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To me this seems backwards. You occupy the space of the future, conservatives occupy the space of the past, you have no more claim to the enlightenment than a conservative that includes the enlightenment in their definition of conservatism, less actually as much of the current progressive agenda is in direct opposition to it. This is the same hiding the defeats of the past so common of whig history. How can you be sure that what you believe in is the glorious future that was the end of slavery and not the doomed project of prohibition? Did the progressive eugenics projects justify anything else that you'd proudly place under the leftist banner as self justifying future efforts?
Please do not let this reading of the past that you enjoy delude you into thinking you cannot err, that your punches cannot harm innocents, that you cannot cause catastrophe. The nightmares of history come from such confidence.
...And yet Enlightenment ideology reliably produces views like the ones you're responding to, and has since the Enlightenment itself. At some point, one really should ask why, if such views are antithetical to the Enlightenment, does Enlightenment ideology so reliably produce them?
I'm not so sure the causality is so simple here. As for why I still support the enlightenment, I guess I can just put it as simply as because I like it and I'm not going to let people with opinions I abhor dictate what I support. If I must be the only principled libertarianish type person in the world then so be it.
Terminal values are, in fact, terminal, and there are certainly hills worth dying on. I think it's worth interrogating why one holds them, though. The Enlightenment did not invent the concepts of charity, tolerance, liberty and so on, and its record at implementing them is questionable at best. Are these what you value, or is it truly the specific mechanisms of their pursuit?
The specific reference to the enlightenment in the first comment you responded to was more to pick landmark movement in the past that would have been considered some value of progressive in its time and show how t=0 progressives might not actually get the credit for what look in hindsight like whig history milestones and instead the enlightenment conservatives get that mantle because it's the argument they're actually making here and now. So it's a bit awkward to pivot to defending the enlightenment quo enlightenment. I was defending it from the left and now to defend it from the right I'd need to see where we're drawing the borders around it. If this is gut desire to be in my proper place ruled by a monarch for my own good, I think I've demonstrated in the various threads involving the royals here that I inherited a lack for that organ that I can trace back through my father's side to the revolution. Mob rule? I'm a little more skeptical. How all this crumbles down to specific value positions would take some time to do in detail.
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