In a notably forthright reaction to US President Donald Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland, the Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk called on the inhabitants of the Arctic land, a constituent of the Danish kingdom and a neighbour of her native Iceland, to “declare independence”, adding that the idea that Greenland “might go from one cruel coloniser to another is too brutal to even imagine”.
It was to underline, for European leaders subjected to the outrageous imperialist drive of the world’s most powerful country, the contradictions of the Old World which, despite the traumatisms of territorial conquests and two world wars, continues to regard itself as the matrix of universal values capable of freeing peoples from their chains.
It also helps in overcoming the stupefaction at the tipping point now being imposed by the neo-fascist forces presiding over the destiny of the planet. From Trump’s United States to Putin’s Russia and Modi’s India, they challenge the multilateralism that was constructed after 1945 in an effort to guarantee that history would not repeat itself.
They openly flout international law, the principles of which, inscribed at the heart of the United Nations, are supposed to establish an equality of peoples’ rights, the right of peoples to self-determination, the prohibition of threats or the use of force against sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the political independence of states. The current victims of this disregard of international law are the Palestinians, the Ukrainians and the Venezuelans.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In a coherent manner, the US administration doesn’t limit itself to only upsetting the world order of the past 80 years. One of the most influential doctrines of the White House targets the values handed down by European thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, those who, by promoting the notion of equal rights, popular sovereignty, and individual freedom, opened the path to some of the most significant democratic revolutions in world history.
This new White House doctrine was dubbed “the Dark Enlightenment” during its emergence in the 2010s. Its theorists, beginning with Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, who enrolled in their wake figures from the digital economy, like Peter Thiel, and from the political sphere, like US vice-president JD Vance, promote openly anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic and anti-humanist positions.
Arguing for a return of ‘traditional values’, they believe that, as Land writes in The Dark Enlightenement, societies prosper when “they accept their natural hierarchies”. Opponents of elections, they promote strong and centralised forms of government which, according to them, are necessary not only to prevent the collapse of capitalism but above all to guarantee its reinforcement, to the benefit of a white, secessionist elite.
In response to the limitation of resources, they call for accelerationism, which advocates unconditionally for the development of technocapitalism. Against the ‘masses’, women, and racial and gender minorities, regarded as obstacles on the road of ‘material progress’, they aim for a ‘bionic horizon’ that is materialized by the creation of a new species, born out of a fusion between humans and machines.
The only concept they share with those of the Enlightenment, which they otherwise dismiss, is the belief in technical progress, but theirs is in the form of that which today has resulted in the dominance of algorithms imposed by the tech giants. Whereas a parallel can be drawn between the Encyclopédie, the conveyor of knowledge, and the internet, which has failed its early promise of the equal sharing of learning, this meeting point between emancipating thought and its retrograde contrary deserves further study.
More generally, to counter the movement of “Dark Enlightenment” (the subject of a book published this month in France by Arnaud Miranda, a political scientist specialised in the history of political theory), it is indispensable to look back at those ill-thought-out aspects of the Enlightenment, an intellectual revolution which, as of the 17th century and despite its utopian aspirations, led to the worst (and well before the Trump era).
The ambivalence of a utopia
In the opening lines to his 1784 essay Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined it as: “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” – that is the motto of enlightenment.”*
Reason is initially placed at the service of improving the human condition. But what happens to this when it serves other ends? The disaster of the two world wars in the 20th century gave rise to a fundamental question: how could those societies which were formed by the Enlightenment then beget fascism?
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin gave his own answer to that question in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, written in 1940, the year of his death by suicide, when he evoked the Angelus Novus, a monoprint drawn in ink and charcoal by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, and which he acquired in 1921. Benjamin wrote that the picture “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.”
He continues: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in their 1944 work Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published in English in 1947), exploring what they saw as the failures of the Enlightenment, observed: “Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them.”
They believed that, seeking to eradicate faiths and myths, as in fighting obscurantism, the Enlightenment made science the new god. Diverted from its mission, for example applied to industrial processes or mass communication, technical progress could be turned into a tool for controlling, for domination and oppression. Instead of its intended use for sharing power, in opposition to arbitrariness, it could be used to destroy human rights and become an instrument of totalitarianism, to the detriment of citizens.
More recently, amid the climate crisis, environmentalist movements also question the inherent risks of the ‘race for progress’. Activists adopted the slogan ‘No infinite growth on a finite planet’ after the publication in 1972 of the report The Limits to Growth, the result of a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Using computer simulation, they predicted that industrial and agricultural growth, in parallel to an expanding world population, was ultimately leading to the exhaustion of the finite natural resources of the Earth.
By confusing scientific ambition with technical strength, modernity threatened to destroy the planet.
