{"id":108830,"date":"2018-04-16T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=108830"},"modified":"2018-04-09T11:59:06","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T10:59:06","slug":"enlightenment-and-social-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/enlightenment-and-social-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Enlightenment and Social Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his 1784 essay on the nature of Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant declared: \u201cEnlightenment is liberation from self-imposed immaturity.\u201d\u00a0 He also noted that, if I may be so bold as to paraphrase: \u201cWe live in an age of enlightenment, but we do not yet live in an enlightened age.\u201d\u00a0 Kant\u2019s observations ought to give us pause.\u00a0 They are worth pondering.\u00a0 They are as relevant today as they were in the late 18th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 To reflect upon them with the seriousness they deserve, we might begin by noting that one hundred years later, another German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said of the same Prussian country in which Kant wrote his revolutionary Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>: \u201cThis nation has made itself stupid on purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nietzsche\u2019s observation applies to America today.\u00a0 So does the maxim by George Santayana: \u201cThose who don\u2019t learn from history are condemned to repeat it.\u201d\u00a0 Let us then pause a moment to reflect upon the possibility \u2013 indeed, the necessity \u2013 of what Richard Oxenberg calls \u201cheart-centered rationality.\u201d\u00a0 Heart-centered rationality is a way of referring to The Golden Rule, revived by Martin Buber in the Kantian-based ethics of his book I and Thou.<\/em>\u00a0 Kant and Buber argue for the innate dignity of every person; a dignity worthy of respect.\u00a0 In order, then, to put an end to what the post-Kantian philosopher Hegel called \u201cthe slaughter-bench of history,\u201d we need an ethical, educational, and cultural revolution; one in which cooperation has primacy over competition, and which embraces what the Dalai Lama calls \u201ca common religion of kindness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accordingly, we must recognize that our collective survival now depends upon a global commitment to what might best be called The Enlightenment Project.\u00a0 This, of course, returns us to Kant\u2019s definition of enlightenment, which I would now like to elaborate with reference to other major figures in the history of philosophy and the pursuit social justice.\u00a0 We might begin by noting that during America\u2019s wars on Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: \u201cAmerica\u2019s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.\u201d\u00a0 And when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied: \u201cI think it would be a good idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Liberation from self-imposed immaturity is liberation from social conditioning.\u00a0 Liberation from social conditioning is escape from Plato’s cave.\u00a0 Escape from Plato\u2019s cave involves appreciation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tragic dictum that “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” \u2013 what Eric Fromm calls “chains of illusion.”<\/p>\n

To break the chains of illusion is to become what Albert Camus calls a “lucid rebel.”\u00a0 A lucid rebel engages in Promethean protest against the vast ignorance that Buddha recognized as the primary cause of suffering.\u00a0 Ignorance, Buddha said, manifests primarily as greed, hatred, craving, clinging, and delusion.\u00a0 To overcome such ignorance is to embrace the point of Karl Marx’s observation: “The demand to abandon illusions about our condition is a demand to abandon the conditions which require illusion.”<\/p>\n

For example, the primary function of the U.S. military is make the world safe for the Fortune 500.\u00a0 The primary function of U.S. education is to ignorate. \u00a0To awaken people to these nefarious facts, Martin Luther King declared: “Wealth, poverty, racism, and war \u2013 these four always go together.”\u00a0 Hence the only way to move from an age of enlightenment to an enlightened age is to recognize that \u201cthese four\u201d vices are inextricably entwined with pervasive political sophistry, a lapdog mainstream news media, and jingoistic pseudo-history in what Gore Vidal calls \u201cThe United States of Amnesia.\u201d\u00a0 Equally relevant here is Mark Twain’s observation: \u201cIt is easier to fool people than to convince them they are being fooled.”\u00a0 Also worth noting is that Emerson, Twain, and William James were members of The Anti-Imperialism League. \u00a0The point is this: The U.S. will never be the country it ought to be, and will never be at peace \u2013 either at home or abroad \u2013 until it eliminates Presidential pardons, throws corporate and Presidential criminals in prison, conscientiously repents for America’s Indochina Holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War), dismantles the American empire (the largest and most globally devastating in world history), and transfers most of the Pentagon budget to an educational system in which schools are gardens and palaces of self-actualization, enlightenment, and cooperative creative evolution.<\/p>\n

Standing before Michelangelo\u2019s statue of David, the poet Rilke said: \u201cI must change my life.\u201d\u00a0 A Catholic bishop, after reading the Dalai Lama\u2019s autobiography, said in his New York Times book review: \u201cWe must change our lives.\u201d\u00a0 Hence we might conclude that Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.\u00a0 Hence also \u2013 as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant would applaud \u2013 we should revise America\u2019s Pledge of Allegiance to read: “I pledge allegiance to the planet and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, with nourishment and beauty for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

During America\u2019s wars on Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: \u201cAmerica\u2019s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.\u201d\u00a0 And when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied: \u201cI think it would be a good idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

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During America\u2019s wars on Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Mark Twain declared: \u201cAmerica\u2019s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.\u201d And when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied: \u201cI think it would be a good idea.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}