Game, set and match to Hari. This morning I actually tried reading through that Jake Chapman interview you cited. I stopped when I realised that he wasn't actually trying to parody the style of a skim-reading halfwit arts tosser. That's when the bullshit meter flew off the dial.

Very odd how unresponsive the interviewer is when Chapman makes the remark about Jamie Bulger: he simply ignores it. Mind on higher things, perhaps.

What do we think Johann is specifically referring to when he says "Fascists, by their own words, oppose the Enlightenment"? This is clearly related to a number of common claims made about generic fascism, but I don't think any particular fascist has said it in so many words, or that they necessarily would have done given the place of modernism, scientific racism, etc in fascism. Fascists have a different view of the relationship between the individual and the state from most Enlightenment liberals, but that isn't really the same thing, otherwise we'd be saying that Communists "oppose the Enlightenment", which really does feel wrong.

I know I am a bit of a bore on this subject, but I can't help feeling that it's the Rosetta Stone of a whole political current that explains why liberalism should get tied up with hostility to postmodernism, with Islamophobia and a load else. I really think that if people were encouraged to be a lot more specific about what they meant by "the Enlightenment", they'd be a lot less inclined to support a lot of the projects currently trading under that name. Specifically, I don't think that universalism was ever really part of the Enlightenment project and that the belief it was, is part of why we are bombing people today in the hope that it will mean that their grandchildren will give equal rights to gays.

I get the feeling you suspect me of trolling here. I promise I'm not, this is a genuine interest of mine and I keep wanting to write something about it, but it always looks like it's going to spiral to book length.

Which is a bit unfortunate because my next comment is going to look like pure troll bait, because it's to point out that the next step after "Democracy and the US Bill of Rights" was 150 years of genocide, and neither the people who built the USA nor those who built the British Empire thought that they were doing something inconsistent with Enlightenment values - John Stuart Mill wrote a long and detailed defence of the East India Company. The idea of racial equality was a much later one, and it owed at least as much to religious elements as to anything recognisable as the tradition of the Enlightenment. As late as July 1939, George Orwell was pointing out that we were about to fight a war for "democracy" while simultaneously asserting control over 600 million Indians and Africans (just to prove we weren't joking, we let 4 million Bengalis starve to death in 1941-2 in what looked to a lot of observers to be something rather similar to one of Stalin's famine-massacres). (I'm talking about http://orwell.ru/library/articles/niggers/english/e_ncn )

I think the easy and obvious way out is to suggest that people like Jefferson, etc, were just hypocrites. But I don't think this really works. It makes just as much sense to me to say that the Enlightenment represented a non-violent coup by elements of the European middle class, forcing their own particular values on the old establishment. I know Nick Cohen starts ridiculing "Freemason conspiracy theories" in the last chapter of his book, but it's also important to recognise that the secret society craze was incredibly important in the political development of the relevant period; the Masons were at that time the non-Catholic middle class's equivalent of the Church in terms of an organisational structure.

So I don't think that there was anything specifically egalitarian about the Enlightenment - it's no coincidence that American libertarians are the other group who are very keen to stake out their claim on this intellectual lineage. And given that, I think Orwell, 1939 vintage, had more than half a point in saying that the battle between Germany and Britain was not one in which the existence of a master race was a contested matter.

I think that what we're doing now is still something like what the Enlightenment did - we're exporting the values of middle class people in the OECD to the rest of the world. It's progress of a sort, because middle class values have got better over the last two hundred years. But the problem is still the same - it can't be achieved without large-scale use of violence. This is all put a lot better in Foucault.

And yeh, the people setting bombs are in general much nastier than us. But this all happened as a predictable (and in fact predicted) consequence of our actions. We set out, in so many words[1] our stall here; that we were going to fight a war to bring democracy to regions which didn't have it. That means, bluntly speaking, creating a situation in which people today will die in numbers, so that a generation hence people will live under something like our value system instead of something like their parents.

There are good arguments to be made for this, although in my opinion they do tend to fall down on the details of execution. But I think it's odd that the definition of universalism and the legacy of the Enlightenment is to treat the discussion over whether that is an OK thing to do by our own values as if it had been conclusively established. I think it's really indicative that when challenged on the question of why the people in question don't fight their own revolutions, there is a real tendency to retreat into exactly the same false-consciousness arguments that did so badly for the socialists and feminists.

