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Of all the articles I have written, both over the course of 2019 and my entire career as a writer, only one has caused me nothing but anger while typing. That article was Yoram Hazony And The Case Of Nonsensical Nationalism for this very website.
Well, Hazony and his friend Dennis Prager have teamed up to take on the Enlightenment. And this video rekindled the anger I felt when I saw Hazony at Ben Shapiro’s Sunday Special the same day I wrote against him.
I should note I have nothing against Dennis Prager or PragerU. In fact, just this month, they made a great video on Christmas that I will make time to watch every year. Even their history videos, often mocked by the left as biased, tend to be quite a good place for research to start, albeit not a good place for it to end.
I mention this because it seems Yoram should watch a few more PragerU videos himself. For instance, Yoram lists the Napoleonic Wars as an example of the evils of the Enlightenment. Yeah, his complaints were debunked last week by Andrew Roberts! Most notably, how “Napoleon didn’t start any of these wars.”
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with hosting an outlet where presenters are giving off different opinions. The issue isn’t that Roberts and Hazony disagree on Napoleon. However, if Scott Howard and I were to go on this website and, in the same week, give off very different facts about an issue like Operation Desert Storm (I mention that because, as covered last time, Yoram doesn’t understand that either), that would raise some eyebrows.
The Napoleon example illustrates quite possibly the largest issue with this video, Yoram has no idea what the Enlightenment was. Yoram says Enlightenment “idolizers,” thank it for “Modern science, medicine, political freedom, [and] the market economy.” While it is true many thank it for the third and fourth items, no one–not even Steven Pinker–thanks it for the first two.
Those are a result of the Scientific Revolution, which started during the Renaissance, usually dated by historians as starting in 1543. The Enlightenment was born out of the Scientific Revolution. It was born out of people like Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Isaac Newton, who felt the best way to understand the world was through testing a hypothesis (also known as The Scientific Method) instead of using logical reasoning–what scientists had done beforehand.
Yoram also insults lovers of the era by saying they consider it “the result of a sort of miracle that took place 250 years ago.” However, since Yoram considers The Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment to be the same, I should note that means it started 476 years ago!
In fact, of all the examples Yoram gives of non-enlightenment advancements, only one–the English Jurist John Fortescue–happened any notable amount of time before the Scientific Revolution. Even then, by the time Fortescue was giving his theories, the Renaissance was already starting!
What bothers me the most about this video is not even that Yoram attacks the Enlightenment, but that he lies about doing just that. His video only lists three philosophers by name: Immanuel Kant, Jean Rousseau, and Karl Marx (unless you want to count Napoleon as a philosopher, in which case be my guest).
However, Marx only came about rather late in the era, all things considered. His most well-known work, The Communist Manifesto, was published in 1848, and Das Kapital not until the tail end of the 19th century, with the publication of the first volume only occurring during Marx’s lifetime. Yet, I have yet to meet a single person who would date the Enlightenment any later than 1870.
Here’s how Yoram describes the theories of Kant:
“His extraordinarily dogmatic philosophy insisted that there can be only one correct answer to every question in science, morality, and politics. And that to reach the one correct answer, mankind had to free itself from the chains of the past—that is, from history, tradition and experience.”
I should note I find it funny (okay, more like infuriating) when a man who wrote an entire book about the importance of religion in Israeli culture dares to insult anything as “dogmatic.” I guess we’ll put the meaning of the word “Dogma,” as yet another thing Hazony does not understand.
Also, he doesn’t explain Kant’s idea according to what it actually means in philosophy today–forming a first principle, probably because that sounds a lot less scary.
However, I should also note that Kant took an unpopular view among philosophers in that era. Hey, you notice how I haven’t mentioned either Thomas Hobbes or John Locke yet? That’s not an accident. Yoram never mentions either of those people over the course of his video despite them being the two most important thinkers of that era (where does he think “Life,” and “liberty,” in the Declaration of Independence came from?) who based both their ideologies on what they saw growing up under a revolution! Yet experience didn’t matter to them?
I should also note he blames Kant for the “scientific race theories of the Nazis,” despite the Nazis being as far from Kant as you could get. Hitler was obsessed with the lessons of history, tradition, and experience–as all three played a major part in forming the anti-Semitic theories Hitler used to rise to power. Does Yoram not know of the history of antisemitism in Europe? Or that the Jewish were used as a scapegoat for Germany’s defeat in World War One? If so, he is quite possibly the most historically illiterate man to open his mouth on the subject of Hitler–even more so than David Irving.
Hazony ends by talking about some critics of the Enlightenment. The only notable part of this is how he lists Adam Smith as a critic of human reason. But Smith believed humans were reasonable enough by themselves to make choices that were best for them. This was the basis for the Invisible Hand–a nice little summary of what Adam Smith believed the market was.
However, all ideologies must believe in some amount of human reason. Under a democracy, people must be reasonable enough to vote for leaders, and there must be enough reasonable people to lead. Under a monarchy or dictatorship, there must be one person reasonable enough to lead the masses. Any ideology that is not both Anarchist and Theocratic must believe at least some humans are reasonable by themselves.
This is where some will say that Yoram is talking about “abstract reason,” as were Selden, Hume, Smith, and Burke. However, this falls apart by asking a basic question: according to Yoram, people should “stick close to custom,” but who came up with those customs?
Modern philosophy started in the Middle Ages as people were trying to figure out why monarchy and feudalism were justified. They wrote those reasons down, and some people read them and criticized them. However, someone had to be a monarch or a feudal lord before people could even consider justifying it. At some point, long ago, abstract reasoning was applied–albeit so long ago many people could not use similar reasoning now.
I simply ask, is there anyone more dishonest than Yoram Hazony?
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Ephrom Josine is a libertarian political blogger/commentator, and a frequent contributor to The Liberty Hawk. In 2019, he published his first book Ramblings Of A Mad Man: Life As An Anarchist. You can find him on Twitter @EphromJosine1, writing near-daily on Medium @ephromjosine or weekly on Freedom First Blog.
Editor’s Note: I have to agree that the way Yoram Hazony derides Kant as dogmatic is striking and somewhat inconsistent with the meaning of the word. If Kant’s ideas truly amount to believing we must free ourselves from “the chains of the past…from history, tradition and experience,” then Kant would appear to be advocating for the exact opposite of dogma. And, it would appear that Hazony is being the dogmatic one by mocking Kant’s pragmatism. –Justin