The Re-Enlightenment of America and Its Universities

It has been almost a decade since Steven Pinker called for Enlightenment Now. Although many readers lauded his clarion call to return to logical empiricism, most of academia, including universities and research publishers, doubled down on postmodernism or its ugly spawn, meta-modernism and post-postmodernism. As a result, the quality of U.S. higher education, scientific research, and public discourse continued to spiral downward, pushed along by the Covid lockdowns, which were firmly rooted in postmodern worldviews that stress authority over scientific method. Only Re-Enlightenment can save higher education and with it Pinker’s optimistic view of human progress.

By Re-Enlightenment, I mean the revivification of the intellectual goals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that privileged empirical observation, logic, and reason above base authority, ancient custom, and rank superstition. That intellectual movement modernized the world, leading to the American Revolution and the sundry economic revolutions that released humanity from the population trap identified by Thomas Malthus and that helped billions of people to become better off materially than the wealthiest pre-Enlightenment monarchs just three centuries ago.

Will progress continue, though? Will the gains already made persist? History is literally littered with societies that experienced so-called Golden Ages only to devolve back towards what Adam Smith termed “barbarism.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century, many Western intellectual elites jettisoned the Enlightenment in the mistaken belief that its ideals had caused the horrors of the twentieth-century: the two world wars, the Great Depression, numerous genocides, and the ever present threat of nuclear holocaust, not to mention racism, sexism, and xenophobia. In the place of Enlightened ideals, those elites embraced postmodernism, a creed that denies the quest for objective truth and replaces it with nihilism, subjectivism, and a quest for governments powerful enough to dictate “truth” by fiat.

The irony is that authoritarian government, or in other words a dearth of Enlightenment in politics, diverted the productive forces unleashed by the Enlightenment in economics to violent, tribal ends. But instead of trying to tame the destructive forces of authoritarian government, the postmodernists blamed humanity’s woes on “capitalism” and Enlightenment, and undercut them at every turn in classrooms and legislatures while bestowing them with heinous sobriquets.

Where the postmodernists won early ascendancy, under labels like communism and national socialism, they ran headlong into the objective realities that they denied. Within a few years or decades they faltered and failed, often reappearing in the more gradualist varieties that gained a foothold in the “free” countries of the West, including the United States. There, they spread throughout government and academia supported by the largesse of rationally ignorant taxpayers and wealthy alumni with eyes swaddled by thick layers of nostalgia.

Reality, though, again reared its oft ugly head, revealing in 2020 Western institutions that the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment would recognize as new forms of authority, custom, and superstition. The conflation of science and authority, the repression of legitimate business, and widespread censorship during the pandemic constituted the Enlightenment’s nadir, but also a springboard from which Re-enlightenment may gain ascendance. 

The same day that I began teaching U.S. History at the new University of Austin I began regularly to work out at the gym again, after having given up my lifelong routine during the pandemic. I did so because for the first time since March 2020, I again want to live long. The conversation that day in early January, which began before the appointed start time of 8:30 am, was deep, frank, and precisely the reason that I decided to join the academy 35 years ago.

The parallel institutions of higher education that have been springing up – some de novo like the University of Austin and Reliance College, others like mushrooms from the rotting corpses of dying incumbents – provide hope that America and the rest of the West will not further devolve into idiocracy, kakistocracy, or tribalism. I still fret, though, that their efforts will prove too little, too late unless they are accompanied by more widespread Re-Enlightenment across America’s intellectual landscape.

The Re-enlightenment can improve upon its predecessor by incorporating the best that its postmodern critics offered. The following sentiments encapsulate it:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Truth is not. Beauty therefore can be achieved for some, but humans can only strive towards Truth without ever fully attaining it. Intellectual humility therefore behooves everyone. No single mind, even that of the great leader or the mighty AI, can understand all. Collectively, however, through the free trade in ideas, human understanding can advance closer to Truth.

