CEASE "OBSESSING OVER THE INTERNAL RUMBLINGS OF THE SELF."

Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2004) ("The Enlightenment was a movement in which the striving for truth was more important than its acquisition: its major representatives understood reality as an experiment and sought to foster conditions in which the new might glimmer. They never embraced a self-serving ambiguity: they knew what they supported and knew what they were against. Their assumptions were simple enough: they viewed tyranny, ignorance, and misery as the product of natural rather divine forces; they believed that curing people of their vices begins by curing them of their prejudices; that progress is the enemy of cruelty; and that a fuller life lies more in exploring the rich diversity of the planet than in obsessing over the internal rumblings of the self. That general perspective retains its salience. Enlightenment thinkers assumed that society could be changed and that political engagement was necessary to bring that change about. They spoke for the lowly and the insulted, the exploited and the oppressed, and the constellation of values and attitudes that defined their undertaking are neither irrelevant or passe. They remain with us, they underpin the struggle of every progressive movement, and--perhaps more important of all--they project the type of world that ever decent person wishes to see." Id, at 167. "To be sure, from the beginning, 'progress' was open to perversion. It was capable of being projected back into the past, thereby justifying the exploitation of those considered lower on the evolutionary scale, and it could be identified with an escalator that moves society ever upward. The idea was always in danger of becoming regimented and stripped of it critical character. But it is absurd to doubt the fundamentally liberating vision with which the notion of progress should remain associated." Id. at 23.).