What's really at issue

So, what's really at issue here?

It would seem that we are confronted with a number of interrelated conundrums: are we individuals or are we not? are we responsible individuals with free choice or are we not? may we be judged by our actions or only by what we say? do we get passes if we're in a high enough position and act against our own beliefs? can you do something that causes widespread grief and destruction and still be considered honorable? are we truly solely responsible for our own decisions? are there no mitigating circumstances?

These are not easy questions to answer. And there is no reason that they should be.

One of the real issues with which we are confronted at denizens of the modern, industrialized, consequently rich, Western world is that we no longer know what is right and what is wrong. There are so many mitigating circumstances with which we are all confronted. When they happen to us, they are a tragedy. When they happen to others, well, they should just learn to suck it up and deal with it. Why is that? One of the reasons, I believe, is our misunderstanding of the notion of "individuality" which was bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment.

There are some of you, I am sure, who wonder what it is that I have with the Enlightenment. I admit, I mention it quite a lot. It was an important period in our development as a species (homo sapiens, that is). It was the Enlightenment that gave us the free-willed individual. It was the Enlightenment that dethroned God and promoted Science to the arbiter of what is "true". It was the Enlightenment that introduced the "Rights of Man" (and I have purposely chosen to phrase this as the Enlightenment thinkers phrased it, not what some these days think it should be, namely "human rights"). It was the Enlightenment that demythologized the world, exalted Reason above Belief, and that displaced the human from the Center of Being, just as the Renaissance had displaced the Earth as the Center of the Cosmos. For Americans, this is a particularly beloved time, it would seem, for America's own (sacred, if not holy) Constitution is a product of the Enlightenment as well.

My concern is more mundane: it's 250 years later ... has nothing happened in the meantime? It would seem a lot has.

Just for starters, how about: the rise of the nation-state, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of capitalism and the counter-effect of Marxism, the consolidation of European powers, the introduction of evolutionary theory, the development of Freudian analysis, the discovery of relativity and quantum theory, the two-time attempted suicide of Europe (WW1 and WW2), the destruction of meaning (via post-structuralism and deconstructionism) and much, much more. All of these things have transpired, yet our thinking remains every bit as much rooted in what came before, as if none of it had happened at all.

It would seem that we've cherry-picked what we like and tried to discredit the rest. As I see it, however, that which we so gleefully discarded is now coming back with a vengeance.