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Of all the potential causes of liberal confusion, few are more confusing than this: being reasonable has become controversial.
It’s a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason.
But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries. During that time, the ascent of reason defined what would become the modern era.
The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of wealth: Compared to economic growth since the Enlightenment, there was almost none during all the millennia before. And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, the philosophy of freedom and equality on which the United States and all liberal democracies are founded.
But ideologues of the MAGA right are openly hostile to the Enlightenment legacy.
So too are the ideologues of the woke left.
So liberals need to decide if they’re going to defend it.
When we left off last time, Ibram X. Kendi had just argued that they can’t, because Enlightenment reason is inherently oppressive. Its supposed objectivity just serves the interests of the powerful people who devised it: rich, white, male Westerners.
As we’ve seen, that argument is central to woke Theory. In this chapter we get to the liberal response.
But first, let’s make sure we understand the argument.
At its core is the charge that the assertion of universal laws of reason was an act of domination: It forced all of nature and all of humanity to fit within the same rigid, logical framework, the better to study, manage, and exploit them for profit.
The case is often made the way Kendi makes it, by pointing to America’s history of racism and slavery.
You don’t have to be woke to recognize that Enlightenment reason is implicated in both.
For a start, the white and black races were essentially invented during the Enlightenment. So were separate races for Native Americans, Asians and other groups.
These new racial identities appeared at a convenient time: when they would help justify the mass enslavement of Africans.
Slavery and indentured servitude had been common throughout history and around the world, including in the colonies of the Americas. But as the colonial economies grew, demand for unpaid labor outstripped supply.
The gap was filled by captives from Africa. In the 15th century, new sailing technologies gave European traders access to the continent, where they discovered and developed a new market in slaves. From the 16th to 19th centuries, more than 12 million would be shipped across the Atlantic.
Not only was the supply bountiful, but it was non-European. Growing moral qualms about the enslavement of human beings could be allayed. Africans would be defined as less than human.
One source of authority for that definition was the Bible. Slavery is condoned there, especially if the slaves are foreigners, as in this passage from the Book of Leviticus:
…[O]f the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.1
Theologians claimed to have discovered that the Biblical “mark of Cain” and “curse of Ham” were borne by people with dark skin. In other words, God wanted Africans to suffer for sins committed in the holy land near the beginning of Biblical time.
Newly ascendant science also provided excuses for slavery. The early botanist Carl Linnaeus designed the system of categories we still use to classify lifeforms. He applied his system to human beings as well, subdividing Homo Sapiens into different varieties.
He then ranked them by intelligence and temperament. At the bottom was Homo Sapiens Africanus.2
According to Linnaeus, Africans were naturally lazy, sly, sluggish, neglectful, and at the mercy of their impulses.
He didn’t design his racial hierarchy as a justification for slavery, but slavers were happy to use it that way, and countless Europeans and colonists prospered on the profits. No small part of the horror of slavery was the scientific elimination of compassion, through what would come to be called “scientific racism.”
In her book These Truths: A History of the United States, Harvard historian Jill LePore describes the dehumanized economics of slavery as realized in the cotton industry:
Cotton had become the most valuable commodity in the Atlantic world… Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine. Factories had mechanical slaves; plantations had human slaves. The power of machines was measured by horsepower, the power of slaves by hand power. A healthy man counted as “two hands,” a nursing woman as a “half-hand,” a child as a “quarter-hand.” Charles Ball, born in Maryland during the American Revolution, spent years toiling on a slave plantation in South Carolina, and time on an auction block, where buyers inspected his hands, moving each finger in the minute action required to pick cotton. The standard calculation, for a cotton crop, “ten acres to the hand.”
In order to drive productivity ever higher, planters deployed organized torture and terror under what was known as the “pushing system.”
Cornell historian Edward E. Baptist describes it in his book The Half Has Never Been Told:
Enslaved migrants in the field quickly learned what happened if they lagged or resisted. In Mississippi, Allen Sidney saw a man who had fallen behind the fore row fight back against a black driver who tried to “whip him up” to pace. The white overseer, on horseback, dropped his umbrella, spurred up, and shouted, “Take him down.” The overseer pulled out a pistol and shot the prone man dead. “None of the other slaves,” Sidney remembered, “said a word or turned their heads. They kept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.” They had learned that they had to adapt to “pushing” or face unpredictable but potentially extreme violence.
The history of this industrialized cruelty is well documented. But the most terrible parts are new to many Americans, partly because some of the scholarship is new and partly because until recently, few history textbooks ever confronted the full truth of what was already known.
