(Roughly) Daily

The Enlightenment is under attack by the Left and the Right. It can only be “saved,” Eliane Glaser argues, through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique. And then there’s AI. After summarizing the critiques from both sides, she continues…

In consequence of this pincer-movement attack, the Enlightenment’s legacy is existentially vulnerable. It makes me deeply worried as someone whose entire career has been built on trying to understand and analyse the world around me – especially a world that still tries to confine thinking women to the realms of emotion and ‘personal experience’.

I believe that Enlightenment values are essential, but that we have largely forgotten how to make a good case for them: we need to rely on shared facts, tested by experiment; a public sphere where open discussion can take place; and the belief that discussion should be founded on reasoned argument. We need, moreover, to cherish the more political values of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the common good. Advocates for artificial intelligence have the temerity to claim that large language models are ushering in a ‘second Enlightenment’ (a claim that was uncritically echoed in a paper published by the World Economic Forum last year) when what we are in fact seeing is the destruction of the Enlightenment legacy under the false banner of its name. As the historian David Bell argued in The New York Times in 2025, AI is actually ‘shedding Enlightenment values’ by simply reinforcing ‘what we already think we know.’ In The Guardian,the journalist and geopolitical risk consultant Joseph de Weck warned that ‘AI is taking us back to the dark ages’, making us lazy, and stymying independent thinking.

The evidence suggests that we are going through a rapid de-enlightenment. Newspaper circulations, attention spans, and trust in forms of agreed knowledge are in freefall. Misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes are gaining ground. If we let go of the valuable aspects of the Enlightenment project, we open ourselves up to a world of AI blather, ‘my truth’ pronouncements, wobbly sentiment and unchecked power.

My unease with this parlous state of affairs has provoked me to go back and rethink the Enlightenment and what it has to offer. But, rather than unthinkingly recouping it as a mission, I want instead to tease out and weigh up its merits, to discern with nuance what is still fit for our times. I want to ask if it is possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rallying power, and if it’s worth defending what the combined forces of Left and Right are coming together to attack. Are the Enlightenment’s deficiencies barnacles on an old ship, or integral to its design?…

And so she does. Do read on: “Flickering Enlightenment,” from @elianeglaser.bsky.social in @aeon.co.

* Voltaire

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As we reclaim reason, we might spare a thought for a glorious product of the Enlightenment, Joseph Haydn; he died on this date in 1809. A composer of the Classical period, he was pivotal in the evolution of chamber music forms like the string quartet and piano trio, and is known as the “Father” of both the symphony and sonata forms. Haydn was a friend and mentor of Mozart, and a teacher of Beethoven; indeed, the Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven trio are sometimes referred to as the “First Viennese School.”

Schonberg wrote that Haydn “was the Classic performer par excellence, and in his long life, from 1732 to 1809, he grew up with the new musical ideas and, more than any one man, shaped them.”