The last time humans circled the moon was in December 1972, when Apollo 17 paid a visit. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walked on the lunar surface. Meanwhile, Ronald Evans spent those days flying overhead and around to the heavily cratered far side. Schmitt, a geologist was the twelfth man to walk there, and one of only six Apollo astronauts still living.
The Artemis II mission has stirred memories of that wonderous time when a few brave men risked everything on ventures of seemingly small practical benefit. The moon had nothing much to offer and the technology to get there and back was incredibly fragile. We did it because? National pride mostly, though people thought up some scientific rationales as well.
The Apollo program’s final swing around the moon did not occasion much comment at the time. Americans had grown accustomed to NASA’s successes. On the terrestrial scene, Nixon had launched Operation Linebacker II, a campaign of intense bombing of North Vietnam, aimed mostly at destroying Hanoi’s industrial base. As it happens, Artemis II also coincided with an intense bombing campaign against a recalcitrant enemy.
At the time of Cernan’s and Schmitt’s stroll in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, and of their drive in the Lunar Roving Vehicle nineteen miles to the South Massif, I was a sophomore in college who had recently drawn a low number in the lottery for the military draft. Nixon had ended deferments for college students and I had been ordered to report for my physical before being inducted into the Army. I reported to the center in Philadelphia, apprehensive about what lay ahead, but on January 27 Nixon officially ended the draft in favor of an all-volunteer military.
I was relieved but also deeply unsettled. I didn’t oppose the war itself, which I judged to be legitimate, but I did not want to fight in it. I was resigned to go anyway, when suddenly I was back to being a college student with no real plans for what to do next. I splashed down in the sea of uncertainty.
Blast Off
The U.S. Space program is surely one of the children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. How exactly that genealogy is to be traced, however, is another matter. The scientific revolution provides the clearest thread, but it wasn’t science alone that fueled the rockets. It was national character, collective ambition, prosperity, a form of governance that fostered innovation, and an optimism about humanity taking charge of its destiny.
All of those elements are now under a shadow, the latest version of which is exemplified in J.C.D. Clark’s new book The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History. In shortest compass, Clark says there never was an Enlightenment. The word is just a label pasted on a variety of contradictory ideas that gained currency during the century that brought us both the American and French Revolutions.
NAS, which regards itself as among the heirs of the Enlightenment, took Clark’s book as an opportunity to reconsider the issue. Clark is not alone in throwing rocks at that window onto our past. His de-essentializing the idea isn’t the only missile. Other contemporary scholars, for example, say the Enlightenment, though real, was a cultural catastrophe in which humans falsely imagined themselves wiser than God, and well-established forms of government were overthrown in favor of experiments that have disordered our souls.
I asked David Randall, NAS’s Director of Research and himself a European historian, to assemble a symposium on that matter. This issue of Academic Questions presents essays by seven scholars who offer their own well-formed views of how Enlightenment “reason” did or did not elevate our civilization.
Un-Locking the Enlightenment
Jonathan Clark’s indictment of the whole idea of the Enlightenment is founded on the observation that the people we usually think of as key Enlightenment thinkers—Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Franklin, Montesquieu, Kant, Diderot, Adam Smith, Hume, von Herder, Wollstonecraft, Voltaire, Paine, Captain Cook, Alexander von Humboldt, among many others—did not recognize themselves as part of a unified movement and didn’t even own the term “Enlightenment” to describe their common project. We owe the popularization of the word to Kant’s 1784 essay, “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” where the absence of the definite article suggests that enlightenment is an abstract noun, like ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth,’ not a social or intellectual movement.
But Kant’s answer to the question he posed did push readers to recognize something larger than individual breakthroughs. Enlightenment, he wrote, was humanity’s “growth to intellectual maturity.”
That’s heady praise and it is easy to see why scientists, statesmen, and philosophers would have welcomed induction into the new club. Of course, not everyone wanted to join. A figure who has been conspicuously left out is the dictionary-maker and critic Samuel Johnson, who for his enormous labors, has often been held up as the embodiment of “anti-Enlightenment thought.” That’s something to bear in mind: the preeminent man of eighteenth century English letters is written out of the movement that we usually think of as defining his age. His exile is due to his lifelong devotion to the English church, his Tory politics, and his conservative morality. Knowing where the edges lie helps us see the Enlightenment itself more clearly.
In the first of seven essays responding to Clark’s provocation, Paul Rahe turns to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, where Jean Le Rond d’Alembert anoints four “great men” who led the world to “secure illumination.” These are Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Descartes (15961650), Newton (1643-1727), and Locke (1632-1704), the first two of whom lived well before the period customarily called the Enlightenment, but can rightly be credited for advancing the “new science” of empirical inquiry and rigorous reasoning. In his essay, Paul Rahe finds that the restoration of Bacon to the narrative is crucial and that Bacon’s absence from Clark’s account is one of the reasons that it fails.
An introduction to the volume cannot claim the privilege of delving into the other six essays in the symposium, but this is perhaps enough to indicate the richness of the collection. AQ is honored to present the other essays by Yuval Levin, Elizabeth Weiss, Eric Kaufmann, Nathan Pinkoski, and Madeleine Armstrong who pick up disparate threads of the topic and show us that Kant’s question remains fruitful.
