The Enlightenment's Crusade Against Reason

November 1989 saw one of the greatest moments in the history of the 20th century--the knocking down of the Berlin Wall dividing Germany. With the Wall, the communist tyranny that had ruled Eastern Europe and Russia for 70 years came crashing down. The overturning of communism was caused by the ``dictatorship of the proletariat's'' own economic implosion, and the persistent striving of the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia toward hope and human dignity. As in the democracy movement of Tiananmen Square in Beijing earlier that year, Beethoven's ``Ode to Joy'' rang in the hoped-for era of human freedom.

Yet, in the brief three years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it can be safely said that humanity has let this grand opportunity for the advancement of humanity slip through its fingers. In 1990, the American statesman Lyndon LaRouche, writing from his jail cell in the United States where he has been illegally imprisoned, proposed an infrastructural development program for Central Europe--the ``productive triangle''--to upgrade Europe's industrial productivity as the springboard for rescuing Eastern Europe and Russia from the ruinous effects of communist economic imbecility.

Instead of the LaRouche productive triangle, the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia have been treated to three years of rapacious looting and economic rape by the ``victorious'' forces of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Anglo-American oligarchy. Instead of economic freedom, Eastern Europe and Russia have been forced to submit to unemployment, homelessnesss, criminal mafias, and hunger, all under the banner of ``free enterprise.'' In more than one state, the despair of economic and political chaos has caused the bloody breakup of nations, while the West complacently watches.

Already the anti-Western backlash is gaining momentum.

The reasons for the failure of the 1989 revolution lie not in the greed of Western bankers nor in the physical defenselessness of the East. The root cause is philosophical: the intellectual hegemony of the doctrines of free trade and British liberalism over the continent of Europe and the United States. That domination--otherwise known under the rubric of the Enlightenment--was the cause of another failed revolution--the French Revolution of 1789.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Europe faced the collapse of the feudal system, along with the downfall of the Amsterdam-based financial system of the time--much as the world faces the collapse of the Versailles System today. The American Revolution of 1776 against Great Britain opened a new vista of opportunities for humanity with the creation of a constitutional republic, a republic dedicated to safeguarding for each individual the rights of ``life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.''

But the attempt to bring this revolution back into Europe was shipwrecked in France and the events of the French Revolution. The seizure of the Bastille by the rabble of Paris in 1789 sparked a paroxysm of civil violence and war that finally led through Napoleon to the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the beginnings of the imperial Versailles System and the cultural dark age we know today.

Writing from Germany during the early period of the Revolution, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1804), the great poet of freedom, decried the Jacobin fury seizing France:

``The attempt of the French people to gain possession of the rights of man and to win political freedom has only shown its incapacity and unworthiness, and has swept back along with it a considerable part of Europe into barbarism and serfdom.... In the lower classes we see only lawless instincts which hasten to their bestial satisfaction now that the restraints of society are removed. So it was not moral control, but external coercion, which hitherto held them back. So they were not free men, as they declared, oppressed by the state! When civilization degenerates, it falls lower than barbarism can ever reach, for the latter can only become a beast, while the former lapses into the devil.''

What Is the Enlightenment?
For this tragic turn of events, we have to thank the so-called French Enlightenment which swept France through the span of the eighteeth century. What is ``the Enlightenment?'' The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who, in contrast to Schiller, considered the French Revolution the crowning event of his life, provides an answer:

``Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This tutelage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! Have the courage to use one's own understanding! is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.... If it is only given freedom, enlightenment is inevitable.... We [do] live in an age of Enlightenment. We have some obvious indications that the field of working toward the goal of religious truth is now being opened.''

In point of fact, as we shall demonstrate, the goal of the Enlightenment was not ``religious truth,'' but the severance of man from God.

Its motto was reason, but in the name of challenging what it called the superstition of religion, the Enlightenment acted to destroy science.

In the name of freedom, it established the preconditions for terror and tyranny.

For these achievements, we have principally to thank two people, Francois Arouet--a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Under the tutelage of the British Royal Society, Voltaire took on the first challenge, and Rousseau can definitely be credited for achievement of the second.

The world would have been a far different place if the ideas of the universal mind of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) had won hegemony in eighteenth-century France--as opposed to the oligarchical nihilism of the Enlightenment. The question posed then is the same facing humanity today: What will replace the crumbling ancien regime? Just as the oligarchy fears the ideas of LaRouche today to the point that he has been given a virtual life sentence in jail, so the oligarchy recognized in Leibniz's ideas a threat that could bring about a new renaissance and take humanity forward in building the City of God on earth.

It is no exaggeration to say that the major impulse of the Enlightenment was the mission to expunge Leibniz's work and influence from Europe. The success of these efforts, led by the Aristotelians of the British Royal Society, brought about the result of which Leibniz had feared. In his 1704 answer to John Locke, the New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz warned of the consequences of

``beliefs that go against the providence of a perfectly good, wise, and just God, or against that immortality of souls which lays them open to the operations of justice.... I even find that somewhat similar opinions, by stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and by slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything toward the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened, and are completing the destruction of what still remains in the world of the generous Greeks and Romans who placed love of country and of the public good, and the welfare of future generations before fortune and even before life.''

Read on from HERE
The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship