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October 6, 2003
The conception of the classical Enlightenment in this paper is about right. It also rightly depicts American liberals, such as John Rawls, as working within this Enlightenment tradition, however much they have modified it with their idea of public reason as democratic deliberation. But Smith argues that there is a decay in this tradition which has become the culture of western liberal democracies.
That decay is what Nietzsche called nihilism.
The classical Enlightenment was concerned with liberating truth from culture---it sought Absolute truth. And we live with the historicist reaction today--that reason is a part of our culture and we cannot escape from our history or get outside our language to see the world as it really is in itself.
The danger is that reason becomes an instrumental reason---a means to achieve pre-given ends---and so it is unable to evaluate competing ends, or to provide justifications for the values that underpin the nation's constitution. What it pushes into the background is the whole process of evaluating and choose competing value ends.
So we are left with reason just endorsing the given values of the nation, and being unable to provide justifications for the values and committments as a response to those who do not accept them. Hence we have a dogmatic liberal reason built around a national consensus that repudiates and excludes dissent in the name of reason and smuggles in its value commitments to liberal constitutionalism. Dissent is excluded because it is unable from an overlapping consensus.
Smith argues that this leads to a culture of manipulation, suspicion and willfulness----nihilism---under the guise of civility and reasonableness. Such a deeply skeptical culture then leads to the political attacks on the High Court for its activism and political interventions.
Hence we need a revaluation of our values. The Enlightenment culture which replaced the decayed Christian one is in the process of being hollowed out. Smith is right in this. His finger is on the pulse, he gives a good account of the process of decay and he is able to articulate a public sense of unease about this decay and the self-deception about the hollowing out of our highest values. Hence we are entering a period of a long dark night of Enlightenment.
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