Unbooked and Still Scandalized
It is heartening that Americans still see a benefit in circling the moon. Some of our sublunary endeavors, however, are in perilous shape. In this issue, Karl Stephens reflects on the rapid decline of libraries as they embrace the transition to digital holdings. A crucial function of libraries from ancient times until now has been the physical preservation of records. Limitations of space have long forced libraries to discard some materials, but that often reluctantly executed duty has now become a wholesale rush to whisker-clean empty shelves. The convenience of AI-assisted recall and the illusion that we can have all knowledge at our fingertips poses, as Stephens puts it a “library apocalypse.”
I’m among those who cling to my printed books, and I half suspect that in some instances my shelves contain copies that a century from now will be rare and precious artifacts. The moon may offer the proper conditions to preserve them from immolation at the hands of tomorrow’s librarians, but how will I get them to the Taurus-Littrow Valley?
This issue features not one but two articles on the sad state of social work education, by Arnoldo Cantú and Nathan Gallo. In 2007 NAS published The Scandal of Social Work Education, a research report that documented missteps by university schools of social work, their main accreditor, and the National Association of Social Workers. Our call for reform went unheeded, but the report itself didn’t go unread. Almost twenty years later, it continues to inspire new attempts to reform this field, and Academic Questions has become one of the main platforms for the critics. We are gratified.
Morningside Craters
In another article, Alexander Riley calmly reaches for the third rail of genetics research: the absolute ban on inquiry into how population-level genetic differences may bear on human performance. Everyone knows that merely mentioning the topic elicits cries of racism, and those cries alone are enough to ruin careers. But everyone also knows that the genetic differences are real and meaningful. Riley walks intrepidly into the valley of death and we editors at AQ stand by his freedom to do so.
In the same spirit of violating the taboos that silence many scholars, we present William Gawthrop’s essay on the intimate connections between some religious doctrines and terrorism. That such connections exist should surprise no literate person, yet in many of our universities they are consigned to a deep crater of self-selected ignorance.
George F.A.W. St. Claire, whose name successfully competes with the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for alphabetical real estate, offers an essay that asks whether Western universities are on solid grounds in admitting students who are determined to erase Western civilization. We share his doubts and apprehensions, but we recognize that to exclude such students might be a death knell for some departments. Mahmood Mamdani, the father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University. His academic career can be fairly characterized as devoted to the destruction of the West. Where would he be if all the international students attracted to his wise counsel were forbidden to scale Morningside Heights?
Nightingales
Wight Martindale, Jr. takes up the vexing problem of the precipitous decline in reading among students. The causes of the decline are several, not least of which is the dominance of social media, but that malady is amplified by the failure of schools to promote the kinds of books that would capture the imaginations of the young. Martindale has some retrograde recommendations which we wholeheartedly endorse.
New York City’s socialist mayor makes a direct appearance in Edward Shapiro’s essay on the death (by academic strangulation) of American exceptionalism. Is this what lies ahead for the whole country, or for that half of the country that as Keats once put it, is “half in love with easeful Death.” The nightingale of socialism always flies at dusk.
We present a conversation between two economists, Adam Dixon and Daniel Klein, on what that great Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith might have made of hate-crime legislation and university rules on hate-speech. This is based on a podcast, which is a departure for AQ. Almost everything in these pages was created for the written page, but at the apogee of our orbit around the moon, we have made an exception. Don’t hate us.
This doesn’t exhaust the issue. We have a review essay by Dan Asia concerning two books on the classic Enlightenment themes of the existence of God and the immaterial nature of human consciousness.
The Perils of Reentry
George Fendt takes up the recent controversy at Texas A&M in which a philosophy professor used “malicious compliance” to undermine a state rule against teaching “gender ideology.” Malicious compliance is a form of strict construction aimed at showing that obeying the law produces an absurdity, in this case banning the teaching of Plato from a philosophy class.
Walter Block takes up the perennial issue of the exclusion of conservatives and libertarians from college faculty. We don’t need to rediscover this point in every issue of AQ, but a brief reminder doesn’t hurt. Carthago delenda est.
This issue includes an edited version of a talk given by Elizabeth Weiss at a conference in Israel, “Navigating Campus Freedom of Expression in Polarized and Turbulent Times.” Weiss takes up the chokehold that indigenous activists have gained over anthropological inquiry.
We have some book reviews that deserve special attention including Roger Pielke’s take on Science Under Siege, by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez. Mann (he of the hockey stick) and Hotez (champion of Covid hysteria) explain how to fight the “five most powerful forces that threaten our world.” They are supporters of true science, and their book sports endorsements from such authorities as Bill Nye, Chelsea Clinton, and Bill McKibben.
We also have a review by AQ editor Seth Forman of Laura Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Field is best known for her essays on “conspiracism,” which is her all-encompassing term for ideas she disagrees with. The book is a little off-topic for us, but she names NAS and me personally, and launches ad hominin attacks on various friends, which made it fair game. But by Seth’s account, Field also develops a typology of contemporary conservative thinkers whom she assigns to three main categories: Claremonters, Postliberals, and National Conservatives, with a left-over bin she calls the “Hard Right Underbelly.”
Perhaps that is useful, but I for one haven’t signed up for any of these groups, though I have good friends in every box and in several others Field overlooks, including old-fashioned liberals and progressives. The key to circling the moon is to stay open to whatever you find along the way.
In the wake of Nixon’s ending the draft, I wandered into my first anthropology course. Something stuck. I could make a career of being unsettled, so long as I was willing to work hard at it.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and editor-in-chief of Academic Questions.
Photo by Muhammad Nishfu on Unsplash