Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stuart Jordan (Greenbelt, MD) is a retired senior staff scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and is currently president and board member of the Institute for Science and Human Values. He holds a doctorate in physics and astrophysics and is a Rhodes scholar.

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the ENLIGHTENMENT VISION

Prometheus Books

Contents

PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION..........................................................11Chapter 1. The Historical Enlightenment...........................................17Chapter 2. Status of Enlightenment Goals Today....................................33Chapter 3. Ignorance, Superstition, and Juggernaut Technology.....................47Chapter 4. The Critical Role of Science...........................................63Chapter 5. Science for Life.......................................................85Chapter 6. Universal Human Rights.................................................103Chapter 7. Religion Evolving......................................................127Chapter 8. The Primacy of Politics Today..........................................143Chapter 9. Planetary Humanism.....................................................165Chapter 10. Overcoming Crippling Ignorance........................................175Chapter 11. Reassessing the Enlightenment Today...................................191Chapter 12. Toward a Better Future................................................213NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................229ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...................................................................267INDEX.............................................................................269

Chapter One

THE HISTORICAL ENLIGHTENMENT VISION

The historical eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment was one of the most dramatic epochs in history. Coinciding with a rapid increase in the development of modern science and the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the democratic ideas of this period were also critical for stimulating the American Revolution. The leading thinkers of the Enlightenment went beyond the arguably more profound theoretical thinkers of the seventeenth century to render ideas that had been developing for the three previous centuries more practicable.

The driving goal of the Enlightenment was based on humanist ethics. All the major thinkers associated with this movement aspired to improve the secular lot of humankind everywhere. Most of them were more interested in action than in abstract philosophy. In order to improve society, they wanted to change it. Some were academic philosophers as well, but their writings bearing directly on the Enlightenment were of a more practical kind, even when rooted in a strong academic tradition. A good example of such a thinker is John Locke in Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay. Voltaire was definitely not an academic philosopher. The first sentence in his farce Zadig reveals his disdain for metaphysics. Both authors had a powerful impact on progressive actions inspired by their writings.

The Enlightenment was the culmination of ideas that developed first in Italian city-states and eventually became widespread among educated Western Europeans during the Renaissance. Renaissance thinkers used extant classical Greek and Roman texts to emulate and eventually to modify classical ideas. In doing so, they rediscovered that secular life "in this world" could be quite attractive. This contrasted to a pessimistic view common during the Middle Ages, when many people believed that humanity had degenerated since the classical era. Widespread acceptance of this dark view made it easy for these same people to believe their only hope lay in personal salvation though the Catholic Church. While historians have noted that this notion of an abrupt transition from "the Dark Ages" to a more optimistic and secular Renaissance is often exaggerated, they also have agreed that there were noticeable differences in how many people, especially the educated, felt about secular life in the later period than they had in the earlier one. The transition from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment was not a smooth one. The Italian city-states that started the Renaissance gradually succumbed to their more powerful neighbors to the north, in spite of Machiavelli's somewhat misunderstood but ruthless recipe for uniting his native country. This failure plus the trial of Galileo eventually reduced the influence of the land that started the Renaissance, while others like the Spanish Netherlands carried on the tradition as the Dutch freed themselves from Spanish domination. The Protestant Reformation ensured that the sixteenth century would be a time of bitter religious strife that was highly destructive for much of Western Europe and disastrous for what would become Germany. These religious wars forced the Catholic Church that was becoming more liberal during the Renaissance (as long as its ecclesiastical authority was not openly challenged) to revert to discouraging all dissent while also implementing needed reforms. The progressive trend that led to the Enlightenment was delayed for more than a century.

Not surprisingly, a major feature of the Enlightenment was its optimism. Not only were the goals revolutionary; many of their proponents believed they were achievable in a not-too-distant future. Nicolas de Condorcet, sometimes called the noble philosopher, is famous for predicting such progress under trying personal circumstances. Not every major Enlightenment figure, including Voltaire, was quite that optimistic, but the general mood of many eighteenth-century thinkers was more optimistic than that of several well-known scholars today, a subject that is discussed in detail in several following chapters. The perfectibility of man is a phrase often associated with the Enlightenment of this formative period. After a long period of worldly pessimism following the classical age in the West, typical Enlightenment thinkers were convinced they saw a bright light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

Another feature of the historical Western Enlightenment was the emphasis Enlightenment thinkers placed on the use of science and reason as the best way to achieve the humanistic goal of a better world for people everywhere. While this goal was based on humanist ethics, science and reason were advocated as the means for realizing the objectives. The Age of Reason is the term frequently used to describe this historical period; and the scientific approach required that empirical evidence, not faith, must be combined with reason to better understand the secular world. The artist Francisco Goya, who was strongly influenced by the Enlightenment, reflected this view in one of the most famous sketches in his Los Caprichos. Loosely translated into English, the long title reads "The sleep of reason produces terrible monsters. But imagination, combined with reason, is the mother of the arts and the source of everything wonderful." Goya was acknowledging what every artist and also what every scientist knows: that imagination is the start of the creative process. He also understood from a passionate and complex personal life that only when imagination is combined with reason, and in science relies exclusively on reliable empirical evidence, can the horrors of uncontrolled irrationality be avoided. Anyone familiar with Goya's famous Black Paintings sees this immediately. The Enlightenment did not disregard the passionate and romantic sides of human life but insisted on understanding and controlling them in a rational manner.

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