PUT OUT THE LIGHT, AND THEN PUT OUT THE LIGHT: In case you’re wondering why I beat up on the Enlightenment and its acolytes a lot here, I figured I’d give some links. I welcome criticism on any of these posts. Just figured it would be helpful, both for me and for people who radically disagree with me, to have all this stuff in one place.

Bad epistemology.

And again. (With added theory-of-journalism!)

Stupid theology. (Yes, I know, this is Mark Twain not Descartes, but if you want to argue that he’s not a child of the Enlightenment you go right ahead and use the email link, because I for one think he’s more or less obviously picking up on Enlightenment preconceptions and missed connections.)

Bad ethics, a.k.a. If God didn’t want us to eat babies, why are they made out of meat?

Edmund Burke = Thomas Paine: All cats are gray in the dark. (Although I should note that what I’ve read of Burke’s treatise on the beautiful and the sublime is brilliant, and there are a lot of truly powerful insights in Reflections on the Revolution in France, mostly to do with the fact that all loyalties are ultimately personal, and the ways in which institutions and countries attempt to become “persons” in order to command our loyalties.)

More on tradition as persona. (And scroll down.)

I do requests, so if you want me to explain something (especially one of those tossed-off lines I do all the time), please let me know. I’ll also entertain arguments as to why modern philosophy (= roughly Ockham through, I don’t know, Hegel) is anything other than an Express Train to Nietzsche.

Oh, and because I’m always getting on people’s cases for presenting purely negative cases without offering any alternatives, I should say that one of my big obsessions is re-grounding roughly-liberal politics on a ground more solid than the shifting justifications offered by e.g. Thomas Jefferson. John Paul II has done more to advance that project than anyone else I can think of. Here are a couple of summary posts on JPII encyclicals. There’s still a lot of work to be done; but this pope has shown the way, and we should all thank God for it. (Even though he can’t write, wow, painfully German in his locutions. It’s still worth it.)