'Democracy' is not a practical aim, it's an abstract ideal. Which is why it's so easy to hijack the word and make it mean 'Colonial rule by an installed thug' - and keep a straight face.

'Open access to policy influence without filtering by cash or caste' is more of a practical aim.

Of course it's not any kind of philosophical absolute. But it doesn't need to be - it just needs to create results which everyone can experience directly.

In this sense "moral" or "morality" derives from the latin mores, which in some of its senses referred to what was right according to custom and was understood to vary from society to society: e.g. sexual customs were  known to vary from one group of people to another and what was right depended on the customs or mores of that society.  There was multi-culturalism even in Roman times!

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Dan Ariely's book, Predictably Irrational, among its other virtues, describes experimental behavioral economics results that reveal the fragility of social norms when these are forced into competition with market norms. It's a fascinating and sometimes profoundly disturbing book. I highly recommend it, even to those who have been casually following the literature in the area. (Fun to read, too.)

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

The effect of state sponsored religion on the non-religious is probably similar to what has happened in Europe. But the combination of state support and benefits, together with a high birthrate, is resulting in a gradual takeover of the country by the fundamentalists (which, like all unsustainable trends, can't go on for ever, but it's anybody's guess at what point it will stop). Do you really want to take the risk that the U.S would be more like Europe?

There is a variety of reasons - most of them very good - that pulling an Atatürk on a modern, reasonably democratic society would be A Bad Idea.

- Jake

Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam

Once the Market Fundamentalists co-opted those words they started to mean their opposites, and lost their potency.

This has actually been a semiotic war. There are plenty of examples of semiotic war from the end of the dark ages onwards, with people writing each other letters and arguing to define reality.

But the Market Fundamentalists have run one of the fastest and most successful semantic campaigns in history, completely debasing and perverting concepts which otherwise showed real promise and squeezing out competing narratives with terrifying effectiveness.

So they were certainly not “ministers to their respective kings”, of which Koselleck writes that they were, on the contrary, to “agree with the king against their own agony”.

I could go on, but you already see my point: whenever the elites act for their own benefit, they still prefer to surround themselves with experts, as a rule. This is not the case when they make decisions for others, and there is a lot more mismanagement there. We like to gripe about all our governments' failures in the Middle East, on health issues, retirement funds, etc., yet do those failures truly affect the elites as much as the rest of society? I don't think so.

The difference is not that great from the 18th century either. Kings' ministers didn't rule *for* the common people then, nor do they now. Social progress did occur, but it was paid for in blood. And today ministers have MBAs and PhDs, which admittedly didn't exist in the 18th century...

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Louis XIV reactive absolutist reign owes much to la fronde upheaval that would have granted new powers to the parliament and the judiciary. The defeat of la fronde "exiled" progressive thought to the parlors (the salons) and the province. The fables of La Fontaine are political treatise, just as the careful extraordinary works of the Bordeaux landholder Montaigne.

It is fitting that Louis XIV left the state in shambles. His reign simply postponed an inevitable revolution.

I do find that qualifying any major intellectual movement as elite is reductive and somewhat a tautology. There are simple requirements for philosophical speculation in periods of repressive zeitgeist- education, free time, a minimum guarantee of livelihood, a tolerated or clandestine network for the diffusion of works, a knack for dissimulation. It is rare that a serf or peasant could fill the bill. In the rare occasions someone rose from the lower classes, usually through the Church, he or she became "elite."

One of the central tenets of the Enlightenment is its universality (since it is based on reason and empiricism, it is independent of culture). It can be argued (and has been on this site) that the Enlightenment ended up undermining itself by showing this tenet to be false.

It is easy to conflate the "Enlightenment" with "Modernity," which was one of its children.  Another Enlightenment value was that social status should be based on merit, not birth.  It is also easy to forget that "western liberal democracy" was not the only political offspring of the Enlightenment.  

The other notable political offspring was the Soviet State. They embraced the same universal values as the others.  It can be argued that they were much more effective in identifying and nurturing talent wherever it was found than were most "western democracies."  

Universality proved very useful to the governance of a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. They had no use for nationalism or racism with so many nationalities and ethnicities.  Religion was suppressed in the name of rationality.  I am, of course, referring to the official dogma, not actual practice.  Apples to apples, as it were.

