What is Endarkenment?

 

Break free from the bonds of what you’ve been taught to believe and think for your self. Think anything you want to think. Free your mind! Follow your own rules. 

With some constraints, of course. 

I mean, when you’re driving I’d appreciate it if you are in the correct lane, stop when the light is red, go when it is green, and when it is yellow proceed with caution and not close your eyes and floor it. There is a social contract in effect, after all.

We’d been living in an age of enlightenment for the past few centuries, although not in an enlightened age. We sought enlightenment. We looked for lights to light our paths. Light of all colors, but mainly lights that will help us find our way and not lights that only project movies that show us things that are not there, and situations that never occur, and behavior that is unlikely.

We cast off many traditions that misled us or harmed us, beliefs and belief systems, entire meaning systems collapsed around us, and even some cognitive categories are no longer relevant.  

We’re dizzy and disoriented and grab onto the first hand that is offered and steadies us. A strong hand that is attached to a powerful arm which hangs from broad shoulders on which a thick neck stands like a mighty oak that lifts a beautiful head with an open mouth from which a confident voice speaks sentences that sound plausible enough.

He — yes, he is a he — claims God has told him what is going to happen. He has an explanation for the weird things going on. You no longer trusted the fake news and your parents meant well but they didn’t understand everything you are going through and how the situations in life are different today, the old authorities lost their authority, so you were susceptible to a charismatic prophet.

So you follow your new guardian, safe at last on a path as you stride confidently together, hand in hand, over the cliff, falling into a deep deep deep pit of ignorance and grief where you are robbed of everything you value and love, whether you know it or not, and you still may not be aware and may never be aware of how lost you were when you pulled us all down with you into this pit of stupid suffering.

You are absolutely free. Your mind is free, to some extent, and free enough to choose to do the right thing.

What is the right thing?

Let’s say you are faced with an ethical decision.

Immanuel Kant offered this useful rule of thumb:

Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be universal law.

What in the world does that mean?

You know, treat each person as an end, not as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves.

That is rather abstract.

Well, here, let me recite the entire Torah while I stand on one foot:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.” ( a famous rabbi said that).

Oh, you mean like the Golden Rule. Like: 

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (another famous rabbi said that).

What about, “Mind your own damn business,” or “We’re all in this together?”

Don’t those contradict each other?

I don’t know.

What about you are faced with a decision you are forced to make, a decision only you can make because only you understand what your existential situation is, what you think your life’s purpose is, or what your, let us say, moral position is, which you can’t really articulate, but which positions you nonetheless so that you say, No, I can’t go there. This is where I draw the line. I can’t cross that line and you can’t make me. But your state legislature has determined it is really their decision, or that of their base, and THEY know what you need to do, because your body belongs to them, to the fine, honest, wise men who managed to get elected to office once, because they had the financial backing to dominate the media that you depend on for your information.

No, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there, as the poet said. We don’t yet live in the Dark Ages, but we do live in an age of endarkenment. I am not the first to use that term, and, yes, it is a joke about Kant’s essay, “What is enlightenment?” 

Kant argued that enlightenment is humanity emergence from self=-imposed immaturity, meaning a childish inability to use one’s understanding, to think for oneself, without submitting to the opinions of others, without questioning those who claim to be authorities.

We don’t question these authorities when we lack resolve or courage to use the ability to reason that we are born with. Laziness and cowardice, in the Kantian view, keeps us intellectually immature.

I’m not sure that Kant’s view is still adequate. Facts are still facts, and the public use of reason still requires that one distinguish what is true from what is false. But we have become dependent on a powerful information technology that is also used to misinform and to shape public opinion. You check a notification on your phone and release a Niagara of false data from an unknown source, often passed along by someone you trust, who received it from someone they trust, but that ultimately came from some manufacturer of a Big Lie.

We live in a new age of endarkenment because the new technology of disinformation is all pervasive. Not everybody is fooled, but enough people are fooled, and in our current non-democracy it doesn’t take a majority of votes to win an election, just a majority of electors to win the electoral college.

When you finish reading this, I want you to read that essay, or watch a YouTube video about it.

“What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant. 

I want you to write a short essay on what you think about it or if you prefer, you may write a short satirical piece, similar to this one I am reading to you now, that demonstrates your own confused musing on the issue of truth and moral authority in the post-postmodern condition.

You will not be graded and you will receive no credit.

Learn to educate yourself.