenment is an embodiment of self cancelling ideas of bourgeois, democratic culture. Following the early critical theory, politics of emancipation is by necessity a politics of enlightenment, a form of enlightenment that transcends the parameters of modernity as the product of the eighteenth century enlightenment and thus beyond the latter itself. The modern enlightenment epitomizes and completes a process of enlightenment that began several millennia ago. This differentiates pre-modern and post modern enlightenment including persuasion and education, as non coercive means of moral regulation in contrast to coercive forms of social control (Jacob, 2001). The age of enlightenment or age of reason was aimed at reforming the society and advance knowledge. It also saw the promotion of science and intellectual exchange and opposed superstition, intolerance and profanity in churches and the government. A distinction occurs between occidental and oriental enlightenment whereas the former is associated with rationalism and liberalism and the latter constitutes mysticism and conservatism or traditionalism. Enlightened thinking is said to begin during the renaissance period, with the reformation or even the Greeks (Jonathan, 2001). The Children of Enlightenment According to Todorov, there are three ideas that form the basis of enlightenment project. These are universality, autonomy and human end which he believes is the purpose of our acts. What we require today is the realignment of enlightenment thinking in a way that preserves our culture while subjecting it to a critical evaluation, assessing it in light of wanted and unwanted consequences. The traditional antagonists of enlightenment are equated with Hydras that keep on growing even after they are cut. These traditional antagonists will never succeed because societies are becoming more liberal in the quest for autonomy and dialogue. He continues to assert that he is sceptical about the use of human rights since they are used as instrument for justifying our western superiority. There is a distinction between religions which appeal to human beings or to tribe only. Human beings have two obligations only; to love God and to love their neighbour. One characteristic about enlightenment is the celebration of plurality and difference. Decolonisation as such was channelled by ideas of autonomy, equality, dignity, personal liberty which were ideas of enlightenment (Jonathan, 2001). Modern western and other democratic societies including Europe and America’s fundamental values and institutions are the creations and legacies of the enlightenment. Their ideals and social structures that are primarily rooted in, advanced and advocated by the enlightenment include: freedom, equality, fairness, democracy, inclusion, individualism, social progress, secularism, pluralism, scientific and technological rationalism, economic prosperity, optimism, universalism, pursuit of happiness and well being, dignity and humanism. It is a sort of Cultural Revolution. In this sense, modern liberal-democratic, egalitarian, rationalistic, secularistic, advanced, humanistic and progressive society or simply modernity is the child of enlightenment. The modern project of society originates and derives from the western enlightenment. Alternatively, liberty, equality, justice and happiness for all are the genuine originator and spiritual parent of modern liberal democratic society. It is the true foundation of modern free, open society through numerous clear links between enlightenment of eighteenth century and modern social, political, philosophical and scientific conditions in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. We are all the enlightenment’s children. This proposition holds true as a general pattern or prevalent tendency with some deviations and oppositions like medievalism and conservatism, including fascism and neofascism. The enlightenment constitutes complete sociological innovation, social revolution, involving multiple and complex societal ramifications and consequences as well as socio-historical conditions and settings (Jacob, 2001). In sociological view, ‘the child and children of enlightenment ’ signifies a modern liberal democratic western and other societies and the people living in them, including America and Americans and the expression of societal outcomes, legacies, and descendants of enlightenment as distinguished from pre-enlightenment. Enlightenment includes values and institutions that are at the heart of western civilization. These values include enlightenment traditions of liberal-secular democratic and rationalistic culture centred around the arts and sciences, specifically involving the disinterested pursuit of truth , cultivation of art and commitment to critical thinking through expansion of intellectual inquiry. The problems of modern enlightenment are solved within the parameters of enlightenment norms. The enshrinement of enlightenment ideas in public law displays the tension between its universal norms and their appropriate application to individual groups and societies (Zafirovski, 2007). Western and other non-western liberal democratic societies have been the children of enlightenment; that is, children that have been reproduced and justified by pre and counter-enlightenment and its ideals. Conservatism, interwar, federalism, totalitarian and war like fascism are all outcomes of counter-enlightenment. Medievalist traditionalism and religion such as orthodox Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe for example persisted the pre-enlightenment and consequently, pre-liberalism and prodemocracy. The opposite lineages of modern liberal democratic open and illiberal undemocratic closed societies reveal the contrast and deep contradiction between enlightenment and anti-enlightenment ideals, values and institutions and their respective outcomes of liberty and democracy and of liberty and authoritarianism respectively. Eventually, the sociological child of enlightenment and its ideals is the opposite to that of pre and anti-enlightenment: liberal-democratic and open versus illiberal-undemocratic and closed society. In fact, without the enlightenment and its holistic, consistent liberalism political pluralism and cultural diversity, it would probably not attain the status of a necessary condition of an integral element of democracy, civil society, culture and liberty. The emphasis of modern western civilisation as the sociological child of enlightenment is require with respect to unique and exceptional Americans ideals, values and institutions. Super patriotic