The woke war on the Enlightenment

Too many who lean left today claim that the Enlightenment was the ideology of colonialism. Some academics, for instance, have claimed that it was a racist, colonial endeavour from the outset. That the Enlightenment needs to be ‘decolonised’. One piece in Harvard Magazine is even entitled ‘How the Enlightenment led to colonialism’.

Do those who make this claim imagine there was no colonialism before the Enlightenment? Presumably not, but it’s important to understand how something so false could come to seem true. (Raise a glass to the virtue of trying to understand those you disagree with.)

Let’s start with the fact that empires were not invented by the modern European nations whose advanced ships and guns were more effective in maintaining them than forced marches and pikes. Stronger nations have colonised weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history; indeed, before there were nations in our modern sense at all. Greeks and Romans built empires, as did the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Aztecs, the Malians, the Khmer and the Mughals. Those empires operated with varying degrees of brutality and repression, but all of them were based on an equation of might and right, which amounts to no concept of right at all. All of them used their power to compel weaker groups to surrender resources, submit tribute, press soldiers into service for further imperial wars, and accept commands that overrode local custom and law. As far as we know, there was one thing they lacked: a guilty conscience.