The Twilight of The Enlightenment: Preface

‘The Age of Hubris nears its end. The Great Dismantling itself unravels.’

The Twilight of Enlightenment

We stand at the twilight of the Enlightenment. As the curtain closes on this failed epoch, our mission must be to reclaim our humanity from the choking grip of modernity, to reforge a culture rooted in the enduring strength of family ties, local community, the stability of inherited customs, honour, and the accumulated wisdom of countless generations past.

A fundamental shift is required; modernity must be rejected wholesale. The most corrosive Enlightenment myth, the myth of progress, must be discarded. In its place must be revived those principles most natural to the human condition and most conducive to human flourishing: tradition, hierarchy, and rootedness in the soil of our particular heritage. These alone provide the stability and meaning that modernity—obsessed with abstraction and ceaselessly chasing ‘progress’ in the form of perpetual change—has torn up. The Enlightenment experiment has run its course, and must now be left behind. The task which befalls us now is not to attempt futile reform of its principles, but to decide the direction of travel after they have been abandoned.

The Enlightenment was a rupture in the fabric of Western thought and civilisation; an all-encompassing revolution which sought to dismantle what it perceived as structures of ‘ignorance’ and ‘superstition’ that dominated Europe. Armed with reason, empirical observation, and a profound confidence in the power of human intellect, its advocates pursued what appeared to them as universal truths and thus attacked the structures of tradition, authority, and faith which had previously formed the bedrock of our civilisation. In short, it railed against the very limitations of the human condition itself. It was a revolt against the traditional world. It promised that through the universal application of its rational principles, humanity could construct a more just and enlightened world.

At the heart of the Enlightenment spirit was an unshakable and short-sighted faith in reason and rationality. Thinkers such as René Descartes and John Locke placed the rational individual at the centre of their philosophies, elevating human intellect to a near-divine status.

Science, working in conjunction with technology to augment each other’s scope, became the sole source of explanatory authority, the sole means of understanding the world, displacing the theological certainties of the Middle Ages and promising complete mastery over nature; this new-found power truly awoke the Faustian spirit within Western man. To be called an innovator was no longer an insult—as it had been since at least as far back as the time of the Ancient Greeks—but the highest compliment; to innovate was to contribute to the task of human emancipation from irrational fetters laid down by the previous generations who had known only darkness.

Reverence for continuity and the sacred, which had long guided human society, was substituted by a fascination with the new, as progress became the supreme goal. Francis Bacon’s scientific method and Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe embodied the Enlightenment’s Faustian conviction that the mysteries of the natural world could be uncovered and thereafter controlled. This spirit of progress and defiance was not confined to the realms of philosophy and science, however.

In the political realm, faith in reason demanded the dismantling of ‘arbitrary’ rule and the reorganisation of society based on new principles, guided by a spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This Enlightenment trifecta, codified by the revolutionary ideologues of late 18th century France, would develop to become the new foundation of all Western political thought—the ‘Enlightenment paradigm’.

The Enlightenment paradigm has been unbelievably transformative, remaking every aspect of human life. From its inception, it has marked the boundaries of political and cultural possibility; it reshaped the horizon of thought, from the organic, earthy, and concrete, to the synthetic, airy, and abstract. It is the playing field within which all subsequent politics, philosophy, science, and life have taken place.

The Enlightenment’s cold, unyielding light shone upon traditional forms of sanctuary—religion, monarchy, and communal bonds—casting them as relics of a darker, less rational age, unfit for the brave new world now centred on reason, equality, and individualism. We, today, are all creatures of the Enlightenment paradigm. With its relentless scepticism, the Enlightenment dissolved the sacred, the mysterious, and all the parochial bonds of tradition, replacing them with the abstract, the mechanistic, and the universal. It created a world in which all primordial certainties had to justify themselves before the tribunal of reason—an ordeal which brought about the slow decay which caused the degenerate, nihilistic age of today.

Despite its longevity, the inherent contradictions of the Enlightenment have remained inexplicably unexplored; the paradoxical legacy of the Enlightenment trifecta would come to define the modern era. Indeed, the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, central to the French Revolution—itself the wellspring of modern politics—have proved both unifying and divisive, and will be discussed in depth later.

