Our fatuous world is eroding Enlightenment gains

Pratt on Texas - copyright Pratt on Texas all rights reservedThe fatuous nature of our world can be easily demonstrated by a few minutes worth of headline gazing. This morning I came across these stories: “Nancy Pelosi Is Already Attacking the Legitimacy of the 2020 Election,” “Christine Blasey Ford Accepts the ACLU’s 2019 Courage Award,” “Fake hate crime victim Jussie Smollett reportedly suing the City of Chicago for orchestrating smear campaign against him,” and possibly the most fatuous of all “PETA Sues to Give Pigs German Constitutional Rights.”

What makes these fatuous things dangerous is that each one of those headlines represents authentic political and social action which can affect the freedom and liberty of all.

To be educated is to know these figures and understand the freedom of conscience, as well as physical and political freedom, their overall movement allowed for in human history.

When the fatuous is taken as serious, our society is in peril as it means there is no longer any widely held standard of what passes for rational or reasonable. This means that the gains of the Enlightenment are being eroded, undermined, by social and political movements wishing to create a populace trapped in ignorant superstition of earlier times which made it easier for despots to exercise power.

The Enlightenment was the great intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries which emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition, especially tradition borne of unproven superstition. 17th-century philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton influenced it and its prominent figures included Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith.

Only the stupid, who have read without understanding, could fail to see how fatuous are the roots of many current social and political movements.

To be educated is to know these figures and understand the freedom of conscience, as well as physical and political freedom, their overall movement allowed for in human history. Only the stupid, who have read without understanding, with any type of true education, formal or not, could fail to see how fatuous, how silly and pointless and inanely foolish, are the root of many current social and political movements from so-called animal rights to apocalyptic climate change caused by man’s technological rise.

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