sociologists, economists and conservative politicians agree on values and institutions like liberty, equality, justice, democracy, prosperity, free markets, capitalism, rational science and technology, optimism and social progress as the American apple pie. In summary, the fundamental western values and institutions notably liberty and democracy are specific products and legacies of enlightenment versus pre and counter enlightenment rather than the assumed, natural enlightenment in modern societies(Zafirovski,2007). The Ideal and Legacy of Enlightenment Liberty in modern society, including political and individual or civil liberties and human rights are the children of enlightenment. The modern concept and practice of liberty, especially individual liberties are the most cherished values and institutions in modern western and other democratic societies including Europe and America. The modern liberal and humanitarian values provide weapons for establishing and sustaining human rights and freedoms in modern society. Human freedom and dignity, specifically personal freedom and individual preferences constitute the supreme ideal and value of enlightenment in conjunction with human reason and knowledge defining rationalism with social-economic progress. Enlightenment hence provides the strongest, fullest, elaborate and comprehensive expression of the ideal and search for human liberty and dignity, liberation, life and happiness against all odds and opposing forces. It rediscovers, rehabilitates, and advocates the perennial dream of society liberty including free, equal and expanded life chances in an open society. Enlightenment members were the most enlightened advocates of liberty during the times of western society and beyond. The crucial concept of enlightenment is the freedom of thought, speech and communication and other perspectives of policies of freedom (Zafirovski, 2010). Furthermore, enlightenment presents the ideal of what can be viewed as integral or comprehensive , thus, indivisible liberty in society, namely economic and non economic, individual o group , positive and negative, political and civil liberties. Enlightenment becomes an ideal and process of human liberation or emancipation through liberalization and related social processes like rationalization, modernization, Democratization and structural-institutional differentiation such as cosmopolitanism, secularization, cultural globalization, renaissance and classical civilization and humanization o social relations. This involves the enlightenment’s envisioned possibility of individual liberation through individual realized or expanded knowledge (Zafirovski, 2010). Enlightenment Culture The modern liberal culture is the product of continuing legacy of the enlightenment and its cultural matrix and renaissance. It is the liberal; expression of a more enlightened and enlarged mind. Liberal culture is enlightened and inclusive rationalistic sense of rational choice, the culture of inclusion, knowledge, progress, egalitarianism, universalism and human reason, freedom and autonomy. Notably science, education and morality, liberal culture stands with enlightened-based ideals, values and norms. Modern culture continues to exhibit directly in Western Europe and beyond like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and America, a sort of historical path that is dependent on original enlightenment values. Hence liberal culture or civilization is that of human freedom, creativity and life by constituting and promoting cultural diversity and identity, thus multiculturalism, just as liberal democracy does political pluralism, while illiberal cultures and civilizations are those of un-freedom, destruction and ultimately deaths. Illiberal societies are also characterised by mass executions of witches and enemies representing or enforcing non-diversity or mono-culturalism. They usually operate and enforce monism in politics. In cultural terms, liberal societies tend to become diverse and multi-cultural as well as pluralistic in political sense, in contrast to their illiberal, conservative and fascist counterparts seeking to become mono-cultural or politically monists (Brewer, 2012). Pluralism and Ecumenism The effect of enlightenment on the reception of psalms was that majority began seeing it as irrelevant or inappropriate and the only way that served enlightenment interests was when scholars read them with little reference to the present community of faith. The legacy of enlightenment thinking has provided unexpected opportunities for the reception of psalmody. Its liberal openness to pluralism and hence to new ways of thinking has encouraged Jews and Christians to begin taking new initiatives towards mutual collaboration in the ways they use psalms. Similarly, Catholics and Protestants who traditionally have defined their use of psalmody since reformation, particularly in worship, are now showing signs of reapproachment. Collaboration is seen in translation, ecumenical liturgies and academic works. The same collaboration is evidenced in devotional use of psalms, music and art. The issues are more about the sharing of new light in regards to understanding of the psalms as opposed to following a specific denominational correctness (Gillingham, 2012). Rather than reading the psalms through the life of David, or through Jesus Christ, those of all faiths read them as universal life centred prayers to their supreme deity, emphasizing what is typical and common to humanity within them. Jewish and Christian readers of the psalms have been brought together as well as those from other faiths and those with no fixed religions at all. In a century dominated by warfare, terrorism, financial uncertainties, threats of bombing and ecological disasters bringing suffering and destruction to mankind, the psalms have been able to address issues which are relevant to all mankind. They are also used at occasions such as royal weddings, funerals, memorial services, liturgies, prayer and thanksgiving at times of national crises. References Brewer, D (2012), The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructuring Eighteenth Century French, Rutledge Gillingham, S (2012) Psalms through the Centuries, Wiley-Blackwell Jacob, M (2001) The Enlightenment : A Brief History with Documents, Palgrave Macmillan Jonathan I (2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Zafirovski, M (2007) Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries: Freedom Liberalism and Antiliberalism in the 21st Century, BRILL Zafirovski, M (2010) The Enlightenment and Its Effect on Modern Society, Springer Read More