This means that many liberals learn about it for the first time from popular Theorists, such as Ibram X. Kendi.
So it’s not surprising that many assume that Kendi’s conclusion must be right: The cause of all this inhuman exploitation was a dehumanizing worldview built on Enlightenment reason. What happened to enslaved Africans was monstrous, and yet scientifically reasonable. And where that kind of reason rules, it suppresses everything that makes us human beings instead of machines, or slaves to machines. The victims are not only black people, but all people who are “other” than the dominant group that constructed the Enlightenment worldview.
This is why Kendi writes,
I knew about the equation of the Enlightenment and “reason” and “objectivity” and “empiricism” with whiteness and Western Europe and masculinity and the bourgeoisie.
So why wouldn’t liberals come to the same conclusion?
Because it contradicts other things we know about the Enlightenment.
There is no doubt that science was used to justify and enable slavery, as well as the expulsion and killing of Native Americans, and many other evils. In the 20th century it would effectuate death and suffering on a previously unimaginable scale in the trenches of World War I, the death camps of World War II, the Soviet gulags, and elsewhere.
But that doesn’t mean Enlightenment reason was the source of those evils. Throughout all of history, people have committed terrible acts using any tool and any justification available. There’s evidence of slavery dating to thousands of years before the Enlightenment, not only in Europe but across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Also commonplace were human sacrifice and other practices we now find abhorrent.
Theory is founded on the axiom that oppression is not natural, but the artificial result of an oppressive social structure, in particular the Western one. Liberalism originates in a more skeptical view of human nature, summarized by James Madison: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”3
There’s an important argument about human nature here, which we’ll pick up when we look at identity politics.
For now, I’ll note that a great deal of evidence indicates that human nature contains both good and evil: We are naturally cooperative, kind, and peaceful, but also naturally predatory, cruel, and violent.
And to conclude that Enlightenment reason is a source of oppression, we have to ignore everyone who has used it to fight oppression. That fight has included using liberal religion to counter racist religion and sound science to discredit racist pseudo-science.
To support his case against the Enlightenment, Kendi, like other Theorists, can list racist statements and actions by leading Enlightenment figures like the philosopher David Hume, or the slave-owning Founder Thomas Jefferson. But he leaves out the many counter-examples.
One is a foundational document of the Enlightenment, the French Encyclopedia published between 1751 and 1772. The mission of the Encyclopedia was to equip every person with the knowledge they would need to live in freedom.
Here’s part of the entry on slavery by the main editor, Denis Diderot. It’s based on the Enlightenment concept of universal, natural rights:
This buying of Negroes, to reduce them to slavery, is one business that violates religion, morality, natural laws, and the rights of all human nature. If commerce of this kind can be justified by a moral principle, there is no crime, however atrocious it may be, that cannot be made legitimate… Men and their liberty are not objects of commerce; they can be neither sold nor bought nor paid for at any price… There is not, therefore, a single one of these unfortunate people regarded only as slaves who does not have the right to be declared free… This Negro does not divest himself and can never divest himself of his natural right; he carries it everywhere with him, and he can demand everywhere that he be allowed to enjoy it.
Theorists often charge that the true purpose of Enlightenment universalism, including the concept of universal rights, was to erase the cultures of peoples subjugated by white European men. The Enlightenment scholar Susan Neiman refutes that claim in her book Woke ≠ Left, published in 2023:
It’s now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views supporting colonialism. When I first heard such claims some fifteen years ago, I thought they were so flimsy they’d soon disappear. For the claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism, on the basis of universalist ideas. To see this, you don’t need the more difficult texts of the Enlightenment; a paperback edition of Candide is enough. For a succinct diatribe against fanaticism, feudal hierarchy, slavery, colonial plunder, and other European evils, you can hardly do better.
Here’s an excerpt from Candide, written by one of the most celebrated Enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire:
As they drew near to the city, they came across a negro stretched out on the ground, with no more than half of his clothes left, which is to say a pair of blue canvas drawers; the poor man had no left leg and no right hand.
‘Good God!’ said Candide to him in Dutch. ‘What are you doing there, my friend, in such a deplorable state?’
‘I am waiting for my master, Monsieur Vanderdendur, the well-known merchant,’ answered the negro.
‘And was it Monsieur Vanderdendur,’ said Candide, ‘who treated you like this?’
