The Enlightenment is going through a dark time. Critical race theorists on both sides of the Atlantic are following the philosophers Emmanuel Eze and Charles W Mills in holding the Enlightenment responsible for modern racism. In The Age of Empire (2021), the British sociologist Kehinde Andrews says that it is time to stop revering ‘dead white men’ such as Kant, Locke and Voltaire. Last year, the University of Edinburgh, which is widely seen as having had an ‘outsized’ historic role in promulgating racist scientific theories, undertook an excoriating process of self-examination, publishing a Race Review that acknowledged that the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were responsible for propagating ‘some of the most damaging ideas in human history’, including the idea that human societies exist on a hierarchical ‘ladder’, from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’, with Europeans at the top. The Review highlighted the role of David Hume, who, in a notorious footnote to the 1753 version of his essay ‘On National Characters’ (1748), stated that non-white races are ‘naturally inferior to the whites’. The university admits that it still has bequests totalling many millions of pounds from donors linked to the slave trade and other colonial conquests. At the same time, the city is embroiled in a long dispute over what to do with a statue of Henry Dundas, who most historians hold responsible for delaying the progress of abolition through UK Parliament.
Censured by the Left for its philosophy-washing of Empire, the Enlightenment is further under fire from the populist Right who see the long arm of its influence in the foundations of our established political institutions and the traditional architecture of representative democracy and professional expertise: those who stand up for Enlightenment values are liable to find themselves castigated as members of a ‘complacent liberal elite’. Writing in The Observer in 2025, Will Hutton bemoaned the fact that, in an era of populist autocracy, what were once taken-for-granted goods – ‘justice, accountability, social fairness, scientific progress, international order’ – have become associated with a ‘Brahmin class – who are the new civilisational enemy.’ Attacks on this new enemy are fuelled, Hutton wrote, by ‘the need for vengeance on the standard-bearers of Enlightenment values.’ Right-wing critics of the Enlightenment are supported by Silicon Valley tech bros. In fact, the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ pioneered by the far-Right software developer Curtis Yarvin, championed by the likes of J D Vance and Peter Thiel, seeks to obliterate the Enlightenment values of equality and democracy.
Famously, the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has rushed to defend the Enlightenment, subtitling his 2018 book on the subject: ‘The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’. These core values, says Pinker, have led to measurable improvements in human health, prosperity and peace. Although it’s good to see prominent commentators stand up for agreed facts and the pursuit of knowledge, especially at a time when scholarship, politics and the media are being eroded by post-truth, conspiracy theories and a mistrust of experts, I cannot align myself wholeheartedly with this big-beast bandwagon.
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