THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT? Yes, I've read and commented on a lot of posts featuring the agony of Democratic Party kool-aid drinkers wannabe court intellectuals whose logic loosely runs: We are so smart. We are so enlightened. Gegen diesen Idioten muß Ich verlieren? It must be The End Of The Enlightenment.

Get a grip, people. This kind of talk has been around for years. The ever-helpful Butterflies and Wheels (which I must confess to not having visited in several months) has been observing the deep thinkers carefully. Julian Baggini provides a longer view.

Intellectuals in general, and academics in particular, have taken their eyes off the ball. They have forgotten how precious their shared commitment to rationality is. Instead, they fetishise technical disagreements and lose sight of one of the core intellectual virtues they share. The result is that the values of rationality and reasonableness become debased and we are left with no defences against the traditional enemies of enlightened humanism: superstition, ignorance, prejudice and plain stupidity.

Consider, for example, what Simon Blackburn, in the title of his forthcoming book, has called “The Truth Wars”. The general history of this conflict has been chronicled many times. First came the Enlightenment, and the championing of reason, truth and science over authority, falsehood and superstition. Then, in the twentieth century, many lost faith with the Enlightenment project. Some, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, went so far as to suggest that Auschwitz was the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment. We had to reject, so the story went, the myth of the rational mind, dispassionately analysing the world. To understand the history of ideas, we need to look not at syllogisms but at who wields power or at the subconscious mind. Reason does not determine what we think; rather, what we already think determines how we reason.

These disagreements are important within the academy today, which is divided between those who carry the torch of the Enlightenment and those who debunk its pretensions. But the disagreements occlude a more important agreement. As Bernard Williams put it in his swan song, Truth and Truthfulness, differences in each camp’s “respective styles of philosophy” leads them to “pass each other by”.

It is no accident, dear reader, that Dante's Inferno

is the place I told you to expect.
Here you shall pass among the fallen people,
soulds who have lost the good of intellect.

H. E. Baber's "The Sleep of Reason" suggests that those lost souls look, well, in the mirror.

The embrace of relativism by many leftist intellectuals in the United States, while it may not be politically very important, is a terrible admission of failure, and an excuse for not answering the claims of their political opponents. The subordination of the intellect to partisan loyalty is found across the political spectrum, but usually it takes the form of a blind insistence on the objective truth of certain supporting facts and refusal to consider evidence to the contrary. So what explains the shift, at least by a certain slice of the intellectual left, to this new form of obfuscation?

Professor Baber has her own weblog, The Enlightenment Project, which is refreshingly free of End of Enlightenment hysteria.