The ideal of liberty, while promoting individual autonomy, also fostered new forms of domination. The development of centralised administrative states, technocratic governance, and the bureaucratic machinery of control have arisen as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment’s rationalist ethos and the technology it has created. The supposedly universal truths which ‘liberty’ proclaims have often masked a distinctly Western imperialism, as the ideals of reason and progress were imposed—often violently—on cultures deemed ‘unenlightened.’ But perhaps most damaging of all has been the Enlightenment's rejection of tradition. In discarding the accumulated wisdom of the past, it has uprooted all facets of life, leaving man isolated in a world stripped of spiritual certainties and communal ties. This uprooting created a profound existential malaise, a disconnection from the sources of meaning and belonging that had sustained human life since its inception.

Moreover, while the Enlightenment proclaimed the ideal of equality, its realisation has proven both illusory and destabilising. The demand for equality, born from a rationalist rejection of inherited hierarchies, dismantled the organic social orders that had previously given structure and meaning to society. By reducing individuals to abstract units, stripped of their historical and cultural particularities, the pursuit of equality created a condition in which all differences—class, gender, race, culture, and station—came to be seen as obstacles to be overcome.

Yet, in the name of equality, new hierarchies emerged, often more insidious than those they replaced. Vast webs of bureaucracy, meritocratic elitism, and the technocratic state replaced traditional hierarchical authority, concentrating power in the hands of a self-serving managerial class. The Enlightenment's vision of universal equality ignored the natural and cultural differences that make human life rich and genuinely diverse. Its levelling impulse dissolved the bonds of family, community, and faith, eroding the very foundations on which social solidarity depends. Equality, stripped of its context within a shared moral framework, became a demand for uniformity, fostering resentment and alienation. The only aspect of equality that has actually been successful has been that of turning everything equally grey and vapid.

Fraternity, the ideal of communal solidarity, was also profoundly reshaped by the Enlightenment’s universalising ambitions. Once rooted in the intimate bonds of kinship, locality, and shared faith, the Enlightenment reimagined fraternity as a universal project, abstracted from small-scale, organic communities. While liberty and equality have their paradoxical double meanings, fraternity itself has proved the most difficult to pin down; does fraternity mean unity within a specific people—an ethnic group, for example—or a universal brotherhood?

Nationalism, itself a product of Enlightenment thought (in its abstracted, ideological form, anyway), replaced local loyalties with an allegiance to the synthetic entity of the nation-state, rather than previously held local bonds or loyalty to king and kingdom. The spirit of universal fraternity would inspire utopian ideologies like socialism, communism, and globalism, which sought to unite mankind but only resulted in mass coercion, violence, and repression.

By severing fraternity from its natural, rooted context, the Enlightenment’s vision transformed the bonds of solidarity into instruments of administrative control and ideological conformity. The promise of universal brotherhood ultimately fractured humanity, pitting groups against one another in the service of capital-P progress, while leaving individuals atomised and alienated from any genuine sense of belonging.

These ideals and the ideologies they would spawn, though ostensibly rooted in the same Enlightenment principles, would clash violently in the centuries that followed, exposing the tensions inherent in the Enlightenment vision of progress, eventually leading us to the Liberal paradigm of our current era.

Thus, the Enlightenment was not merely a phase of European history but the crucible in which the modern world was forged. It is the framework through which we interpret the past, according to which we organise our contemporary societies, and with which we imagine our futures. And yet, as we continue to live in its shadow, the contradictions it has unleashed remain unresolved. Its light, while brilliant, is cold and unyielding, revealing the cracks in the very structures it sought to build. In illuminating the world, the Enlightenment has blinded most to what was lost—a more meaningful, traditional sense of humanity, outside of and prior to the confines of the episteme of the Enlightenment paradigm. In its ambition to transcend all limitations the Enlightenment spirit has achieved a certain level of greatness, but it has also sowed the seeds of the West’s demise.

The Age of Hubris nears its end. The Great Dismantling itself unravels. Midwinter approaches. Let the new spring—the Age of Restoration—commence!