Context? Yes, please.

Eve Garrard, has written a comment on this John Gray’s latest piece in the New Statesman. Since Gray got his new post-JG Ballard prose style it is often quite difficult to work out precisely what he is on about, but in this case, he is making the point that “Enlightenment Values” have historically been associated with a hell of a lot of death and destruction (things like the French revolutionary Terror). Garrard’s point is that when she and the Euston Manifesto crowd use the phrase, they use it only to refer to ” universal human rights, equality (in some sense), religious tolerance, scepticism about received dogmas, freedom of speech, a commitment to the use of reason to improve our condition” rather than blood and the guillotine, and that Gray knows this and is just being silly.

I think there’s more to it than that. It would be quite easy for Gray to come back with a cheap shot on this one; that although Eve Garrard claims to only be in favour of the nice bits of the Enlightenment and against all the revolutionary terror, the actual tangible results of her project have been Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

So argues Daniel at Crooked Timber. To which SB says:

Hmmmm, here's a little speech I used to give in History of Ideas classes to folks whose glasses didn't extend their vision quite far enough to the periphery:

AS IF the Enlightenment did not / does not take place in a larger context called Patriarchy. AS IF the core values of patriarchy are not: competition, power, dominance, and control (hence History, Fallujah, Gitmo, &c.). AS IF there is an ideology or religion under patriarchy that has not believed / does not believe it can "bomb some sense into them." AS IF the Enlightenment and Humanism are not on-going historical projects in a process of not-very-quick refinement that tends toward the mutation of Patriarchy into something new and unprecedented (which is what's making all the Jack/ies -- patriarchal folks -- so nervous all over the world).

Irritating when writers (including me) can't get the picture in its proper (usually larger) frame.

All that changed in the 19th and 20th centuries w/r/t power/control/violence is that we developed technologies that amplified the effects of these values by many orders of magnitude.

(There is a reason that George Sand refused her invitation join the new French legislature. She would not be part of a government that refused women full participation. The "fraternite" part of the slogan did not turn her on.)

Thus: "sharing" democracy becomes a matter of controlling and dominating the choices of other nations, and doing that through the deployment of power/violence if necessary, especially where competition for economic resources are at stake. Not to mention the psychological complexes patriarchy sets up in which to fail, or lose, or become controlled is to become feminized -- because women are the first thing a man must compete for, and control and dominate through power. Not to have control of one's woman, or to be controled by another man is, in the metaphorical logic of Jack-dom, to be a girl, bitches. (See Allan Johnson)

I'm ALLLLLL for more people having democratic say in their governance, and certainly ALLLLLLL for women no longer living under the iron fist of their husbands'/fathers' whims in much of the world, and I'm ALLLLLLLL for things like the Bosnian rape camps becoming simply inconceivable by any human being --- the problem is that we're going about this is a singularly patriarchal way which will Not, because it Can Not result in the Enlightenment values we "cherish" taking hold in these places. Much less here.

These liberal changes we wish for people would have a way, way better chance of happening if these other people would, perhaps, actually read the Enlightenment thinkers instead of just insisting that they create constitutions and rule of law with no context for it. I wonder, really, if fundamentalists and traditionalists actually read some of this stuff (I mean the primary texts not some dope's interpretation) what connections and points of felicity might they find between that bugaboo Secular Humanism and their own ideologies?

Some would find none, their religion having been so perverted by their faith. Some would find many points of felicity, their religion and ideology still placing compassion and self-discipline and the innate value of the human being at the center of their faith.

And that might actually get us a good starting point for the establishment of democracies by those people, for those people.

Method and means matter to the character and quality of the ends reached. There is no way around that.