We need to understand the thinking that is changing society before our eyes. For a couple of minutes, let’s do this: let’s go back to the beginning of The Enlightenment, discover the Counter-enlightenment, track key thinkers to the Marxist idea, and conclude with the defeat of the collectivist Right. This will prepare us to understand the rise today of the collectivist Left.
(The Woke danger 4 will track Antonio Gramschi, the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and the rise of postmodernism, as we speed to a discussion of Applied Postmodernism in our day, as described especially by James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose in their masterwork, Cynical Theories. My presentations The Woke Danger 1(1) gave a basic introduction to woke, and The Woke Danger 2 (2) especially offered the example of the takeover of Evergreen College in 2016-2017 as an additional introduction.)
Many in my audience come from the Christian side of things. The Reformation began with Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses at Wittenberg church in 1517. Ensuing events freed religion from the shackles of tradition and church authority and bore enormous consequences for the relationship of church and state. But because my goal for this series is to explore the ideas that lead to wokeness, we will follow this development from its secular lines. Secularism inevitably generates secular religions and god substitutes, and we will come to that. But now, let’s refresh our understanding of The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment
The dawn of this period is connected with Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descarte (1596-1650) and John Locke (1632-1704). Their legacy to us is the primacy of reason, individualism, science, and liberalism (in the classic sense of freedom of speech and religion and representative politics). Stephen R.C. Hicks offers a chart like this in his book Explaining Postmodernism. See the chain of consequence starting with the Enlightenment’s affirmation of the power of reason leading to progress and happiness.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of the Enlightenment. It put reason front and center. But reason was soon made a weapon against religion. Historian Will Durant says, “science and philosophy became the gods of the Enlightenment.”(3) At the height of the French Revolution, a ceremony was held in Paris, 1793, where it was declared, “Cease to tremble before the powerless thunders of a God whom your fears have created. Henceforth acknowledge no divinity but Reason.”(4)
William Lane Craig, Christian apologist writing in our time, says,
“Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated the whole of Western society. The hallmark of the Enlightenment was ‘free thought,’ that is, the pursuit of knowledge by means of unfettered human reason alone.”(5)
Our Enlightenment inheritance, engaged in with godly respect--reason, individualism, science, and so on, as indicated on Hick’s chart—made The Enlightenment the foundation of contemporary civilization. All this, the advocates of applied postmodernism are determined to burn to the ground.
The Counter-enlightenment
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
But all did not share zeal for The Enlightenment. In France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) especially opposed its ideas and became the beginning of the Counter-enlightenment. Rousseau attacked reason. He said reason increases wealth and creates a need for property rights. This leads to competition, and thus, to inequality. Reason, claimed Rousseau, was opposed to compassion. He wrote that passions are the proper foundation for society, that feelings are a more reliable guide. He said, “I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let us consult the inner light.’”(6) Rousseau understood that religion was a powerful force and when he wrote The Social Contract (1762), he opposed state toleration for unbelievers, stating, “If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death.”
Rousseau wanted power to be centralized in the state. He saw the state as the executor of the collective will. Accordingly, the “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them” and “whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.” Rousseau’s thought was thus opposite that represented in the American Revolution. Whereas the new American government featured checks and balances to limit the power of the state in order to protect the liberty of individuals, Rousseau envisioned an all powerful state with no rights vested in the individual.
Immanuel Kant
German thinkers (mostly Lutheran or Catholic) saw The Enlightenment as antireligious. Besides Rousseau’s collectivism, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) made another crucial philosophical move. He reasoned that reason cannot access reality. Hicks, concludes “Kant, that great champion of reason, asserted that the most important fact about reason is that it is clueless about reality. . . . Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard.”(7) This was the crucial step that prepared the way for postmodernity. German philosophers after him followed his lead.
Hicks’ Understanding Postmodernism has more than 100 pages discussing the ideas of Rousseau and Kant at length.(8) Many writers list these figures as greats of The Enlightenment, but they are actually the central figures of the Counter-enlightenment.
Georg W.F. Hegel
Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) built on Rousseau and Kant. Let me emphasize Hegel’s view about the relationship between the individual and the state. Hegel said, “All the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the state.”(9) He even said that “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”(10) Hicks’ evaluation is, “We find in the case of Hegel a call for total government to which the individual will surrender everything.”(11) For Hegel, says Hicks, “The collective, not the individual is the operative unit.”(12)
Rise of Marxism
Hastening onward, we move to Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his associates. Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel. Marx taught that private businessmen own the means of production and exploit the workers. The workers need to figure this out in order to act in their own best interest. When they understand this, they will revolt and take the means of production from the rich.
Marx said that “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”(13) Marxism insists that capitalism is unsustainable and will collapse from its internal contradictions. Marxism is extremely hostile to religion. It assumes that economic arrangements influence all other social phenomena. Paul Kengor writes, “Marx was an atheist-utopian who envisioned a ‘new morality’ without God. The path to utopia was a classless albeit godless society. The ‘classless society’--which would be a ‘worker’s paradise’--would, said Marx, make its ‘own history! It is a leap from slavery into freedom, from darkness into light.’”(14)
Marx’s ideology was implemented in Russia in 1917 in the Bolshevik Revolution, also called Red October. Ardent communists looked for a similar revolution to occur in Germany, but it didn’t. That will lead to modifications by Antonio Gramschi, the rise of the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, and Postmodernism. Those bits we will address in our next presentation. But for now, I want to conclude with a critically important observation by Stephen Hicks.
Hicks, in his chapter titled “The Climate of Collectivism,”(15) describes Left and Right collectivism. For Right collectivism, think Nazis. For Left collectivism, think the Left in America. Listen:
What links the Right and the Left is a core set of themes: anti-individualism, the need for strong government, the view that religion is a state matter (whether to promote or suppress it), the view that education is a process of socialization, ambivalence about science and technology, and strong themes of group conflict, violence, and war. Left and Right have often divided bitterly over which themes have priority and over how they should be applied. Yet for all their differences, both the collectivist Left and the collectivist Right have consistently recognized a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its limited government, its separation of church and state, its fairly constant view that education is not primarily a matter of political socialization, and its persistent Whiggish optimism about prospects for peaceful trade and cooperation between members of all nations and groups.(16)
World War II led to the destruction of the collectivist Right. This set the stage for the battle now playing out: between liberal capitalism, and, Left collectivism.
We face a rapid rise in the power of the collectivist Left, which I will address in The Woke Danger 4. There is nothing to feel comfortable about with the ascent of the collectivist left. In dangerous respects, the present situation in America is not very different than Russia in 1916.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes
1. The Woke Danger 1: Applied Postmodernism. https://youtu.be/XnUsk_MR4Eg
2. The Woke Danger 2: From Evergreen to the Purge. https://youtu.be/lfPTCPc-Tj8
3. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, part VI The Reformation, 939.
4. Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, 276.
5. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (3rd ed. 2008), 78.
6. For convenience, all Rousseau quotations are drawn from Stephen R.C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, e.g. pp. 94, 95, 97, 99, 100.
7. Ibid., pp. 29, 39.
8. Ibid., pp. 23-130.
9. Hicks, op. cit. 120.
10. Ibid., op. cit. 121.
11. Hicks 125.
12. Ibid., op. cit. 121.
13. Karl Marx, “Introduction,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859.
14. Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx: Marxism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration, loc. 699, op. cit. Thomas M. Magstadt and Peter M. Schotten, Understanding Politics: Ideas, Institutions, and Issues, p. 39.
15. Hicks 84-134.
16. Hicks 104.
