The Enlightenment contains two central ideas, both of which are worth defending: individual liberty and reason. Out of these emerged a shift from otherworldly fatalism toward this-worldly action to improve the human condition. Both liberalism and rationality are under threat today.
Does this mean the storm clouds are coming from a counter-Enlightenment? Only partly. There are two other principles that, while not central to the Enlightenment, are ancillary to it—egalitarianism and humanitarianism, which I term the Shadow Enlightenment.
Egalitarianism and humanitarianism have strong biblical roots. The Bible includes egalitarian passages such as “the first shall be last and last shall be first” and Isaiah’s command: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” Marx scorned Christian and utopian socialists and liberals as “bourgeois socialists”: “Philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.”1 Friedrich Nietzsche derided Christianity as upholding a “slave morality” of the weak, meant to restrain the noble excellence and might of the heroic supermen that Greco-Roman pagans had exalted.2 The new egalitarian-humanitarianism emerged as the Enlightenment infused and reworked Christianity.
Egalitarian-humanitarian tenets resonate with what Jonathan Haidt dubs the equality of outcome and “care/harm” moral foundations, the moral intuitions of today’s liberal left.3 These ideas did much to advance human progress, but they began to overreach during the twentieth century. Today they threaten to upend the freedom and reason that produced the wonders of modern Western civilization.
The tension between liberty and equality, and between humanitarianism and reason, was present at the beginning. The radical Enlightenment and utopian socialism challenged private property and the family, but mainly in small-scale experimental communes such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana, which subsequently fell apart.4 For mainstream liberal reformers, a common enemy in the form of the ancien regime of elite privilege overshadowed intra-Enlightenment differences. The price of egalitarianism and humanitarianism, paid for by setbacks to liberty and reason, was initially dwarfed by the benefits. Society was extremely unequal and inhumane, as well as illiberal and irrational, and the Enlightenment could advance on all fronts with only modest internal friction.
So began a period of positive returns to scale for Shadow Enlightenment principles.
The Enlightenment endowed equality with concrete institutional form. In the late eighteenth century, egalitarianism focused on civil liberties (political rights), seeking to level hierarchies of birth and status between the aristocracy and the masses.5 This gave rise to the idea of the nation rather than the monarch as the proper bearer of political authority. The aristocracy and clergy lost power, capitalism and wage labor replaced feudalism and serfdom, sumptuary laws were repealed.
Democracy, previously only present at the scale of the city-state, or meant for nobles against the King (as with premodern parliaments), expanded to encompass a much larger population and territory. Equal treatment under the law was a key element of Enlightenment political ideas. In Anglo societies, this was initially extended to Jews and Catholics, later to racial minorities and women. The franchise was limited to property holders but came to encompass all white men, then all men, then women.6 Naturally there were exceptions such as free blacks and non-tribal Native Americans, who got the vote from the beginning—though restrictive laws would later affect blacks in the South. The final decriminalization of homosexuality in the early 2000s in the U.S. and U.K. can be seen as the apogee of egalitarianism’s positive-sum phase, in which egalitarian and humanitarian progress poses little threat to classical liberalism and reason.
These were important gains for humanity.
Along with egalitarianism, humanitarianism in the West is a second biblical idea that the Enlightenment absorbed. There had already been an early modern evolution away from cruel punishments such as torture and witch burnings. Duelling died in the early nineteenth century. The abolitionist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century showed the power of a politicized and purposeful humanitarian approach. What Marx termed “bourgeois” reform movements for the abolition of child labor, as well as in favor of poor relief, animal rights, and world peace gained force in the nineteenth century. Liberal-egalitarianism’s fusion of humanistic elements of Christianity with reason (i.e., questioning the inconsistent application of rights across groups), still contributed to human welfare.7
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Progressive movement sought to apply Christian humanitarian and egalitarian ethics to this-worldly social problems caused by the industrial revolution and urbanization. It sought economic equality and the amelioration of social problems. However, it had little sympathy for immigrants, non-Protestants, and blacks. The Liberal Progressives of the early 1900s overcame these blind spots while imbibing elements from secular pluralists, watering down their Christianity to arrive at a new cosmopolitan humanitarian-egalitarianism.8 Alongside the ecumenical movement in elite mainline Protestantism after 1910, this pushed Anglo intellectual elites in a cosmopolitan-humanitarian direction. In the U.S., the religious training wheels would fall away in the decades to come, symbolized by the cessation of mainline Protestant missionary activity in the name of combatting cultural imperialism.9 The Civil Rights movement from the 1940s to the early 1960s was the last flourishing of this religious-secular humanitarianism. Meanwhile, Fabian socialism and social democracy gave rise to the egalitarian-humanitarian ideas of the welfare state which blossomed with the New Deal in America and the post-1945 European welfare state.
Progressive humanitarianism had possessed a quasi-blind spot on race before the Civil Rights Movement. When awareness of racial inequality hit the Western conscience, it exploded with atomic force. Social norms in polite circles in America were transformed almost overnight.10 Racism became the highest sacred taboo.11 This marked the beginning of the dark phase of the Shadow Enlightenment, when progressive illiberalism imposed costs which increasingly exceeded any humanitarian gains.
