What To Take From The Enlightenment?
This week I tuned in to the newest episode of Joshua Citarella’s podcast, Doomscroll. Citarella, a 38 year old artist and internet culture writer based in NYC, is the host of Doomscroll, a podcast that explores online culture and politics in the 21st century. Alongside this, he is the founder of Do Not Research, a non-profit arts organization, as well as a graduate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has previously taught at the School of Visual Arts (2018–19) and served as an outside advisor at Carnegie Mellon University (2020) and Tufts University (2021).
I first encountered Citarella and his podcast because one of the episodes featured Matty Healy, frontman of The 1975, a band I love. That episode was fantastic, featuring Healy and Citarella brimming with visible passion when talking about all things art, culture, politics, music, and Mark Fisher for over 2 hours straight. I have since binged all of the Doomscroll catalogue, and await a new episode every week! I understand the ripped social democrat Citarella’s output as a response to the ever-increasing market share and stranglehold the right-wing have for influencing young men on social media. In fact, one commenter even joked on one of Citarella’s Substack articles where he criticised the popular idea that the Democrats needed a “Liberal Joe Rogan”: “Wait I thought you were the liberal Joe Rogan”. Citarella made his stance and intent for his work very clear in said article: “we need political messaging from the left, targeted at young people that are en route towards right wing ideologies. These viewers are receptive to new narratives and their grievances can only be meaningfully addressed by the left. Its that simple.”
But another stated purpose for Citarella’s work is a “class-conscious effort to build alternative art institutions”, though perhaps more generally, all institutions which effect and impact culture. Citarella and his revolving guests of leftist interviewees routinely criticise the academy for its cloaking of itself in radical language, all the while capitulating to the increasing neoliberalisation of education. As Citarella puts it in the most recent episode of Doomscroll with Jennifer C. Pan (a writer for publications such as The Nation, Dissent, The Atlantic, Damage Magazine, and former host of the Jacobean podcast as well as staff writer at the New Republic), “there’s a life cycle to institutions and a lot of the ones we have now are just completely rotten. That’s why social media is interesting now. It’s not that social media has a better design than the institutions or that we should, you know, favour this kind of exitarian impulse to just do all of our discourse on Substack and YouTube or whatever, but just like, the deep political rot in the institutions is basically unfixable right now. You need another generational life cycle. Like I mean, like anything else, a magazine is relevant and interesting for a certain period, and then it gets captured by certain interests and so you start another one. We’re going through that with basically our humanities, our scholarship, our higher education right now.”
Amongst this criticism of the academy, Citarella asked Pan a very interesting question: within the context of the academic left’s rejection of the Enlightenment tradition based upon its use as a justification for the atrocities of European colonialism, how should the left consider its relationship to the Enlightenment? Pan responds that “the left should consider itself the proud and rightful inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition”, highlighting how “almost every significant left movement for the past hundred, maybe two hundred years, has drawn from Enlightenment values” citing the Russian, French, and Haitian revolutions as examples. Pan then proceeds to flippantly remark “it just doesn’t make sense to me. Like why would you throw out all of that just because Kant is European or something?” This, to me, seemed like a willful misrepresentation of the actual motivation behind some of the academic left’s Enlightenment critiques. Anti-Enlightenment figures in the academic left don’t dislike the Enlightenment for so vacuous a reason as Kant being European, I do believe they have genuinely meaningful criticism that we ought not to handwave away in such a manner. And though I recognise that Pan was probably joking here, nor do I think we should, as Citarella proceeds to do in the interview, figure the academic left’s disavowal of the Enlightenment heritage as simply ambitious academic contrarianism: “people who are educated of our generation get these tertiary and secondary sources and they probably haven’t read the primary source material. And so the way that you found upward mobility within those institutions was making criticisms of the canon that came before you.” This is not to deny that institutions are structured in this way, but simply to say that not all Enlightenment criticism is done for such cynical reasons as this. Although I am of a younger generation than Pan and Citarella (they are Millennials, and I am but a lowly zoomer for my sins), I am a postgraduate, with, not to brag, a Masters in Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought, and a key part of my discipline is to read the primary source material. And yet I still find myself critical of elements of the Enlightenment — not because, as Citarella supposes, I want to be contrarian in an attempt to oust those in a superior position to me in my institution “so that I can get a promotion” (I am not currently employed in an academic institution, nor am I currently looking to be), but because I genuinely believe that there is intellectual merit in an Enlightenment critique…and not just because Kant was European.
