Motus Mentis

I have been presenting for years, in these pages, a charge against the Enlightenment: namely that it enshrined, with religious fervor, a radical skepticism that acted as a kind of “universal acid” that no tradition or social order could contain.

In 2022, for example, I referred to:

…the radical skepsis of the Enlightenment, which simultaneously raised Man to the throne of Creation while throwing him back onto his own meager resources. The shearing away of all but “scientific method” as a means of understanding the Universe, and our place in it, meant that the Universe itself had to be put on a kind of Procrustean Bed, upon which all the features of the cosmos that aren’t accessible by those tools and methodology had simply to be cut away, and believed not even to exist. (This fatally narrowing effect, by the way, is a good example of why Pride is considered the deadliest of sins.)

I’ve been making this case for much longer, though. Here’s an excerpt from a post called This Is Your Civilization On Acid, from 2015:

Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ‘memetic’ — an aggregation of concepts, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle. Moreover, the less a nation depends upon tangible factors such as territory and ethnic homogeneity for its stability, the more vulnerable it is to this hazard — and the modern, rapidly diversifying United States, which describes itself more and more as little more than “an idea” — is most vulnerable of all.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”: given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind only a desiccated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse.

Also from 2015:

The modern attitude places the burden of proof upon every aspect of traditional life. All is disposable unless proven necessary, including even the axioms upon which such proof depends.

And so on. (See also this post and its internal links, including links to a discussion we had in 2018 with Michael Anton on the topic of natural law.)

The reason that I am mentioning all this today is that I have just read an outstanding essay at City Journal making this same indictment of the Enlightenment. (The author, Martin Gurri, even uses a term — “The Endarkenment” — that we NRx types were kicking around fifteen years ago.)

The whole thing is so good that I won’t bother posting any excerpts. You should just go read the whole thing yourselves, here.