There is a common factor behind the America's right-wing assaults on teaching evolution, access to contraception or abortion, civil equality for gays, feminism, drug legalization, divorce, and so forth: opposition to modernity. America's right-wing, especially the Christian Right, is seeking to undermine the modern developments begun during the Enlightenment.

In America Right Or Wrong: An Anatomy Of American Nationalism, Anatol Lieven quotes Daniel Bell in 1963:

What the right wing is fighting, in the shadow of Communism, is essentially “modernity” — that complex of beliefs that might be defined most simply as the belief in rational assessment, rather than established custom, for the evaluation of social change — and what it seeks to defend is its fading dominance, exercised once through the institution of small-town America, over the control of social change. But it is precisely those established ways that a modernist America has been forced to call into question.

Many people think of “the Enlightenment” as a single event or at least a single era where things changed for the better and then stayed that way. It would be more accurate to think of the Enlightenment as simply the beginning of important changes — during the Enlightenment, the philosophical basis for radical change was created, but most of the implications of Enlightenment philosophy were never enacted because people simply weren’t ready.

Consider, as a relevant example, the American Constitution and the creation of the American political system. It was obviously a radical break from the past because it was founded on the principle that the people are sovereign and that the government derives its authority from the people, not from gods or traditions. The American Constitution took seriously some of the most basic philosophical principles of the Enlightenment — but it didn’t fully implement them all. Remember, neither women nor blacks had the right to vote. Constitutional liberties also weren’t extended to state actions, thus the states were able to infringe on free speech, religious liberty, etc.

Slowly, that has been changing — as people become accustomed to one level of liberty they become more ready to accept the extension of those liberties to other areas and other people. Slaves were freed, though it required force to do it. Women and racial minorities acquired the right to vote. Segregation was ended. Church and state have been better separated. Freedom of speech has been expanded. All of these developments are directly connected to the philosophical writings of some of the earliest and most important writers of the Enlightenment, but it’s taken a long time for their ideas to find political expression.

Even today, though, some still reject the Enlightenment principles behind the Constitution — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, believes that the government derives its authority from God, not from the consent of the people. The Enlightenment still hasn’t fully reached him yet.

Conservatives defend earlier expressions of Enlightenment principles — the extension of some liberties to some groups, but not all the same liberties on an equal basis to all groups. Conservatives are, by definition, seeking to “conserve” traditional institutions, power structures and ways of doing things. Too often, they ignore how earlier forms of conservatism defended what they would now recognize as indefensible and thus fail to make the connection between earlier conservatism and their own.

The problem in America isn’t conservatism, though, because conservatives recognize that progress happens — they just want to keep it from happening so fast that mistakes are made. Conservatives may be wrong on any given issue, but this principle is quite valid and we need to have people around who defend it. The real problem is the far right, especially the Christian Right, because they aren’t just trying to keep progress from happening too fast.

Instead, they are trying to stop progress altogether and roll things back to a much earlier stage of social and political development. I have no automatic problem with someone who approaches social change cautiously, even when their caution is conveniently exercised against the civil liberties of others; I do have a problem with those who seek to undermine what achievements we have already made in civil liberties because they cannot accept the use of reason over religious tradition and dogma in social government.

 

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