The left critique of the Enlightenment that Pan and Citarella are discussing could generally be termed the postcolonial critique: stemming from a postcolonial perspective, the argument follows that the Enlightenment’s universalist claims are a facade that were often used to justify European colonialism and all its myriad horrors, tantamount amongst them slavery. Kant, in his 1784 essay, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment, contended that the “Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority.” By minority, Kant meant the “inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another.” Put in the positive tense, the Enlightenment, for Kant, is “the calling of each individual to think for himself.” This imperative certainly gave rise to the increasing secularisation of European societies (Nietzsche’s infamous God is Dead quote ought to be figured as a response to the Enlightenment’s consequent secularisation), but such a maxim was also used as a rhetorical justification for the sweeping away of the allegedly “backwards” and “barbarous” religions of the non-European populations as well — ‘here comes the Enlightened white European to rid us of our myths, to liberate our minds, to ‘enlighten’ us (let us rest on the implication of that word in this context for a second), and to allow us to ‘think for ourselves’. And, indeed, until such a time when our enlightening is complete, until we are able to think for ourselves and to act virtuously and with right reason, I suppose the superiorly enlightened European will have to paternalistically rule over us.’ (One can find some semblance of this exact polemic amongst many of the key Enlightenment figures, for example Alexis de Tocqueville who used Enlightenment values to justify France’s colonial exploitation of Algeria). Europeans were not simply content with tearing away their own myths and stultifying traditions, they had to take everyone else’s away as well, so that they could open their minds up to a contingently Western form of rationality, and in so doing, exploit them with capitalism. Any discussion of “human rights” within the Enlightenment tradition were essentially discussions simply of white men’s rights. Which, as I will grant Pan, was the whole point of the Haitian Revolution — to affirm, despite the French’s denial, that the Enlightenment-inspired Declaration of the Rights of Man, which proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”, applied to all people, not just white ones. However, that ought not mean, and I don’t think Citarella and Pan are making this argument necessarily, that the left should cower away from the shameful history of the Enlightenment tradition, focusing only on the ideal rather than on it’s real world implications. Rather, they are arguing that we ought not to throw the baby out with the bathwater — I think Citarella and Pan believe the left can recover the universal ideals of the Enlightenment from their dark history, and still use it as an intellectual tool. And this is an important point: Citarella and Pan definitely seem to judge Enlightenment ideas, and seemingly ideas in general, on their potential utility to left-wing organizing and agitating. Some might call this historical cherry-picking, but this utility-minded approach to the history of ideas is an absolute necessity at a time when our ideological opponents are doing the exact same thing. Citarella and Pan are essentially arguing that if we as the left don’t take ownership over the Enlightenment, we cede that territory, that ground, to the right.
In fact, Citarella literally points out how this is already happening in far-right forums centred on the “dark Enlightenment”: “There are organized, well-capitalised movements now that are advocating for theocracy, literally fucking monarchy — that’s what they describe it as — people make arguments for the caste system, and all these anti-enlightenment/”dark enlightenment” ideologies. And then you have a left which refuses to take inheritance for rationality, and reason, and is also maybe incapable, in some cases, of making arguments that stand up to critiques. And so, y’know, we kind of shoot ourselves in the foot before we can even engage in the debate. I think that is actually the thing to be deliberated among people on the left: what to take in terms of inheritance from the Enlightenment? Is it a complete project? Is it done? Do you abandon it? And it just seems very convenient within the framework of cultural institutions to be like ‘ah this stuff is bad, I dismiss it, I don’t need the canon that came before me’. And essentially what they’re arguing for there is not a kind of lineage or a kind of like a certain scaffolding of scholarship or ideas on top of each other.”
Well, allow me to throw my two cents in on the deliberation as a scholar in intellectual history. Though I empathise with the position that a ceding of ground to the right on the Enlightenment is unwise, I think we must fully understand the left Enlightenment critique before naysaying it. Although the postcolonial argument is certainly the most popular in the academy presently, my own grievance with the Enlightenment differs slightly. Kant’s explanation of the Enlightenment is essentially that with the increase of an individual’s capacity for rational thought came an increase in knowledge, hence a proportionate increase in their capacity to act virtuously and with right reason. In other words, to act in their own best interests. In risk of oversimplifying an immensely complex idea, the Enlightenment project affirmed that when we know better, we do better. Or as Kant put it, ‘People gradually work their way out of barbarism of their own accord if only one does not intentionally contrive to keep them in it.’ The Enlightenment tradition borrowed heavily from the natural law framework — which equally posited that certain principles were inherent in human nature and discoverable through reason. The Enlightenment, following on from the natural law tradition, posits that rational beings are those that act to preserve themselves — anyone who does not act to preserve themselves is hence irrational. This stance is generally dubbed rational egoism: the idea that an action is only rational if it maximises one’s self-interest.