Anyone may claim whatever he or she likes, but no one else is bound to listen to, let alone heed, the message. Just because someone offers a good for trade does not mean anyone must take it up. The same holds for the trade in ideas.

Normative claims can be ignored on their normative basis alone. Positive claims can be ignored too, but at the listener’s peril. If a person shouts “fire!” in a crowded theater, for example, the listener can call the Thought Police but will be better off by critically assessing the veracity of the claim. Who is the speaker? Does the speaker have more information or better insight into the state of the theater than the listener does? If so, the listener should seek more information.

The listener can also independently assess the speaker’s credibility. If the speaker is carrying a large water hose and wearing a fire-retardant uniform, following directions will likely extend the listener’s existence. If the speaker is another theatergoer giving directions to a character to shoot his gun, ignoring “fire!” likely will extend the listener’s enjoyment of the film, play, musical, or other theatrical entertainment.

The veracity of the most important positive claims, however, is not so easily ascertained. Some Enlightenment thinkers erred by being too optimistic about the ease of establishing Truth claims. Moreover, some policymakers incorrectly invoked the Enlightenment to support normative claims that bolstered their power, a propensity that constitutions based on Enlightenment thought did not sufficiently check. In reaction to the Enlightenment’s intellectual overreach and its usurpation by power seekers, the intellectual pendulum swung too far in the other direction, toward nihilism and Continental philosophies like postmodernism.

Higher education and freedom suffered as a consequence. Free speech devolves into vacuous concepts like “voice” when all claims carry equal weight, or solely the weight of the speaker’s perceived authority. Free enterprise likewise suffers when its defenders’ views can be outright censored, distorted through linguistic twists that conflate authority and liberty, or denigrated as “biased” even if based on empirical evidence and logic. 

To re-establish the intellectual milieu in which free speech and free enterprise can thrive, universities can again ground students in Analytic philosophy, reason, and logic, alloyed with applied history and tempered by post-modernist concerns over power relationships, particularly those of the state over individuals.

Consider, for example, classroom treatment of the following proposition: “The U.S. federal government should ban all firearms.”

Many universities today would laud students for making or virtue signaling support for such a claim. A few would chastise students for supporting it and might even try to ban such speech. A Re-enlightened University, by contrast, induces intellectual investigation by first asking what type of claim it is. It is normative, so listeners need not heed it. 

The proposition could be better understood, however, if reframed as a positive claim, like “If the U.S. federal government bans all firearms, the homicide rate will …” If the speaker ends the claim with “decline,” a certain set of universities will reinforce and another punish the speaker. If the speaker ends the claim with “increase,” the set of universities will reverse.

Note that if they do not insist upon restatement of the original normative claim in positive terms, some universities will laud students who believe that the U.S. government should ban firearms because the students believe doing so will increase the homicide rate. 

A Re-enlightened University, by contrast, asks the speaker to state the empirical grounds for his or her positive claim. That is where simplistic views of the world can be questioned (can’t people kill each other with weapons, like bombs and vehicles, other than firearms?) and rational tools like comparative analysis, logic, and statistical inference can be used to move toward a better understanding of the issue and perhaps even closer approximations of Truth. 

Re-enlightenment is not inherently imperialist, racist, sexist, or anything else anyone might think untoward because it is more intellectually humble than its predecessor. Contrast the views of, say, Friedrich Hayek with the Marquis de Condorcet. Re-enlightenment will also be even more skeptical of intrusive government policies than its predecessor. Contrast the skepticism of James C. Scott with, say, the optimism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

A Re-enlightened University does not exclude topics of discussion but simply accords postmodern approaches to policy questions their due weight. Not everything is knowable, or effable, but for those things that are, the methodologies of the Enlightenment, like randomized control trials and natural experiments, remain far superior to those of postmodernism. Re-enlightened universities allow postmodernists to speak, of course, but attend to them only insofar as they help students to progress toward greater understanding of the real world.