From Jonah Goldberg’s Newsletter:
“Karl Marx is simply the most famous of the first—but not the last—generation of experts and intellectuals who believed they now had the tools to do the things they thought God would do if He existed or actually cared about the organic mass of humanity called “society.””
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This is accurate – but also interesting, because it makes a clear connection between the role of theology in driving the Enlightenment Autonomy Project the direction it went in.
In the context of his newsletter, Goldberg is talking especially about the advent of statistics in the midst of the industrial revolution and how that seemed to give us a view to the true inner workings of societies.
For many in the Enlightenment Autonomy Project, humans were inextricably bound up with some notion of God. This ought to be obvious when we consider that Marx is commonly considered to be an inversion of Hegel, and this was (from what I can tell) Hegel’s explicit thesis about God and humanity.
That is, Hegel seemed to think that human nation states reflected the Will of God (I’ll lazily refrain from trying to use Hegel’s terms), and that the most powerful ones reflected it the most.
This is probably a poor summary of Hegel, but I’m writing this on the fly, and the overall point holds, and will be obnoxiously repeated:
The Enlightenment Autonomy Project is tied up in theology – though today we are generally ignorant of this and its implications.
I try to draw attention to these periodically in this blog, but this post is not intended to do much more than draw attention to the fact.
Perilous Resonance 