However, people often do act in opposition to their own interests and even, on occasion, against their own self-preservation. Certainly, some of this is simply a misjudging of what is actually in their best interest and preservation — I might, for instance, invest in one company over another, and in doing so, lose a lot of money, simply because I have responded poorly to the information in front of me. But that’s not what I want to focus on. Rather I wish to focus on, to borrow a line from Dostoevsky, the “millions of facts that witness that people well within their ken, that is in full understanding of their real advantages, have left these advantages in the background and have thrown themselves down another path, toward risk”. It seems to me that the Enlightenment, indebted as it is to the natural law tradition, rested on a dubious understanding of human nature — after all, Thomas Hobbes, perhaps one of the most famous natural law theorists, contended that the only rational motive for human action was self-preservation, thereby denying that any other motive was rational. This is, of course, problematic — is all love and compassion for one’s fellow man irrational? Altruism? What about suicide, more specifically euthanasia? Humans are obviously motivated by other things than just selfishness, and these other motives ought not to just be written off as irrational.
After all, it could be very rational not to preserve oneself under certain conditions. If your life has become just constant suffering due to a medical condition which you have no possibility of ever recovering from or being rid of, is it not rational to want that suffering to end? But to give a political example where it could be rational not to preserve oneself, we needn’t look too far. After all, there are people currently going on hunger strike to protest the genocide currently going on in Gaza, and still others are taking up direct action against companies complicit in this genocide, and in so doing, performing a sort of suicide: receiving criminal records, thereby effecting their employability, hence effecting their ability to obtain the necessities of life. Now, we can dispute the efficacy of these measures (how effective are they at bringing about the end of this genocide), but we cannot deny that these people are doing the right thing — they are doing something about a genocide, rather than doing nothing. Sure, an argument could still be made that someone who is, for instance, shutting down an Elbit factory through direct action is still acting as a rational egoist in the sense that they fear what Aime Cesaire and Hannah Arendt both referred to as the boomerang effect. In the 50s, Cesaire and Arendt both identified in their analysis of Nazi Germany the effect of an imperial boomerang — the thesis followed that governments who develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. They argued that the West’s imperialism had come back to bite them in the form of Nazism. Hence, a Palestine Action protestor, for instance, might still be argued as acting in the manner of a rational egoist in trying to prevent genocide. On a long enough timeframe, they could actually be acting in their own self-interest. But in the short term, the argument still holds that these people are acting against their own self-interest by putting their lives and liberty on the line for people thousands of miles away who they have probably never met. If they were to act rationally, that is, according to their own self-preservation, they would not be doing this — not at a time when Pro-Palestinian activists are literally being disappeared.
And all of this is not to mention how the rational egoism of the natural law tradition, and, hence, the Enlightenment, is a core tenet of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism depicts individuals as rational, egoistic actors primarily driven by self-interest, bordering on selfishness. After all, what else is Ayn Rand’s objectivism but rational egoism on steroids? Neoliberalism has, of course, been able to successfully socialise and naturalise this politics of selfishness within the populace at large — capitalist realism has us believing that human beings are naturally selfish creatures, despite all of the resounding evidence to the contrary. We might not naturally be selfless creatures, but that does not necessarily mean we are naturally selfish ones. In fact, it rests on exactly this premise: that given the opportunity, we will, as in Richard Matheson’s short story Button, Button, press the button knowing that someone we don’t know will die, as long as we stand to benefit from their death. The further away the person from our sight, the better. We are all plugged in, to borrow a phrase from Fisher who I know Citarella respects immensely, “the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of sugary gratification on demand” — and perhaps the only way to unplug ourselves is to relinquish our pleasures and our privileges, to deny hedonism, to say no to the cheap thrills and the short-termism, and the preservation of ourselves and our interests. If neoliberalism thrives upon our desire for preservation and for the comfortable life, perhaps the only way to get rid of it is to embrace the death-drive and act contrary to preservation (But alas, I have more to say on this in an upcoming article, and have prattled on too long here).
That being said, rational egoism is a tool — one that has been used by the left before. In fact, Russian socialist philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky argued that rational egoism served as the basis for the socialist development of history. Max Stirner is also perhaps the most famous example of an egoist on the left. But the question is whether this principle, that rationality is only when you act in your own self-interest and preservation, is a kind of rationality that is beneficial to the left — we have certainly be socialised to accept it under neoliberalism and so it creates a sort of argument that people might be prone to accept as reality, but is it actually in our benefit to make people think only in terms of their own interest? I suppose it could be if we can make people realise that what is in the interest of the whole is, more often than not when it comes to leftist politics, in their individual interest also. Citarella and Pan are correct: if we are to win, we must scavenge the Enlightenment for any ideas that we can usefully co-opt for our own purposes, while leaving the bad ones behind.