Since 1989 we have seen a general retreat from universal values and a rise of nationalisms.  This has  become the context to the rise of market fundamentalism.  But these universal values were never too well rooted anywhere, and were repeatedly overwhelmed by nationalism and racism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

By contrast, historical sciences require interpretation, because alternative histories cannot ever be observed. It's obvious that interpretation has a degree of arbitrariness, which the postmodernists have rightly pointed out.

Yet in Physics, postmodernism has no place. The primary authority is the experimental result, and the interpretation is merely a convenient summary which can always be replaced or ignored. It is a second tool for answering questions, which complements the experiment, which can always be performed.

Does your Hegelian dialectic count as universal if it applies only to a subset of human knowledge? ;-)

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$E(X_t|F_s) = X_s,\quad t > s$

1) World view: The Enlightenment was primarily a change in world view which came to see and explain the world in naturalistic terms rather than in religious terms.  It incorporated the humanistic emphasis of the renaissance, "man is the measure of all things." with a newly found confidence in the ability of the human mind to understand the workings of the natural world.  

The development of science from Copernicus to Newton provided the foundation for this shift.  Voltaire, among others, assimilated an understanding of Newton and an appreciation of his impact while cooling his heels in England in the early part of the 18th century. Locke provided a rationale for governmental authority separate from Divine Right, which had been the prevailing view.  This was a practical necessity in England after the beheading of Charles I.  

The Enlightenment Project, so called, came to include replacing all arguments from authority and all explanations involving Divine Intervention with naturalistic ones.  This was Adam Smith's great contribution.  He developed a comprehensive account of moral and economic organization and behavior that was independent of any Divine Supervision.  These were set forth most notably in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations  Smith did for the social sciences what Newton had done for physics.  

In all spheres of knowledge men sought to determine the Laws of Nature.  The nature of God changed from that of a theistic divinity to which one prayed directly to a deistic divinity who, if he really existed, had created, or was embodied in, the Laws of Nature.  This was known as The Clockwork Universe.  God created it, wound it up and let it go.  He retired from the world.

It came to be assumed, among the educated, that The Laws of Nature could be studied and apprehended by man.  This was a profound change from a world view in which God was the immediate author of all things and man was assumed to be incapable of understanding his inscrutable ways.  But this process was hesitant and proceeded over a long period of time.

2) Reason and History. The worship of reason during the French Revolution became infamous.  Most of the Philosophers sensed the inadequacy of reason alone as a guide to man in society.  In their heart of hearts they might have believed that there was no God, but Hume, Diderot and others refused to publish some of their best works during their lifetimes: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Hume's case and Le neveu de Rameau in Diderot's case.

Reason showed them the absurdities of religion and led them to doubt the existence of God, but they had little confidence that they had an adequate replacement. They could see that an omnipotent, omniscent and omnibenificent deity was an absurdity, given the state of the world, but they had no satisfactory replacement. It was as though God had absconded during the night, leaving mankind in the lurch.  Hume said of his work: "It is true, but men cannot live by it."

Hume turned from philosophy to the study of history, economics and politics. They came to study useful arts and sciences and to compile these into Diderot's Encyclopédie and in England the Encyclopedia Britanica.  Experience had to supplement abstract reason.  As Priestly said: "Without history the advantages of our rational nature must have been rated very low."  Gibbon, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Herder all produced histories.  These histories were written to teach by example.  They sought to see through history the universal nature of man.

Per Becker, what they really did was to create a new religion. "The essential articles of the religion of the Enlightenment may be stated thus: (1) man is not natively depraved; (2) the end of life is life itself, the good life on earth instead of the beatific life after death; (3) man is capable, guided solely by the light of reason and experience, of perfecting the good life on earth; and (4) the first and essential condition of the good life on earth is the freeing of men's minds from the bonds of ignorance and superstition and their bodies from the arbitrary oppression of the constituted social authorities.

3) The uses of posterity:  The philosophers saw the future as a better world they were building and they looked to posterity for justification for their actions.  They sought to reclaim the world from the misery into which they saw Christianity as having sent it.  "For the love of God they substituted the love of humanity; for the vicarious atonement the perfectibility of man through his own efforts; and for the hope of immortality in another world the hope of living in the memory of future generations."

This is but a poor Cliff Notes of Becker's work and already too long.  The great virtue of Becker is his brevity, 168 pages.  The Heavenly City was written in 1932 and there are newer works available, notably by Peter Gay. But I believe Becker remains the best introduction to the subject.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.