The New Left, which drew on counter-Enlightenment notions of romantic anti-rationalism, seized upon the cultural energy of the race taboo, and swiftly embraced destructive anti-whiteness and unreason. This was manifest in the cultural socialism of affirmative action quotas as well as early cancel culture. The left soon forced the right to kowtow to its cultural power. William F. Buckley and neoconservatives took pains to distance the Republican Party from supposedly racist cultural positions such as restricting immigration and abolishing affirmative action. Support for illegal immigration and multiculturalism spun out of control in elite institutions. This laid the seeds of Trumpian reaction.
Beginning in the late 1960s, feminists, gays, and even Northern Irish and Quebec nationalists styled themselves the new negroes, drawing on an identity politics playbook that deployed emotional blackmail instead of principled argument.12 Humanitarianism came to be weaponized by groups identifying as victims on the basis of past mistreatment. The intellectual left, ascendant in the universities, used the past inhumanity of the white male-led order to dehumanize whites, men, and conservatives. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” announced Susan Sontag in 1966, having never previously had anything to say about race.13
Meanwhile, humanitarianism permeated the new psychotherapy of Carl Rogers and his acolytes in the early 1960s. This sought to relegate both Protestant restraint and Freudian mistrust of emotions to the scrapheap of history. Out went self-control, and in came the unquestioning affirmation of hurt feelings. Humanitarianism had struck a therapeutic seam, which by the late 1970s metastasised into the first cult-like confessionals of white privilege. From the 1980s, academics stretched out of all proportion the meaning of terms such as trauma, prejudice, and bullying.14 The minority self-esteem vogue of the 80s and 90s became the emotional safety and microaggressions authoritarianism of the Great Awokening of the 2010s. Resilience was replaced by victimhood culture.
Late stage humanitarianism is responsible for the emotionalism of cancel culture, the neurotic narcissism of the youth mental health crisis, and the anti-white, anti-male, and anti-national animus of the critical race/gender omnicause. The problem with empathy as the basis for morality is that it fixates on particular groups and dehumanizes those who are deemed to be causing them harm. The complexity of the world is reduced to a totalizing binary of good and bad people.15
The concentration on objects of affection obscures the claims of deserving others, as when DEI causes funds to flow to racial minorities and women instead of the disabled, or when making “white privilege” salient reduces empathy for the poor.16 The focus on the global South makes it harder to empathize with national have-nots, to say nothing of the struggling middle. The modern progressive scorns the disorientation felt by less mobile members of white majority groups in the face of mass immigration and ethnic change. Worse, progressive activists’ addiction to moral emotions and guilt produces policies such as affirmative action or land acknowledgments which increase minority dependency, sap agency, and trap historically marginalized groups in a mental prison.
This brings us to what Gad Saad dubs “suicidal empathy,” today’s simple-minded humanitarian extremism.17 Crossed with the egalitarianism of affirmative action quotas and the neo-Marxism of critical race theory, we arrive at the bankrupt progressive terminus that is “woke.” Unfortunately, progressive control of the means of cultural production and transmission means that this cultural socialism steadily tightens its grip on the professions and elite institutions. The net result is political division, cultural stagnation, and wasted potential.
The Shadow Enlightenment of equality and humanitarianism, originally an ancillary part of the Enlightenment idea complex of liberty and reason, has come to consume it. Lies about sex as a spectrum, unarmed black men being targeted by police, Canada’s Native residential schools as genocide, or deportation and incarceration as white nationalism, reveal that for today’s progressive elite, feeling virtuous toward totemic groups is more important than upholding freedom of conscience or Rauch’s truth-based order.18
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and directs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He is the author of several books, including Whiteshift and Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, and writes widely on immigration, populism, and demographic change.
America and the West must elevate the liberal and rational components of the Enlightenment. Doing so requires us to tame its shadow.
1 Karl Marx, K, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York N.Y.: New York Labor News Co., 1948).
2 F.W. Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage, 1989).
3 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2012).
4 B.K. Johnpoll, L. Johnpoll, The Impossible Dream: a Century and a Half of the American Left (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).
5 T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge: CUP, [1950] 1992).
6 Ibid.
7 N. Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).
8 M. Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement 1885-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
9 E. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
10 Paul Krugman, “Unacceptable Prejudices,” New York Times, Aug. 9, 2013.
11 S. Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 497-8; Eric Kaufmann, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan to Roll Back Progressive Extremism (Bombardier, 2024).
12 P. Vallières, White Niggers of America, trans. Joan Pinkham (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971); H. Johnston, New Social Movements and Old Regional Nationalisms “New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity,” E. Laraña, H. Johnston, J. R. Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 1994), 267-287.
13 Robert Carson, Hollis Robbins, “Susan Sontag: Race, Class, and the Limits of Style,” National Interest, November 29, 2019.
14 N. Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 1 (2019): 1-17.
15 P. Bloom, P. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Random House. 2017).
16 E. Cooley, J. Brown-Iannuzzi, “Liberals perceive more racism than conservatives when police shoot Black men—But, reading about White privilege increases perceived racism, and shifts attributions of guilt, regardless of political ideology,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 85 (2019): 103885.
17 Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy (HarperCollins, 2026).
18 Rauch, J. (2021). The constitution of knowledge: A defense of truth, Brookings Institution Press.
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