Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

Contradictions of the Enlightenment.

People studying how enlightenment philosophy actually developed might be surprised to learn that, at a stage after the people who are classically associated with it, like John Locke, what fueled some of it was an intentional embrace of immorality as a good thing.

I'm not making this up.

It's disturbing, but nonetheless a fact.

If you look at the works of the third earl of Shaftesbury, for instance, what he's saying in his book "Characeristicks, opinions, and manners of men" is that if people want to break the law, moral and otherwise, they should go right ahead because in the end it'll contribute to a better society.

This is a major flaw, I think, with Enlightenment Classicism, namely that in the absence of an alternative morality or alternative understanding of morality they jettison everything.

The Fable of the Bees, as well as the proto-capitalist philosophers, reinforced this.

Their idea was that, in reality, people really aren't moral and yet society still survives, therefore, legitamizing immorality isn't a bad thing.

What they miss is what other people have done in terms of redefinition of values. To redefine something, to redefine and to liberalize morality is not the same thing as being against the idea of morality to begin with.

But at its start capitalism was fueled by ideologies which jettisoned all of morality and said that the resulting world was both better and more true to life.

The Marquis de Sade may not have been too out of the mainstream after all, since he shared similar ideas.

All of this might have fueled the initial rejection of capitalism of the importance of what some may call 'traditional values', in reality things like thinking that it's good to be moral, not real 'traditional values', which has been with us ever since.

The economy has been disconnected from the rest of the world, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, and that disconnect has been fueled by a rejection of morality and of any influence from the human culture which could restrain and provide a different path.