Peter MacKinnon: The death of the Enlightenment and the rise of populism
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May 01, 2022 • May 1, 2022 • 9 minute read • 731 Comments 
The U.S. Capitol riot was an example of populism run amok, writes Peter MacKinnon. Photo by John Minchillo /AP Article content
In a new book, Peter MacKinnon discusses how Enlightenment values have come under attack, while populist movements have gained traction around the world, and what this means for the future of Canadian citizenship.
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Populism is on the rise around the world. According to one report, there have been 46 populist leaders or political parties that have led 33 countries between 1990 and 2018 — a five-fold increase in numbers over those same years. Originally most prevalent in Latin America and in eastern and central Europe, it is now also found in Asia and western Europe. “Watershed political events in recent years — the election of President Donald Trump … the Brexit vote, the electoral success of Italy’s Five Star Movement, Brazil’s sudden lurch to the right with the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, the doubling of support for populist parties across Europe — have brought the word ‘populism’ out of the annals of academic journals and into the headlines.”
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Those headlines became more disturbing in the final weeks of the Trump administration, when thousands of his followers gathered in Washington as Congress prepared to confirm Joe Biden’s election win. Incited by the outgoing president, the gathering turned into a mob bent on infiltrating, mocking and disrupting the institutions and processes of American democracy. This was populism run amok, inspired by the nation’s populist-in-chief, and its consequences were serious: casualties among the mob and those deployed to resist it, as well as appeals for Trump’s ouster two weeks before the inauguration of his successor. As of this writing, the extent and duration of the damage is not fully known, but the episode is a striking demonstration of the dangers of the us-versus-them thinking that is so common today.
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Canadians have no reason to be complacent about populism. Our decentralized federation, the absence of anti-state public sentiment and our relatively successful emergence from the 2007–8 recession may explain why it has not gained the traction in Canada that we have seen elsewhere. But there have been populist influences in our history, and some have anticipated the emergence of its more severe modern variant. Though its expression to date has been subtle, the “thin-centred ideology” may yet surface in the mainstream, particularly in concert with a decline in Enlightenment values.
The legacy of the Enlightenment that dominated European ideas from the 1700s to the late 1900s was “a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism and progress.” Reason takes the lead here and is the enabler of the others:
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“If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings or the hermeneutic(s) parsing of sacred texts.… The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable.”
Steven Pinker believes that Enlightenment themes — and values — continue to be confronted by human inclinations for “loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers” and that they “are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism and sometimes contempt.” Underlying this observation is Pinker’s rejection of a right wing–left wing dichotomy and the ideologies along the spectrum. “A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending and judicious regulation.” But this picture is at odds with ideologues and with “religious, political and cultural pessimists who insist that western civilization is in terminal decline.” Pinker argues that the evidence supports the opposite conclusion. “The Enlightenment has worked — perhaps the greatest story seldom told.” And because its achievements are often denied or taken for granted, its ideals need renewed defence for the 21st century.
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Pinker is the latest celebrant of the Enlightenment. Earlier ones included Albert Saloman, who wrote of “the orthodoxies, fanaticisms and prejudices … which need enlightened reexamination” and argued that the “desire for enlightened vigilance and praise of the Enlightenment are appropriate in the contemporary age of irrational modes of thinking and acting.” More recently, Anthony Pagden has shown “how Enlightenment concepts directly influenced modern culture, making possible a secular, tolerant, and above all, cosmopolitan world,” and Tzvetan Todorov has praised the Enlightenment’s “celebration of plurality, of difference, of the idea that debate is healthy and productive.”
The counter-arguments begin with the claim that Enlightenment thinking is monolithic on the subject of religion. Emory University’s Dominic Erdozain writes that “Christians are taught to despise the Enlightenment. It is hard to find a theologian with a good word for this era of rational presumption.… The Enlightenment is the sin of the modern; the chimera of crass autonomy.… The picture is sharpened by a secular literature that celebrates the Enlightenment as a brave emancipation from theological tutelage: a defiant obituary for an expired God.”
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Erdozain argues that in fact, the Enlightenment “was as religious as anything that came before it — a time of spiritual awakening as well as criticism and doubt.” While secularism is among its credos, we learn from Charles Taylor that this does not mean the disappearance of religion; once freed from the strictures of fundamentalism, secularism can be accompanied by robust spiritual pluralism.
The counter-argument is not limited to religion, and debate on the legacy of the Enlightenment “and its ideological child, liberalism” will continue. The interest here is in the impact of non-liberal critics of the Enlightenment (from the left and the right) on the future of liberal thought and its political expression, liberal democracy. From the left, according to Stephen Bonner, Enlightenment values have “come under assault” from “anarchists, communitarians, post-modernists, half-hearted liberals and authoritarian socialists”: “Ideals long associated with reactionary movements — the privileging of experience over reasoning, national or ethnic identity over internationalism and cosmopolitanism, the community over the individual, custom over innovation, myth over science — have entered the thinking of the American left.… The collapse of intellectual coherence on the left reflects the collapse of a purposeful politics from the left.”
