On Story: A Critique of the Enlightenment’s Story

enlightenmentAgain, not all Enlightenment ideals are false. Some are only partly false. Some are quite true. Some are true but only if understood in a different context.

The natural human tendency is to be overly binary — that is, to create false dichotomies, going to one extreme or the other. And it’s not a helpful way to think about or to discuss worldviews (or anything else, for that matter).

For example, I’m all in favor of reason. Reason is good.  It’s just that reason can only produce true conclusions if it begins with true axioms. If you start with false assumptions, reason will inevitably produce absurdities.

Just so, while I am a man of faith, I’m also a skeptical person. It’s better than being naive or gullible. I just don’t want to be so skeptical that I can only sneer. And one of the failings of Postmodernity is to leave us with nothing but irony and condescension.

Also, individualism is not wrong; it just has to be balanced with community. We need both. Either one apart from the other is very wrong. When the group predominates over the individual, you get collectivist cultures or even totalitarian regimes. The people serve the state rather than the other way around. But if we become too individualistic, then no one cares about the city, state, or nation and we begin to bowl alone. Neighborhoods become places to live among strangers.

Let’s consider some of the Enlightenment concepts from the last post —

* Humanistic optimism. We were pretty optimistic that the second Gulf War would bring peace and prosperity to the people of Iraq — and yet our “liberation” only brought more warfare and terror and corruption. We were optimistic that mankind could eradicate disease — and yet the ebola virus is spreading exponentially in Liberia and surrounding lands.

When I was young, I was told we’d learn to control the weather. Well, I live in Tuscaloosa, which was recently hit by a mile-wide F5 tornado that went right through the middle of town, not long after we were a sanctuary for refugees from Hurricane Katrina.

Science and Enlightenment ideas have done good, make no mistake, but there is no end to warfare, disease, and natural disaster — and it seems the more we try to help “win the war on poverty,” the more poverty there is. The more we try to help the poor in Africa, the poorer Africa becomes. The more we fight the “war on terrorism,” the more terrorism we have.

Yes, there have been victories — many of them — but the worst problems are the most intractable — and the more we use Reason to solve them, the worst they become. Science and Reason do not and cannot solve some of the biggest problems this world faces. Therefore, they cannot represent ultimate Truth.

* And, yes, Enlightenment values do result in the oppression of the supposedly ignorant by the supposedly wise. Check out communist Soviet Union or communist China. No religion. A purely Enlightenment government. And brutal oppression, starvation, and even government sanctioned mass murder of citizens. Or consider the world of the French Revolution, where Liberté, égalité, fraternité brought 25,000 brutal executions and the Reign of Terror. Christianity was outlawed, and priests and nuns were subjected to summary execution. Notre Dame Cathedral was turned into the Temple of Reason.

* And from communism to socialism to nationalist socialism to whatever is going on the U.S., we see the “Wise” using government to make the world a “better” place while it becomes much less better.

Government has become a battleground for largely unexamined worldviews in which the intelligentsia impose their values on the rest, certain of the wisdom and justice of their values founded solely in Reason.

And it’s not as though no good has been achieved through government. Quite a lot of good gets done — but sometimes in very dangerous ways. For example, 100 years ago, there were very few public schools. Massive immigration, largely into New York City, overwhelmed the churches and charities and created the need for massive educational programs.

Across the country, at the behest of Christians and churches, states adopted constitutions promising free educations to children regardless of income, and lives were dramatically improved. And then one day the churches and Christians realized that their children were being educated by the state and not by Christians and churches — and they tried to regain control of education, only to find that the government wanted only more and more control so that it could impose the values and worldview that Reason, not Revelation, requires.

Is that good? Would it have been better if the churches had not been so consumed with Enlightenment values that they and parents didn’t give control of education over to the political system? They had a choice, but it never occurred to them that there was a choice. Big problems require big solutions require big government.

And so it goes.

But the government was quite right to champion the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. The church failed to handle its God-given mission of racial reconciliation, and so the government did the right thing instead. And the church — much of it — was embarrassed.

