Hope amidst Chaos: Kant, the Enlightenment & Its Enemies

He saw it coming…

Kant & the Enlightenment

• Kant, in his ‘speculative’ historical writings, dictates a transcendental gunshot marriage between the realism of Machiavelli and the idealism of Rousseau (though not by name), improving on them both by revealing them as the two interpretive poles of historical interpretation, and of man’s understanding of his capacities and limitations, as they emerge over time from the real life and practices of mankind, in its two-pronged and utterly ambiguous foreseeable history.
• That ambiguous future is the core bit of dark humor lying at the crux of the generally humorless Prussian’s short work Perpetual Peace. The inspirational and aspirational title is accompanied by a Dutch tavern sign, with that name lettered over a picture of a graveyard.
• The crux of that dark joke is this: the unstoppable advance of man’s powers can only lead to one of two destinies. We shall either, having accumulated the powers sufficient for mutual annihilation, proceed to do just that, or we shall find a way to live together in peace and mutual respect.
• Should we go the path of destruction, it will not be calculated and deliberate, but the result of the mad scramble of all to preserve themselves as best they can against the looming sense of threats from every direction. In other words, it would only be the predictable and inevitable result of world anarchy.
• Should we go the path of Enlightenment — enlightened self-interest, really — it will be the result of a long sequence of gradually improving half-successes and half-failures, glacially approaching, without ever fully reaching, a world of perfect justice.
• It can only take the form of a consensus acceptable to all, whose political form is the social contract and whose individual or personal form is the categorical imperative.
• I’ll leave the reader to research those two complex ideas as far as they wish, but if you don’t at least Google them, what can you have to do for the next 3 minutes that’s more important?
• Kant’s gunshot wedding of Machiavelli and Rousseau was the high-water mark of the Enlightenment.
• To see this, read Perpetual Peace (38 pages) and the brief but brilliantly condensed “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (@13 pages). Both can be found in Kant, The Political Writings,ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK; 1970.

The Counter-Enlightenment

From there’s a clear and simple point to all of this to No exit. We should have stopped at perpetual progress toward a distant and perhaps unreachable goal.

• The forces of the Counter-Enlightenment now loom large.
• On the Left, they take theoretical form in postmodernism and various forms of moral relativism.
• On the right, they take practical form in MAGA, the Tea Party and the Freedom from Responsibility Caucus in the increasingly extremist Republican Party.
• In the center, they take practical form in the narrow focus of Independents on short-term financial advantage.
• So much for domestic politics.
• In geopolitics, they take form in the repressions, invasions and assassinations of the Putin regime and the New World Order espoused by rogue states like Russia, China and Iran, and exploited by the complacent mid-level powers narrowly focused on expanding their own local prestige and power: India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Egypt heading in the same direction. The New World Order is just the Old World Order — essentially, might makes right — that dictated most of history until the end of WWII and the pax Americana.
• It was an imperfect peace — although, unlike the world orders promoted by autocrats, it allowed peaceful change, generally raised living standards, and spread voting rights, making governments more accountable.
• It was limited in other ways as well. Its mandate never reached beyond America, its allies, and awkwardly independent or unaligned states like ex-NATO France, Franco’s Spain, Orban’s Hungary, pre-Modi India, Switzerland, and the like.
• The New World Order is accepted by both middle and rogue powers because it frees then to pursue local hegemony.
• Good for them, bad for their smaller neighbors.
• It is entertained by the Global South because they focus on past injustices rather than those that the New Order will bring; by the time they realize their mistake, they will be victims, unless they rank among those with the power to exploit their smaller neighbors.
• And the Global South will play both ends against the middle to maximize their own short-term advantage, which they can rightly point out was all the Global North ever did for them.
• But this fence-sitting attitude — the attitude of a watchful scavenger — always comes home to roost, as the predator finishes its current meal and looks around for its next victim.

Victor and victim…
unless — they say it’s happened before — the victim were to rise again (perhaps as a movement rather than as a man))