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From the right, again according to Bonner, “anti-Enlightenment and anti-modern prejudices” persist as conservative thinkers “obsess about sexual licence and the decline of family values, cultural ‘nihilism’ and the loss of tradition, tolerance for divergent lifestyles and the erosion of national identity.”
If this case for the rise of populism and the fall of Enlightenment values is sound, then we must consider its implications for Canada and for our citizenship. We note again that populism has not gained the traction in this country that it has in some other western nations. However, its sentiments are sometimes heard, and may grow, and so our interest in the subject is not misplaced. What do populism and weakened Enlightenment values mean for pluralism, solidarity and public discourse? The two in combination are what first catch our attention. Either — by itself — may undermine liberal democracy, but in tandem the threat is increased because each magnifies the other: populism accelerates a decline in Enlightenment values and is in turn strengthened by a flight from reason, science and humanism.
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Pluralism is essential to democratic governance of a large federation with a number of provinces and regions, and a multicultural population, but differences can be submerged within “the people” in the populist contest between them and elites. A growth in populism makes complex societies more susceptible to factions arrayed against one another and rulers they perceive as controlling their lives. Fragmentation into groups of like-minded individuals, strategizing with one another on social media, and turning away from those with whom they disagree, diminishes the wide, continuing and often difficult conversations necessary for democratic life.
To the extent that populism, properly understood, has been contained in Canada, it is not posing a threat to our liberal democracy and the pluralism on which it rests. Multiculturalism has been a Canadian reality for decades, and its pluralist foundation is understood and generally accepted. We cannot be as sanguine about a decline in Enlightenment values. The threats to them are as discernible in Canada as they are elsewhere. Especially troubling is the threat to Enlightenment values in our universities, where some students and faculty treat those who disagree with them as not simply in error but in sin: “I am right, you are wrong and therefore a wrongdoer.” They are not above threats, nor are they above shouting down those with whom they disagree in efforts to silence them and to embed their own views on social justice in university policy. If Enlightenment values are not as protected as they should be in our universities, we cannot expect them to flourish more widely.
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Solidarity and public discourse suffer as well. We should be cautious in our use of the word solidarity, for its meaning depends on speaker and context. Here we are interested in what it means for us to say “We, as Canadians.” For some, it may mean nothing: they see the country in terms that leave them unattached to it except for the convenience of holding its passport and whatever of its benefits may fall their way. Some may embrace the cancel culture that sees our history in terms of the villainies they attribute to its principal actors and even to fellow citizens, overlooking their more complicated lives and legacies. For Canadian citizenship to endure, however, most of us must have a positive attachment to the country. Attachments will differ in kind and intensity but they have to be present. We must ask an important question: what does Canadian citizenship mean to Canadians? There is evidence that most Canadians have positive views of the country and take pride in their citizenship. That is solidarity enough, but it must be sustained and encouraged to withstand the decline in Enlightenment values.
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Populism and declining Enlightenment values undermine public discourse too. We know that “the communicative tools for spreading populist ideas are just as central as the populist ideas themselves.” Populist rhetoric features “adversarial, emotional, patriotic and abrasive speech” that inspires or moves the converted but is obnoxious and often crude to others. In a context of weakening Enlightenment values, its simplified and exaggerated messaging divides listeners instead of bringing them together.
We must contemplate the consequences of an end to a liberal democratic rules-based social order. What would take its place? We don’t know, of course, but we can foresee a more authoritarian successor rooted in the ideology of left or right. This is the place to which populists and deniers of Enlightenment values would take us, and both the journey and the destination must be resisted.
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The first step in resisting them is to understand their origins. Why do supporters of populism believe themselves to be sidelined and ignored? Why do many people turn away from reason when it has been the foundation of modernity? Why (as Pinker asks) do some in our universities — supposedly citadels of reason — treat Enlightenment values with disdain? Where have our democratic institutions fallen short in their representative and deliberative responsibilities? We need serious, open and evidence-based debate on these questions even though the questions themselves point to conditions that make that debate less likely to occur.
We have seen that populism is less demonstrable in Canada than in many other countries. However, it may yet gain more visible traction here and threaten pluralism, solidarity and public discourse. Combined with a decline in Enlightenment values it threatens our democracy. Unless that threat is averted our citizenship too will be undermined.
Excerpted from “Canada In Question? Exploring Our Citizenship in the Twenty-first Century” by Peter MacKinnon, courtesy of University of Toronto Press.
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