[1]Or rather we didn't, but I don't want to fight that battle.

I agree that irrationalism is part of generic fascism, and that this is therefore a rejection of the Enlightenment, but Johann seems to be saying that something more like a counter-Enlightenment is part of fascism, which I don't believe (there are non-racist and secularist versions of Fascism, which were particularly popular in Brazil - Ordem e Progreso is a Positivist slogan and the whole August Comte element is a part of the Enlightenment that is woefully understudied, including by me).

In the Crooked Timber post where I think everyone accepted that we had descended into self-parody ("Was Foucault a Closet Habermasian?", for fuck's sake), Jim Johnson defends the view that MF's version of postmodernism is an immanent critique of Enlightenment values as failing to live up to their own standards. I disagree with him in the comments but I do think he's on to something: http://crookedtimber.org/2006/07/17/was-foucault-a-closet-habermasian/

Well, it's "what have the Romans ever done for us?" territory, innit? It's not as if any of the alternatives have got a much better track record. But we can't cover up the crimes of imperialism or pretend that they weren't something to do with us. Btw, "smug" isn't something I said - it's just that historically, it was the middle class rather than any other which did the Enlightenment.

It just bugs me when people try to say that EVs are all things bright and beautiful. In particular, I don't like the way that people like Ophelia Benson behave when dealing with guys like Foucault who are (often, and on some interpretations) trying to say that we ought to set the bar a bit higher than that. Nick C's book irritated me a lot on that score (unsurprisingly, as there doesn't appear to be much in the relevant section that wasn't also in "Why Truth Matters"), because he sets out his stall for being in favour of scepticism, etc, and then argues in a really dishonest way about postmodernism - basically by laughing at their writing style and trying to politically "place" them. These are both logical fallacies and it was the Enlightenment that said so, but these standards get dropped when having a go at the bad guys.

I don't think I've ever made a secret of the fact that I'm not really a fan of the "Enlightenment values" strain of contemporary liberalism. My problems with it would be:

1. Factually, more or less nobody who professes enlightenment values lives up to them.
2. This isn't a moral failing of the people concerned. It's because there's actually a problem with the system.
3. This problem shows itself most obviously when one tries to deal with guys like Foucault and Derrida who push the system to its breaking point - nearly always, one comes up against the line that it's "so open minded your brains fall out" or some such.
4. A large part of the problem is that there's a tendency to pretend to solve problems by naming them. For example, "scientific method". What is that exactly? If you ever try to tie it down to what actual scientists do, pretty quickly you get some twat inviting you to "step out the window if you don't believe in the theory of gravity hahaha".

I'm trying not to bait here, but this is an intrinsically really flamey topic (it always interests me that of all the topics I argue about on the internet, the two that *invariably* and *immediately* degenerate into namecalling are evolutionary psychology and artifical intelligence). It's just that I did a bit of hard time with philosophy of science in the 1990s, and there are genuine, intractable problems with the positivist worldview. And the way that "enlightenment values" types deal with them is to clam up, refuse to discuss them and deny that they're there, which usually involves getting really nasty.

btw, this might amuse you. "Humanism", was, of course, the name of the "religion of mankind" developed by Auguste Comte that I was referring to above. It was basically the formal codification of the best and nicest bits of Enlightenment values into a system of belief and a program for ordering society on rational lines. It got a bit nutty toward the end as it turned into a secret society and Comte elected himself Humanist Pope, but in the meantime it was very influential on a lot of things, including the nascent state of Brazil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

the point I'm trying to make is that most of the people on your list don't go as far down this road as Comte did, but they're on the same path and they don't realise it.

[oddly these comrades seem to be under attack by people who share the majority of their values - ie leftish, unreligious nice guys, who seem far more interested in attacking the utter reasonableness of the aforementioned]

It's immanent criticism. The entire point is that our shared values aren't, in my opinion, very well described by the "enlightenment values" brand, and that on lots of occasions the utter reasonableness is displayed in some very unreasonable ways. Most vicars spend about ninety minutes in their sermon talking about the sins of their parishioners and only tack on five minutes at the end about Satan. And in any case, it is hardly one way traffic, is it?

