Enlightenment and Tyranny
It's hardly an original idea, that the 18 th century "Enlightenment" degenerated into 20 th century fascism, because any movement which basically relies on using social pressure to make all society's intellectuals appear to agree about everything, is waiting only for the name of fascism to be invented and bestowed upon it. The question which this begs is this: where did the legacy of Enlightenment take us, after it had taken us to Belsen and camp 731? Although it's often presented as an age when reason replaced superstition and tradition in the affairs of man, that would better describe the flood of new ideas, creeds and innovations, that followed the English Civil War a century earlier. Some of these ideas were lunatic, and nobody except Tony Benn and Billy Bragg still believes in them, others, particularly the concepts of religious and therefore, inevitably, political, freedom, have become so basic to our way of life and our values that we struggle to under...