Quote (Jupe @ Dec 9 2024 01:01pm)

Quote

By every known measure, the Enlightenment inaugurated an unparalleled improvement of the human condition. But a penalty was to be paid: the critical impulse lacked a logical stopping place, an end of history of the kind that the Hegelians and Marxists promised. The monarchies and the old nobility were overthrown, representative democracy expanded the suffrage to all citizens, universal literacy and education were achieved, and free markets and science generated undreamed-of wealth and vastly enriched lives—yet still the criticism continued its inexorable assault on social relations.

Criticism was unrelenting because the gaze of science is total: no exceptions are tolerated, no waivers issued for angels in the great beyond. The Old World was enchanted. Meaning flowed from heaven to earth. Social structures reinforced the linkage: religion, class, guild, family, village, and neighborhood—all inserted the individual into communal arrangements rich in memory and certainty. But these were precisely the bastions of conservatism that liberal thinkers and statesmen undertook to tear down. By the mid-nineteenth century, the disruption of traditional forms had attained escape velocity. Listen to Marx in 1848: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”