Please Enlighten Me
Here's an article by Dennis Prager, a conservative, asking "Have We Stopped Trying To Make Good People?"
The short answer is no, we haven't. If we were trying to make good people in the past (which the title assumes), then we're still trying today. Prager doubts this, because he feels leftist thinking has taken over. Unfortunately, rather than present serious evidence as to why this would mean we don't try to make good people, he seems to base his argument on a caricature of the Left (where we blame society for everything, not the individual).
But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about this:
One cannot make a good society if one does not begin with the arduous task of making good individuals. Both Judaism and Christianity begin with the premise that man is not basically good and therefore regard man’s nature as the root of cause of evil.
This may sound basic and even obvious, but it is not. In the Western world since the Enlightenment, belief in the inherent goodness of human beings has taken over.
This is one of the most frightening things about modern conservatives. So many seem to have a "thing" about the Enlightenment. More than once I've been reading something by a conservative and, out of nowhere, he condemns the Enlightenment and its influence.
I don't know about you, but I like the Enlightenment. Conservatives seem to associate it with certain leftist ideas (such as Rousseau's inherent goodness of human beings), but Enlightenment thinkers took different sides on many issues. Their great gift to us was support for critical thinking, evidence over authority, reason over superstition and a concentration on basic human rights. America and its Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment.
I don't understand why conservatives keep talking it down, since I'd think they'd want to say much of what they believe today can be traced to the Enlightenment. In fact, if you want to see what a group not influenced by the Enlightenment looks like, it's easy--we're fighting a war with them.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:01 AM
2 Comments:
Prager wrote:
Both Judaism and Christianity begin with the premise that man is not basically good and therefore regard man’s nature as the root of cause of evil.
Wow. This is so utterly false. I'm not an expert on Judaism, so I won't speak on its behalf. But for two thousand years, "Man's nature is good" was a core doctrine of most of the Christian denominations all of the time, and almost all of the Christian denominations at least most of the time. In the very beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures, God creates all life (including man and woman) and declares "It is good."
Most Christian churches, including my own, teach that after he was created, man sinned, and this introduced a significant corruption, and even a certain tendency towards evil that fights against the tendency towards good. But the Catholics and Orthodox Christians (unlike the Lutherans) still hold that man's nature is good. When a bad man reforms and turns to good, it's analogous to washing a dirty car -- the dirt, however much there was, is still not the "nature" of the person.
Conservatives seem to associate it with certain leftist ideas (such as Rousseau's inherent goodness of human beings), but Enlightenment thinkers took different sides on many issues.
I had thought more people understood this. Rousseau was absurdly positive about human nature. Hobbes was absurdly negative. Locke and Montesquieu were sensible and felt that man's bad nature needed to be controlled and channeled so that his good nature would win.
So Prager doesn't know that the United State's "founding fathers" were 100% creatures of the Enlightenment, and devoted to both Locke and Montesquieu?
I believe Prager is trying to paint an extreme picture of the other side so he can stake out the safe middle. So he tries to claim the left believes people are basically good, which allows him to claim his reasonable, Judeo-Christian informed viewpoint is that man is a mix of bad and good.
I'm sure Prager would also insist he's got a "reasonable" view of the Enlightenment--that it's not all good or bad. He's just ready to blame bad things on it when it's convenient.
Conservatives have made the Enlightenment the root of all bad modern ideas (or should I say modern ideas they don't like) when, of course, it's a contributor to many ideas that exist today, good and bad; however, the overall effect is very positive, so any group that wants to disavow the Enlightenment is scary.
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