This bit evinces a wholly different issue at stake.
>I am much more interested in attacking Eurocentrism, and I tend to identify
>with the world-systems people like Blaut, Eric Wolf, Wallerstein et al. The
>Enlightenment is a particularly European construction and baloney like the
>"Asiatic Mode of Production" flow from it. What I have a problem with in
>particular is the schema that the world lived in darkness and superstition
>until the French and British Enlightment thinkers decided to apply
>UNIVERSAL REASON. Careful study of Chinese and Arab civilization would
>reveal an entirely different set of circumstances. If anything, the Mideast
>was much more enlightened than Europe for centuries before Decartes came
>along. I have been planning to get around to reading and reviewing Tariq
>Ali's historical fiction on these questions and will have more to say.
But I reckon you still have to have an 'episteme' (if I may wax Foucauldian) with the propensity and capacity to remove God/s, and the social orders thus legitimised, before you have 'enlightenment'.
Yours recalcitrantly humanist, Rob.