In his NYT Op-Ed contribution, Gary Willis described Bush's re-election as the day the Enlightenment went out. Well I have news for him. The Enlightenment has been out for decades. And it wasn't the religionists who extinguished it. The prime culprits were those whose sacred trust was to keep that precious fire burning: the philosophers.
Today's "philosophers" are the children of Kant, and have taken his critique of pure reason to its logical conclusion: the dismissal of the very subject of philosophy. The entire "post-modern" and "deconstructionist" movements are premised on the impossibility of objective values and objective truth. One of America's most prestigious philosophers, Richard Rorty, wrote: "Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are."
Religion will always win when people are forced to choose between religious answers and no answers. Mr. Willis is correct in his prescription: we do need a return to our Englightenment roots. I suspect however that he tragically misunderstands the nature of those roots. We need liberal politicians - liberal in the classical sense - who recognize that government should not be used to right historical wrongs or cure social ills or force people to be good, but only to defend individual rights from force or fraud. We need intellectuals who will assert a rational non-religious code of ethics. And most fundamental of all, we need philosophers who will revive a pro-reality metaphysics and a pro-reason epistemology. We need a return to the Aristotelian principles that ended the Dark Ages, sparked the Renaissance, fueled the Enlightenment, and birthed the greatest, most moral nation in the history of the planet: ours.
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