I bought a lipstick yesterday, in a lovely shade of rose-pink. I like those soft, slightly faded pinks better than the fuchsias or screaming magentas that some women prefer to wear. Now, do I hear anyone telling me that I don't really like rose-pink, because as a matter of fact roses come in all sorts of shades of pink, including the lurid blue-pinks and purple-pinks which I profess to dislike? No, I don't hear anyone saying that, since it's so obviously daft: in the context of cosmetics the term 'rose-pink' refers to a much narrower range of colours than that which can be found in rose flowers, and everybody who's a competent speaker of English knows this.
Why, you might ask, am I telling you all this? Well, the reason I'm describing these innocent, uncontentious facts about our language, facts that everyone knows and understands perfectly well, is that it will help to reveal what's gone wrong with certain kinds of criticism of something rather more important than the colour of my lipstick. An example of this can be found in John Gray's recent article in the New Statesman (one free hit), where he dismisses the commitment to Enlightenment values, found in the Euston Manifesto and many other places, on the grounds that the Enlightenment in the 18th century was a very complex phenomenon, and some of its most noted figures endorsed some very illiberal values indeed.
Karl Marx allowed liberal values only a transitional role in human development, while Auguste Comte, founder of the influential positivist movement, rejected ideals of toleration and equality...What Gray is claiming is that because the values actually held by the thinkers of the Enlightenment included some fairly unattractive elements, we shouldn't now look to them to help us deal with our political problems. But this is a mistake: when we now talk of being committed to Enlightenment values, what we standardly mean is that we support things like universal human rights, equality (in some sense), religious tolerance, scepticism about received dogmas, freedom of speech, a commitment to the use of reason to improve our condition. What we don't mean is that we're committed to the totality of values, whatever they were, endorsed by those 18th century thinkers who figured in the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Perhaps that totality is what historians of the period mean by Enlightenment values. But the term has now entered into non-specialist discourse, and it's come to mean a specific set of values such as those suggested above.As an intellectual movement, the Enlightenment has always had a distinctly seamy side. In its political incarnation, it was one of the factors that shaped modern-day terror. Right-thinking French philosophes campaigned for the prohibition of torture, but their ideas also gave birth to the Jacobin Terror that followed the French revolution. Later, Enlightenment ideas animated some of the most repressive and murderous regimes of the 20th century.
Those of us who endorse these values do so because they seem our best hope for a decent life in a liberal society, and for some progress for those whose lives right now are hideously bereft of both liberality and decency. Pointing out, as Gray does, that some other values endorsed by 18th century Enlightenment figures were extremely dodgy and may have led to later racism and oppression doesn't constitute a criticism of what we now call Enlightenment values, unless it can be shown that these latter inevitably go along with, or lead to, a commitment to racism and terrorism and oppression. And Gray can't show that there's this inevitable connection, since it's manifestly obvious that there isn't - plenty of people manage to support freedom and tolerance and the rest without eventually committing themselves to racism or terrorism or oppression; and in fact support for Enlightenment values looks like our best defence against such horrors. Reference to unattractive features of the historical Enlightenment is irrelevant as a criticism of support for what are currently called Enlightenment values, just as reference to the very wide range of colours that roses come in is irrelevant to my stated preference for rose-pink lipstick. There's a real connection, of course, between what we now call Enlightenment values and the historical Enlightenment, just as there's a real connection between the name for the colour of my lipstick and the characteristic colours of roses; but in both cases the connections are quite loose, and there certainly isn't complete overlap.
Now, lipstick doesn't matter (well, not much) in the wider scheme of things; but human rights, freedom, tolerance and the rational pursuit of progress do matter, and they need to be defended from the puritanical claim that because they sometimes kept bad company in the past, they're hopelessly tainted for the present and the future. (Eve Garrard)