MAGAZINES & JOURNALS
A glance at the January issue of "Reason": The end of the Enlightenment
Postmodernism has long attacked the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason to examine accepted doctrines and traditions, but now the movement has found an unlikely new ally in its attacks on reason: traditionalists. In "Dark Bedfellows," Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, writes that just about everyone -- from "center-left communitarians" to "Strauss-influenced conservatives" -- is lambasting Enlightenment ideas as a racist, classist "cover for power." Mr. Olson, however, defends the ideals of the Enlightenment, crediting the philosophical movement's inventiveness, intellect, and enterprise with forging modern scientific methods, as well as modernist thinking about individual rights and self-cultivation. While Mr. Olson concedes that the Enlightenment had its share of "blind spots and excesses," he writes that today's attacks on science, evolution, and the self-made man are unwarranted. Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Olson notes, once said he was sorry that he was born too soon because he would not be alive to see what would happen in 100 years. "Two centuries later, amid undreamt-of levels of health and comfort that science has brought the West, a generation of intellectuals amuses itself in efforts to gnaw away at the Enlightenment foundations of the enterprise," Mr. Olson writes. "Were he hooked to an underground turbine, Ben Franklin might be discovering a new way to generate electricity: spinning in his grave." The article may be found on line at http://www.reasonmag.com/9901/co.wo.darkbedfellows.html