‘Yes, Monsieur,’ said the negro, ‘it is the custom. Twice a year we are given a pair of blue canvas drawers, and this is our only clothing. When we work in the sugar-mills and get a finger caught in the machinery, they cut off the hand; but if we try to run away, they cut off a leg: I have found myself in both situations. It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe.
Enlightenment arguments against slavery and racism were advanced by the most effective antiracists in history, like Frederick Douglass, WEB Dubois, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
And as it happens, Kendi’s anti-Enlightenment arguments also depend on Enlightenment reason.
He uses it to construct each of his sentences and to link one to the next. He cites empirical evidence for his claims. He expects readers to trust that this evidence is objective.
He has little choice. If we couldn’t rely on shared reason, empiricism, and objectivity, all arguments could end in stalemate. So an antiracist would assert their lived experience and personal truth, a racist would assert their lived experience and personal truth, and that would be that — except that whoever had more power would be even more likely to prevail, since there’d be no viable alternative.
This is another paradox of Theory. It’s a version of what philosophers call the Liar’s Paradox. Let’s say we accept the Theoretical claim that there are no objective truths, but only assertions of power. Then we have no reason to trust anything a Theorist says over anything anyone else says: It’s just another assertion of power. In order for Theorists to persuade anyone, they have to abandon Theory for what looks a lot like Enlightenment reason.
Or rather, it looks like a kind of Enlightenment reason that Theory usually ignores.
There is a kind that reduces everything to amoral facts and logic. Philosophers called it instrumental reason. Instrumental reason is non-normative, meaning it has no moral norms. It can tell you how to cure diseases or build bombs, but not which is better.
Instrumental reason is supremely useful, but if it were to take over our minds completely, we would churn out rational but immoral decisions without ever being troubled by conscience. This in fact does happen to some people. It’s one way of understanding the behavior of Adolf Eichmann, who efficiently and dispassionately managed the logistics of the Holocaust. At his postwar trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann appeared to feel no guilt, arguing that he had only done his duty. Reporting on the trial, the political theorist Hannah Arendt described what she witnessed as “the banality of evil.”4
But instrumental reason isn’t the only kind. There’s also such a thing as moral reason, the medium of moral philosophy. One of the most important breakthroughs of the Enlightenment was to free moral reasoning from control by priests and princes, and offer it to ordinary people. “Dare to know!” as Immanuel Kant wrote in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?”
Kant was probably the most influential Enlightenment philosopher. He is often accused by Theorists of embedding Eurocentric oppression in his universal principles of reason. Like many people of his time, Kant did make Eurocentric and racist assumptions. And yet the basis of his philosophy was that it applied to all people, and late in life he applied it to himself, renouncing his earlier biases. At the age of 71, he wrote this in his book Toward Perpetual Peace (which Susan Neiman also quotes):
Compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing … [they] oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind.
Without moral reasoning, the religious justifications for slavery and racism would have gone unchallenged. And so would the pseudo-scientific ones. With moral reasoning, we got liberal societies that, for all their faults, have become the most free and egalitarian in the history of civilization.
Reason does not have to be amoral or oppressive. It can be the shared language of the “public sphere,” where people of all kinds can communicate, debate, learn, solve problems, and pursue justice without anyone forcing anyone else to adopt any particular belief or ideology. This kind of reason is what the sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls communicative rationality.
In his youth, Habermas was a student of Horkheimer and Adorno, the Critical Theorists who wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment. But he concluded that their critique of Enlightenment reason was based on a reductive mistake: it assumed that all of Enlightenment reason is instrumental. It isn’t.
Habermas has since emerged as a leading defender of the Enlightenment and liberalism. And he defends them even as he frequently criticizes liberal democracies from the left. He can do that without paradoxical self-contradictions, because in its commitment to the open exercise of reason, liberalism supports anyone criticizing anything, including liberalism itself.
That can be a severe political weakness. Self-critical, self-doubting liberals are notoriously self-defeating.
So it’s up to liberals to make reason a political strength. That involves defending it as a vehicle not just of amoral productivity and technocratic progress, but the inspiring values liberalism owns but too seldom claims.
At the same time, it involves recognizing that in politics, reason isn’t enough — not nearly enough.
We’ll start there next time.
Image: Portrait of Immanuel Kant, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
- Leviticus 25:44-45
- Europeans were initially at the top, but in some editions of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae they were replaced by American Indians, possibly because Linnaeus was influenced by the noble savage literature. But many people who accepted Linnaeus as an authority on Africans chose to ignore him on the subject of Indians.
- The Federalist Papers, Number 51
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil