" . . .the herd mentality of medieval orthodoxy."
Appreciate the site and the writer’s acknowledgement of where liberalism has led.
But…some of us aren’t too fond of the so-called “Enlightenment” and do not believe a “herd mentality” built the Cathedral of Chartres (among other things). No need to slam that which came before. There was never a “Golden Age” of liberalism. Just a postponement of the final tragedy as liberalism fed off what medieval society created.
CA Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown put it:
“I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution.”
"All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led,in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth — what Revel describes as “an almost pathological indifference to the truth.”
Justice Brown:
A Whiter Shade of Pale