By the late 17th and 18th centuries, the Renaissance application of reason to the natural and political world morphed into various strands known collectively as the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that, for its practitioners, the Enlightenment was “not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place.” No one seems to agree exactly on what it was, and it cut a wide enough swath for some historians to blame it for slavery’s justification while others credit its emphasis on equality and justice as contributing to slavery’s abolition. Likewise, you could blame/credit Enlightenment science for both pollution and environmentalism to combat pollution. Enlightenment science ultimately brought us hydrogen bombs and the missiles to deliver them on. Yet Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764) helped convince America’s Founding Fathers to add the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Critics began describing torture and the death penalty as “unenlightened.” The Enlightenment ushered in an age of questioning, searching, comparing, and analyzing society objectively that led, ultimately, to scrutinizing practices like slavery and torture, even if change came gradually. There was no big push against such practices prior to the Enlightenment. America’s founders are often criticized for failing to live up to the Enlightenment’s ideals, but that could only have been possible if the ideals existed in the first place. Is partially unfulfilled idealism worse than no idealism at all? Like the Renaissance and Dark Ages, the Enlightenment is one of those historical tags that lends itself to biased agenda-driven oversimplifications, highlighting some themes while concealing others. Yet, people who lived through it were aware they were in a new age.
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