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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
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OK, so the Enlightenment helped define/codify and in a sense promote racism. The point is what do we do now? No one with a serious interest in the Enlightenment (Peterson and Pinker included) are unaware of its problems - although they may not interpret them in quite the way that article does. But the point is they (and I) still prefer it to what the Liberal/Left is currently offering via the zero sum game of Intersectional politics. If rational discourse is essentially a white straight male one then all I can still think is that rational discourse remains the best way of working on that. You won't agree with that because within your discourse that's an impossible contradiction but until something better comes along in terms of actually helping us out of this mess, I'm sticking with it, even if I'm holding my nose while I do. Interesectional Politics appeals to a certain impulse because it .doesn't seek reconciliation as a way forward but rather a multitude of little micro-wars between genders races and sexualities. Enlightenment rationalism may never achieve that reconciliation either but I do believe (counter to the points in that article) that it at least aspires to it, even if only conceptually through the idea of a dialectic. The Enlightment can essentially settle on a 1-1 draw. Interectional Politics needs one group to win which by default means another group has to lose.
We're gonna have to fundamentally agree to disagree on that cos you can always point to problems within the Enlightenment (many of which I'll concede) but I'll still consider it preferable to Intersectional Politics.
Apart from that, I'm sort of more interested in the real world problems of why the Dems have lost political ground, than going into abstract philosophizing that might underpin certain points but ends up a topic on its own.