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July 31, 2007
In his Enlightenment and Terror ----The Thomas More Lecture, Amsterdam, 2004--- John Gray makes a crucial point--- today there is a
widespread attempt to recapture the fading certainties of the Enlightenment:
At the start of the twenty-first century the faith that has been lost is not Christianity. It is faith in humanity—the faith that by using the growing knowledge given by science humankind can create a future for itself better than anything in the past. This was the faith—for it is a faith, not a conclusion of rational inquiry—that inspired the thinkers of the Enlightenment, that animated Marxism and liberalism, that somehow survived the great wars and tyrannies of the twentieth century and that is now at last beginning to falter.
In these circumstances it is inevitable that the Enlightenment should engender a fundamentalist movement of its own. Fundamentalism arises only when traditional systems of belief have broken down. Like their Christian and Islamic counterparts, Enlightenment fundamentalists seek to recover a faith that history has destroyed. The faith that has been lost today is a faith in progress.
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