PragerU and Tradition: The Conservative Utopia | Big Joel

Episode Title: PragerU and Tradition: The Conservative Utopia
Produced by: Big Joel
Description: In this video, I'm gonna talk about Yoram Hazoney's fascinating PragerU video, "What Was The Enlightenment." Who knows maybe this one will slap. Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/bigjoel Follow me on Twitch: twitch.tv/biggestjoel Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/biggestjoel Edited by Ben from Canada! Footnote: So, broadly speaking, historians just don’t really talk like this, give credits or attaboys to various historical moments. They don’t pretend that eras of human history exist in isolation, uninfluenced by anything else, and if you said in a historical setting “no progress occured before the enlightenment,” you’d have a bunch of medievalists on your ass saying “fuck off.” So I have no clue where Hazony’s getting this idea. Even the example he uses here, Steven Pinker’s quote, feels extremely threadbare. Steven Pinker isn’t a historian, he’s a linguist and pop academic, and his claim here isn’t really a historical one. There is no sense in Pinker’s work that he cares about establishing an argument about the enlightenment era, proving that it was the first time a set of ideas were had. No, he’s talking about the ideology the enlightenment is known for, empiricism, democracy, limits on government, secular reasoning, etc. His book is about how great liberalism is, not about how John Locke was super original and stuff. So, yeah, without any kind of evidence for Hazony’s ridiculous claim, I have to assume it’s not true. Since that’s how claims work lol.

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