A New Enlightenment?

This blog has been silent for quite a while, but the article from NPR, What the World Needs Now is a New Enlightenment, has gotten me fired up enough to write a response.

First, Gleiser's assessment of the goal of Enlightenment philosophers strikes me as a little off. At least I doubt they conceived of it in terms of multinationalism in the way he suggests. Their goal was to promote the use of human reason above other forms of conceptualizing the world, and they assumed that the capacity for human reason was universal. While I agree that the capacity for reason is universal, this assumption carried with it the assumption that Western ideas of reason were the only valid ones, an assumption I would strongly contest.

            Furthermore, I take issue with "the need to create a global civilization with shared moral values". No doubt, by "shared moral values," Gleiser means liberal Western values. Ostensibly, of course, part of this value system is an emphasis on diversity, but if this value system is to trump all others, then it ultimately collapses in on itself in a rubble of hypocrisy. Better to celebrate and allow ourselves to be challenged by the ways in which the moral systems of other cultures conflict with our own. That, I think, will lead to a more healthy understanding of diversity.

            Finally, in celebrating the importance of the Enlightenment and how it was "far removed from traditional religious precepts", he declares that we need a new one based on "humancentrism", summed up by one of his closing statements, "We matter because we are rare." Does not this ironically echo the attestations of those same "traditional religious precepts" that Earth and humanity must be at the center of the universe because man is the peak of God's creation?