Bad Ideas Have Bad Consequences, by Joseph Pearce

The Enlightenment’s misreading of man and history has led to a reductionist understanding of human society. This, in turn, has led to the reduction of the human person to that of being a mere subject, or dare we say, guinea pig. The consequences of such a bad idea are clear enough. It leads and has led already to the crushing of humans in the name of humanity.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. Take, for instance, the Enlightenment, otherwise known as the Age of Reason, which can be judged by the superciliousness of its definition of itself. In claiming to be the “enlightenment”, it was claiming ipso facto that the world was living in darkness until its “enlightened” perspective arrived; in calling itself the “age of reason”, it was dismissing the whole heritage of humanity as being lacking in reason until the arrival of the “rational age”. In this light, or darkness, we can see that the so-called Enlightenment was a progenitor of today’s cancel culture which sees the past as inherently inferior to the present. ….