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notebook on liberalism and obsolesence

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Greg Gauthier 2022-08-28 22:21:59 +01:00
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@ -115,11 +115,11 @@ And from there, we were off to the races.. As Reinhold Niebur put it:
### The Death of God and the Divinization of Man
So, given this new concept of the autonomous individual, is it really any wonder that by 1650, we have Descartes nonchalantly internalizing the "light of reason" within his own skull, and birthing the wind-egg of the "Cartesian Circle" in the process. Or, also, Locke in 1690, providing a justification from Genesis for absolute individual sovereignty in his less often cited *First Treatise*, in which God, being the creator of all things, is also the owner of all things, and by analogy we as creators are owners of that which we create. And, by 1793, we can see a defiant anti-authoritarian individualism in Thomas Paine's famous "The Age of Reason":
So, given this new concept of the autonomous individual, is it really any wonder that by 1650, we have Descartes nonchalantly internalizing the "light of reason" within his own skull, and birthing the wind-egg of the "Cartesian Circle" in the process. Or, also, Locke in 1690, providing a justification from Genesis for absolute individual sovereignty in his less often cited *First Treatise*, in which God, being the creator of all things, is also the owner of all things, and by analogy we as creators are owners of that which we create. And, by 1793, we can see a defiant anti-authoritarian intellectual individualism in Thomas Paine's famous "The Age of Reason":
> *"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life... But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."* ~ Thomas Paine, 1793
The ever-widening gap between The One and The Many had begun to skew our perspective. The One shrank from view, and the Many autonomous individuals began to rapidly grow in apparent size, until eventually we came to think that individual autonomy under the ruler-ship of God was not enough, because a ruled subject that thinks he is free, is either a fool, or a liar. Thus, came the day we declared man himself to be a divine thing all by himself, without reference to God. His own mind is his own church, and now another 100 years after Paine, according to Emile Faguet, his own conscience is his own God:
The ever-widening gap between The One and The Many had begun to skew our perspective. The One shrank from view, and the Many autonomous rational individuals began to rapidly grow in apparent size, until eventually we came to think that individual autonomy under the ruler-ship of God was not good enough, because a ruled subject that thinks he is free, is either a fool, or a liar. Thus, came the day we declared man himself to be a divine thing all by himself, without reference to God. His own mind is his own church, and now another 100 years after Paine, according to Emile Faguet, his own conscience is his own God:
> *"Man is sacred because he is a temple; he has divine rights because he is himself a divine thing; there is no social code against the code of his conscience; there is no collective right against his individual duty"* ~ Emile Faguet, 1891