The Threat to Reason, by Dan Hind

Since 11 September 2001, the idea of Enlightenment has been ripped from university textbooks and airlifted into battle between the West and its irrational enemies. In this elegant polemical essay, Dan Hind rightly quibbles with this supposedly Manichean tussle between the guarantors of Enlightenment in the West and everyone else. Hind wants to rescue the idea of Enlightenment from its usurpers, while pressing it into the service of something better. He doesn't succeed, but fails in an interesting way.

The Threat to Reason begins by rehearsing the different national variations on the theme of secular Enlightenment which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The age of reason brought with it intellectual commitments to robust individualism, to freedom from church and state, to the twin ideas of rational inquiry and scientific method. Hind knows his subject well enough to write about it with insight and wit. The perceived threats to Enlightenment, he says, differ according to local taste and political affiliation. "The mainstream left likes to fret about religious fundamentalism, while the right tends to go after post-modernism."

He is quite right to be suspicious of the new militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who seem to think that the ideas associated with Enlightenment can be imposed by state diktat, or (in the case of Hitchens) by sending in the Marines. He is right, too, to shrug off the idea that a deeply unpopular new strain of militant Islam could on its own be enough to topple the idea of Enlightenment in Western countries.

But Hind wants to go much further. He wants to argue that the ideas associated with Enlightenment are under threat not from religion or even new-age gobbledegook, but from powerful and entrenched corporate interests. Alternative therapies cost little and do little harm, he points out, while thousands of people die every year from the side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs. Maybe, but Hind seems unable to distinguish between ideas associated with Enlightenment and things which he simply doesn't like. The incidental side effects of pharmaceutical drugs suggest that we tweak the regulatory system; they are not a problem for the operation of human reason itself. Likewise, Hind criticises corporations for their venality, but businesses which seek to squeeze as much profit as they can are only doing what is perfectly rational from their point of view.

Whereas the new anti-God squad want to steal the ideas of Enlightenment for their own purposes, Hind wants to borrow it for an inspiring new radical agenda. The renewal of Enlightenment ideas, he suggests, could take place within a "public research" programme operating both outside the market and public institutions. In an (almost theological) cross between Calvinism and Maoism, he demands that we "give up a certain regime of pleasures", "abandon illusions about ourselves", and refocus our efforts upon a "disinterested commitment to truth".

Hind makes heavy weather of it, but he turns out to be referring to the collaborative ethic of knowledge and information-swapping championed by the open-source movement on the web. The open-source principle is an interesting way of encouraging innovation on the web, and Hind's model mirrors exactly its flimsy swap-shop structure, but it is highly unlikely to be capable of re-igniting a radical enlightenment.

Enlightenment activism, Hind quotes the late historian Roy Porter as arguing, "always involved clashing interests", and "could be deployed for radical ends or equally by sections of the propertied". Compared to this radically engaged pursuit of the truth, his own version - a kind of Enlightenment 2.0, powered by febrile bloggers and enthusiastic amateurs - makes for a rather toothless, muddled kind of liberation. With friends like these, it would be tempting to say, the Enlightenment was never in much need of any enemies.

James Harkin's 'Big Ideas' will be published next year by Atlantic

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