Whereas some philosophers of the 18th century supported colonialism and slavery in the name of a ‘civilising’ mission, others denounced them both in the name of equality of rights, while also dismissing European pretensions of being a model of society. In his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, published in 2000, the Indian historian and specialist in postcolonial theory, Dipesh Chakrabarty – following in the wake of the Martiniquais poet and author Aimé Césaire – challenges Europe’s self-important vision of its role in the production of knowledge, and attacks the use of the notion of universalism as a tool for domination.
Applied to the issues of the exclusion of women, these dialectics have been taken up by a number of feminists, including the French sociologist and theorist Christine Delphy in her 2010 book Un universalisme si particulier. Féminisme et exception française.
Renewing with the notion of the universal
From ecocidal accelerationism to masculinism and to the return of imperialism, it is striking to observe how the theorists of the “Dark Enlightenment” today exploit some of the problematics of the historic Enlightenment for the benefit of authoritarian powers, and against their intrinsic promise of equality.
To counter this deadly movement, it is urgent that emancipating values are reaffirmed, from the universal equality of consciences, the autonomy of individuals, and emancipation through knowledge. These emancipating values are the only ones that allow peoples to confront political chaos, economic and social inequalities, and climate disruption.
In his inaugural lesson at the prestigious research and higher education institute, the Collège de France, historian Antoine Lilti, after having underlined the diversity and longevity of the polymorphous movement, a “space of debates and controversy”, proposed that the Enlightenment be “brought up to date”, so that we can collectively inspire ourselves from it. This entails placing “science and progress at the service of ecological preservation and a common world”, which he said could be summed up as “at the service of a renewed universal”.
Lilti called for the Enlightenment to be “pluralised” and, using the phrase of Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, to “inscribe the pluralism of the world onto a common horizon”. To prevent authoritarianism, he underlined the plasticity of a thinking that has, at its heart, recognition of its own limits and a self-critical approach.
At a time when algorithms spread fake news, and when science turns against itself, Lilti called for a reinterpretation of the heritage of the Enlightenment, in the sense of a “patient search for the truth, which is not a naïve and soothing moral but, rather, a survival kit to avoid despair of ‘the human’ under the reign of Terror, and to never give up on the modern promise of emancipation”. In its opposition to imperialism, Lilti insisted on its capacity to spread across the globe, and how it belongs, through hybridization, to a “worldwide intellectual heritage”. While it has been passed on through situations of violent domination, this thinking has at the same time provided the resources to denounce and overcome such domination, as the Indian political scientist and anthropologist Partha Chatterjee observed in his 1997 book of essays, Our Modernity.
French philosopher Corine Pelluchon also proposes a reinvention of the Enlightenment, arguing that it is the recognition of how its ideas have been misused that is the condition by which its promise of individual and collective emancipation can be realised. Refusing “instrumental rationalism” which leads to “separating civilisation and nature”, she calls, in her 2021 book Les Lumières à l’âge du vivant, for “the construction of a democratic and ecological society”.
The betrayal by the West
Rather than to jettison the Enlightenment, it is its geopolitical interpretation that needs to be detached. The West, dominated by the US since the Second World War – and all the more so since the fall of the Berlin Wall – displays only the failings of hegemonic arrogance towards the rest of the world along with an absence of solidarity among its members. Successive betrayals of its principles have led to it losing all substance and credibility. European leaders are beginning to admit that the saviour who landed on the Normandy coast in 1944 is no longer an ally.
The “Western hemisphere”, as designated by the ideologues of the White House who arbitrarily include South America as part of it, only exists by their desire to vassalize it by exploiting its riches, as witnessed with the recent US focus on Greenland and, prior to that, Venezuela.
To avoid an explosion of war, it is essential that France, along with all the member countries of the European Union, put an end to denial and servility, and reach an economic and military autonomy.
In opposition to this US “Dark Enlightenment”, European governments have no choice other than to unite their forces to defend, without cowardice nor double standards, international law and multilateralism, which is indispensable for the guarantee of enduring peace. The gravity of the situation calls for the building of an independent defence framework at a European level, in an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian logic.
It also necessitates finding partners in the Global South, in a process of creating new alliances based on cooperation and solidarity, in a more equitable ecosystem, one that has greater concern for the existence of peoples and the Earth.
We are a long way off that. The European continent is paying dearly for 80 years of dependency upon Washington for its economic and defence interests, and has only very recently sought to partially reduce that. It is also paying a hard price for its strategy, in vain, of appeasing a presiding thug. But the current collapse of the world order offers Europe a hitherto unhoped-for opportunity to unhitch itself from its past alignment.
It is yet to be seen whether, to quote from Kant in his definition of the Enlightenment, European leaders have the political “courage” to emerge from “immaturity”.
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*Translated from the original German by Ted Humphrey for Hackett Publishing, 1992.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.