Walter Dirks
THE ENLIGHTENMENT–
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
"Enlightenment" is not only an eighteenth-century theme;
it is a theme for us, indeed it is our theme.
If
we have not grown honorably or dishonorably gray as mem–
bers of the Free Thinkers' Association, we tend to enunciate the
word very critically. A few use it in constructive criticism, the
majority contemptuously or bitterly. The Enlightenment is, it ap–
pears, "to blame for everything"; it demolished and demoralized
the old order, the consecrated laws, it turned man into a self-seeking
individual avid for enjoyment, ostensibly liberated him, in reality
made him solitary, shallow, and refractory: it bears the guilt first
of "individualism" and then of its consequence, the mass-man.
It
squandered the capital of confidence and uprightness on which
in–
numerable generations had lived. It dried up men's hearts. It de–
stroyed the "community," to say nothing of religious faith.
This is a huge reckoning. It might be possible to reckon up a
modest offset to it. Each of us still profits by the Enlightenment
when he makes use of technical progress; no one will seriously want
to get along without electric light-still less without the surgical
technique which saves
his
child's life. To state this would be super–
fluous, were it not that we have with us today certain profound minds
which damn the Enlightenment root and branch but at the same
time quite happily live on its fruits- much like people who give
lectures in which they inveigh against the spirit of technique, but
think nothing of driving to the hall in a car, reading by electric
light, and even having their words broadcast. This sort of thing is not
quite fair-yet such is the attitude of many intellectuals toward
technique, toward the Enlightenment, and indeed toward the whole
Modern Age. They are against them, but they live by them. They
live by them, but they are against them.
