Today’s followers of Burke still oppose the Enlightenment legacy for the same reason: because it seeks to ameliorate suffering, ignorance, and risk. Most of all, because it values enjoyment. Consider, for example, one of the more prominent conservative enemies of the Enlightenment today, Sorhab Ahmari, who recently wrote in the religious journal First Things that the Enlightenment is responsible for “the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, community solidarity, and much else,” and has led to “the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness.”
Like Burke, Ahmari deploys these euphemisms carefully—after all, to the Burkean, euphemisms are just what politics is all about! Let us rudely tear them away. When Ahmari writes of “permanent truths,” he does not mean the natural rights of mankind, let alone the economic forces of supply and demand or the scientific laws of biology. He means religious dogma, handed down by an established church.
When he speaks of “family stability,” he does not mean harmony attained by respecting and nourishing the value of every family member. He means the subordination of each one to unchosen obligations; the prohibition of the right to marry for large portions of our society; and opposition to the right of unhappy spouses to divorce and to value their own flourishing and happiness along with their family commitments.
When he speaks of “communal solidarity,” he means the right of the community to sacrifice the happiness and freedom of individuals within that community—to censor people; to dictate how they may use their property and what jobs they may take; to tell them what books they may read and what movies they may watch.
And when he denounces “the cult of competitiveness,” he means the right to excel, the right to aspire, the right to pursue happiness and achieve one’s dreams. He is mounting a direct attack on the value of enjoyment. When Ahmari denounces what he calls the “fetishizing of autonomy,” his meaning is unmistakable: individualism—the right of the individual to his or her own life—is his primary target.
Ahmari and his admirers pledge themselves to a society of—in Burke’s words, “submission,” “obedience,” “subordination,” and “servitude.” And they do so while wrapping themselves in the American flag.
This becomes obvious in another First Things article that Ahmari recently praised, in which the author, Archbishop of Los Angeles Jose Gomez, speaks—believe it or not—of “recovering the Hispano-Catholic Founding of America, which . . . enjoyed a much wider geographic sphere and cultural span than did the second, Anglo Founding.”
Now, think about that sentence for a moment. When the author speaks of the “wider geographic sphere” of this so-called “Hispano-Catholic Founding,” he’s referring to the colonization and enslavement of the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores in the 15th and 16th centuries. Have the nations of Central and South America benefitted as much from that founding as we in the United States have from ours? Is the political culture of Catholic Central America as prosperous, safe, and free as ours? The answer, of course is no: The Hispano-Catholic founding was rooted not in peace, freedom, commerce, opportunity, and the enjoyment of human happiness, but in exploitation and subordination of human beings for the alleged glory of God.
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