L'Esprit des Lumières

Promising to "defend the spirit of the Enlightenment", from the Turkish French-language newspaper TRT.

I am feeling pretty good about the outcome of the présidentielle in France, though obviously not as thrilled as the Bothsides Twins, who were beside themselves, or at least beside each other, which is virtually the same thing:

@ron_fournier Exactly. It is time America did this. Now.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) May 7, 2017

Right now, Ron! This minute!

The Fool on Prof. Hill

Anonymous image from The Abraham Lincoln Blog.

David F. Brooks dropped his humility lectures at Yale a while back when he unexpectedly learned he wasn't very interested in humility, but he continues on the part-time celebrity faculty as a participant in Yale's Grand Strategy seminar, in the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at the John W. and Susan G. Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He's not involved in the fall semester, when they study contemporary issues, but in spring he helps actual political scientist Bryan Garsten out with Machiavelli in week 4, early February, and actual historian John Lewis Gaddis with Lincoln in week 8 in March.

That's two classes per year (each presented twice, because Yale has too many young members of the "next generation of leaders" to fit into the classroom) to which he offers what exactly? Punctuating the solemnity of his partners' lectures the way he does the PBS broadcasts with self-deprecatory wisecracks and expressions of pious alarm? He can't presumably use the joke about "I only teach at schools I couldn't get into" more than once a year.

He also sits in on somebody else's classes once in a while, to expand his perspective, as we learn from "The Enlightenment Project" in today's Times:

Spiritual wut?

La Sainte-Cène du Patriarche, Jean Huber, 1772-73. Image via German Wikipedia. I think Diderot is the wigless man in black seated at right; Voltaire, in the red cap, the Patriarche of the title and the host of the gathering at his exile home in Ferney, is waving for attention, about to make a quip. 

This nation was not founded on political principles - this nation was founded on spiritual principles. https://t.co/CoKDlQOGYn #PFF15

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 21, 2015

Just the same old shit, obviously, that according to the Declaration of Independence all men are

endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights

which means that they're spiritual rights, not political rights, since the Lord laid them on us without even asking which ones we wanted, though it seems to me like a questionable reading in the first place; I mean honestly what is spiritual about "liberty" or "the pursuit of happiness"? If you believe in a kind of personal Creator, who endowed you with a nose, does that mean your nose is a spiritual rather than physiological property? If it's thanks to the Deity that we have a propensity to argue about politics, does that mean political discussion itself is spiritual rather than political?

I may actually have something new to say on this subject (I'm going to sketch an argument that Jefferson's formulation of natural rights owes less than commonly understood to the good Protestant Locke and much more to the atheist Diderot), but I want to work toward it backwards, starting on the more familiar territory of what Jefferson, as opposed to the Declaration, said.