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Notes -
You said yourself we don’t even disagree that much on the object level issues. That’s why it’s a shame that your anti-enlightenment theory makes it seem that we have more values difference than we really do.
One point where we disagree is censorship, you are more in favour of it than I am. The enlightenment was anti-censorship. This is a rare example of your theory managing to cleave reality at the joints and actually explaining something.
“Censorship is unavoidable” , “They didn’t have anything to read” – yeah, yeah, but the questions that matter here are : How much censorship, and should they get more to read? The enlightenment and anti-enlightenment sides took positions here, don’t evade.
The censorship issue is a good template to evaluate the rest of your theory. Do we disagree on an issue now, and is it traceable to the enlightenment/anti-enlightenment kerkuffle?
On Marx, Freud, most of the woke stuff we discuss endlessly, I don't disagree with you, despite this presumed enlightenment-borne ideological distance between us.
On total social engineering vs brutal state of nature, I don’t disagree with you and have never thought otherwise. The first time I heard about Rousseau was from this short, pudgy, adorable, and very opinionated french teacher, who told us she couldn’t stand ‘that scoundrel’ Rousseau, who despite writing the celebrated On Education, abandoned all his children to an 18th century orphanage as soon as they were born. And later in the course, on the “do as I say, …” part of his life, it was clear to me that hobbes was right and rousseau was wrong. So when you two accuse me, along with everyone else, of being inveterate rousseau-ians, I’m left scratching my head.
Sorry, I meant contemporary in the sense of ‘living or occurring at the same time.‘, not recent time. Ie, anti-enlightenment thinkers from the time of the enlightenment.
It might not be a bad idea to do the definitions thing after all: “The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state. wikipedia “
Which of those am I supposed to repudiate? (I have my problems with natural law.) It seems to me you want to claim a large chunk of those as not-enlightenment for your strange theory, unlike a true reactionary. So what are we even talking about?
It might just be a big misunderstanding: You say you oppose the enlightenment, people hear the above definition and object, when in reality you mean rousseau, anticlericalism, plus some other shit you tacked on, and people don’t even disagree with you on rousseau.
Else, if you want to argue for absolutism and theocracy, against reason, happiness, liberty and empiricism, please say so clearly and don’t bring Freud into it.
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