Deaccessioning the Enlightenment

David Hume (1711-1776)

Erosion of the shoreline is a product of global warming, Coastlines shrink. The same might be said of the Humanist Project which began with Hume, Hobbes and Locke. It's not only Project 2025 and the threat to democracy but the whole notion of education. Rousseau’s Emile (1762) is a broadsheet for “Le Gai Savoir,” the joy of learning which Godard appropriated as the title of his 1969 film. The thrill of Goethe’s Faust is something you might find yourself experiencing in isolation, ditto any number of the classics which themselves depend on an inurement to literature. The great books whuch were once part of the core curriculum constitute a palette. Knowledge has always been a lonely pursuit with its satisfaction deriving from discussions on the way out of the carrel. With AI libraries and dictionaries, the repository of history and language have all been swept up in a maelstrom of data bytes.

read the review of The Wormhole Society by Francis Levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star