Religion-free religion...

All mentions of the Enlightenment should perhaps come with an intellectual health warning.

Right thinking people cite the E word as if it is blindingly obvious that this late 18th century cultural movement was unimpeachably a good thing.

Yet, as we have lately seen with the liberal progressive ideals that said right-thinking people most commonly espouse today, some of the core notions of the Enlightenment evolved into a dangerous cult...the cult of Reason.

It's not hard to see why, because Enlightenment thinking often involved swapping out the Medieval world's predominant way of conceiving humans and their imperfections with a godless alternative....a religion-free religion, where Nature itself is elevated to near enough divine status.

Whereas previously it was understood that innately flawed and contingent beings like ourselves were engaged in some sort of cosmic drama with the Absolute, Enlightenment thinkers envisaged a more earthly (or at least 'Natural') path towards fulfilment. The idea became that we were not so much born imperfect, but had somehow lost our true selves within imperfect societies. The basic imperative to correct the problem was retained.

Given that this infinity-aspiring imperative was naturally less wishy washy and spiritual, it is not hard at all to see how this replacement for religion might lead to crimes against humanity on an even vaster scale — specifically in the form of totalitarian regimes aspiring to unattainable utopias or at least some kind of standard that is 'out there', but which ordinary human beings in their weakness cannot attain without some robust encouragement.

To be fair, some of the most significant minds of the time anticipated this defect in the programme. One could say that there were two Enlightenments, an upbeat one and a downbeat one. Early members of the pessimist crew were Mandeville and Swift, and they were joined later by Voltaire. It's hardly surprising though that it was the optimists who set us on the path to the gas chambers.