This is what happens when the church fails to be the church, when the church loses faith in God to change the world and instead asks the government to make things better. Or has so little faith that it doesn’t even try, letting the government fill the moral vacuum.

When the church fails to speak courageously in the face of sin, the church loses credibility and the government gains power. By standing against needed change, the church allows the government to pretend to be the religion of the people, teaching its own form of “morality” and pushing the church further and further out of the public mind.

This is Enlightenment. Ultimately the problem is that Reason does not provide any moral boundaries. Pragmatism prevails. Hence, abortion becomes morally acceptable — even a “right” — because it’s a pragmatic solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies. And pragmatism makes right.

Try as it might, the Enlightenment cannot define “moral” or “immoral” in a way that persuades. And this is why, when the US threatens to enter yet another war, no one asks whether the war is moral. We have no way to decide. We can ask whether it’s good for business or good for keeping us safe. We can judge the pragmatic implications of a proposed war — but, as we keep proving, only very poorly. But we cannot declare it right or wrong. Apparently we think God does not care about such things.

Even our preachers are at a loss to tell us whether it’s right to send our sons and daughters into battle to possibly die for a cause. We are clueless about some of the biggest, most important questions because it doesn’t even occur to us that morality is an important question when we launch rockets and bullets at fellow human beings — some of whom are often fellow Christians. No, we’re such creatures of the Enlightenment that it doesn’t even occur to us to open our Bibles and lift our eyes to heaven and ask the question.

In fact, I’m not a pacifist, but neither do I believe that warfare is a purely pragmatic question to be answered for us by politicians and economists. No, I think Revelation has much more to say to us than we may be willing to hear.

About Jay F Guin

My name is Jay Guin, and I’m a retired elder. I wrote The Holy Spirit and Revolutionary Grace about 18 years ago. I’ve spoken at the Pepperdine, Lipscomb, ACU, Harding, and Tulsa lectureships and at ElderLink. My wife’s name is Denise, and I have four sons, Chris, Jonathan, Tyler, and Philip. I have two grandchildren. And I practice law.
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2 Responses to On Story: A Critique of the Enlightenment’s Story

  1. Ray Downen says:

    Churches have never had exclusive “rights” to public education. So we couldn’t “turn them over to the state.” People are people. Some people are righteous and good. Others are not. In our churches, some people are wiser than others, and wisdom does not always prevail. I hear it being said that the church “turned over” to the state public education. Perhaps I’m hearing wrongly.

    What we own, we can give away. What we do not own, we surely can’t give away. Rights to education are God-given, and I know of nothing in apostolic writings which indicate that churches are public schools. This article speaks of problems faced by “the public.” It was more than the churches who wanted public schools funded by the government. And surely not all churches were in favor. So churches are not at fault. Individuals are at fault, and perhaps that’s what this article is saying.

    Addressed to church people, it seems to be blaming church people for what was done by the population as a whole. Or am I misunderstanding?

  2. Jay Guin says:

    Ray,

    Just because we don’t have a “right” doesn’t mean we don’t have influence or even power. The fact is that in the 19th Century, education was largely by private schools, especially church-sponsored schools. The “Sunday school” movement was not about Sunday morning Bible classes but education provided by the churches to poor children who had to work the other six days of the week. It was a massive effort to lift children out of ignorance and to educate them — by the churches. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/asktheexpert/whendidsundayschoolstart.html

    And as is shown by the Temperance Movement, the church had political power in those days to move the government to accomplish all sorts of things, even passing a constitutional amendment imposing Prohibition. We have trouble imagining days such as those!

    Most positive social movements pre-WWII can be traced to the work of the church — child labor laws, humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill, etc.

    And so, yes, the church once provided free education to children across the country, and the Bible was the primary textbook. So when we complain that the schools are run by the government and don’t allow prayer, well, it wasn’t always that way. It changed — and the church happily allowed it to change not realizing that the state would secularize education, removing the Bible and all Christianity from the education of our children.

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