Or in other words, your radio show is about science and liberalism. Both of those are good things and enlightenment values is not a misleading brand for them. But that doesn't mean that "Enlightenment" is an actual movement that exists and can be opposed by fascists or defended by Johann Hari.

The trouble is that when these things turn into brand names, they always get tied up with the actual projects associated with them. It's like the way that Norman Geras whines about being called "The Decent Left" these days, when it was originally a self-description (from Michael Walzer's essay, "Can There Be A Decent Left"?). He doesn't seem to realise that it's the term "Decent Left" that has become tarnished by association with his project, not vice versa.

"what we agree on, then forever finding further schisms "

er- "than" rather than "then"!

ahhh the trouble is that while you lot are a bunch of sheep who all think alike, I am a precious little flower who is completely unique, and also a real rebel who goes my own way, and so are my mates :-)

If "Keynesian" was a political school rather than an economic one I'd be one. Otherwise, I would live with "liberal-left" in what Nick Cohen seems to regard as the pejorative sense, but it seems a bt greedy to be claiming that whole space. Your mate Will coined "fucking wank wank wank", which has the benefit of being catchy if a little generic.

I think I like "post-liberal", in the sense that I'd like to bear roughly the same relationship to liberalism and the Enlightenment that your band does to rock and roll.

I'm quite likely to dip out myself at short notice - as you might guess I have seemingly unlimited spare time this last couple of days, but that's cos I'm waiting for a phone call which will trigger some ... intense work. I think there's a lot to what you say which is why I've never been 100% satisfied with guys like Gray who basically say it's all bollocks. But it's worth a look.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy lists eight points which broadly agree with Devine's definition, starting with "Reason is man's central capacity, and it enables him not only to think, but to act, correctly". The OCP definition does include egalitarianism and universalism.

However, part of the Enlightenment was Rousseau's idea that there is only one rational conclusion to any question, and people who don't think that way are not being rational (and could therefore be coerced because you are acting in their best interests even if they don't think so). Rousseau had an absolute horror of political debate, which he saw as a sign that one side or the other was not thinking straight (and debate itself meant people were likely to be persuaded by emotion rather than reason). There's more than a bit of that rejection of intellectual pluralism in Marxism, "false consciousness" and the modern attitude that if silly Muslims want to believe in something wrong, they must be persuaded otherwise, by force if necessary.

I'm thinking more along the lines of Dawkins and Grayling's rejection of commonsense when it comes to dealing with Muslims. They aren't going to stop believing what they do just because you and I disagree with them, and an overbearing "the future belongs to us" attitude isn't at all useful. There are serious debates to be had about the extent to which society (in the sense of the common spaces and institutions which we have to share) should be secular, and the extent to which we should take a liberal "offence is no harm" attitude to both cartoons and wearing the niqab. Those debates aren't going to happen if either side is saying that the other is not capable of rational discussion, or announcing that they already know the answer so they don't need to consider alternatives.

Well, as daniel_davies points out, it's not a club with well-defined membership rules. Rousseau was a big influence on Kant (especially in Kant's universalism and egalitarianism), and it was Kant who (if I recall correctly) was the first person to describe and unify the intellectual current as "Enlightenment" - so in a sense, if Rousseau isn't an enlightenment thinker, nobody is. There's certainly no lack of respect for reason and rejection of traditional authority in Rousseau, even if it did lead him to some deranged conclusions.

Despite generally agreeing with Hari I find some of his articles a bit generalising and poorly-written but I think that taking-apart of the pretentions and underlying nihilism of the ideas that fuel a lot of modern art is one of the best things I've seen written by him in a while.

I shall have to strike Jake Chapman off my list of 'bald men with dignity'. I always thought he wore his baldness well, and considered him a model for emulation for when I finally run out of hair.

Basically I think if one has no hair at all on top, attempting to have any hair on the sides looks silly, so any bald man who shaves the remainder of their hair to #1 length is a Bald Man With Dignity. I'm sure there are exceptions.

Honoured!