Maybe it's a good thing my blogging has dropped off

The rest of the world just now seems to be catching up with my enlightened world view.

Me, December 2007:

The real conflict in American politics isn't Republican vs. Democrat and it didn't just start in the last say 40 years, it is French vs. Scottish and it started in the mid 1700's.

Despite being educated at William and Mary College (which was founded by scholars associated with the Scottish Enlightenment) Jefferson was really a child of the French Enlightenment. This can be seen in his vision for America as an agricultural nation of Yeoman farmers and his hostility to the idea of corporations. It is also evident in his hostility to organized religion. These are all characteristic of many French Enlightenment writers.

Hamilton (and others) with whom Jefferson was antagonistic believed that America should be a commercial nation and pointed to Scotland's transformation from the poorest nation in Europe to a modern society as a model. Many of them also believed that religion should have a prominent place in civil life. An idea much more in line with the Scottish Enlightenment.

David Brooks, May 2010, Two Theories of Change:

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

…

These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”

…

Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

…

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

Personally, I dispute the idea that followers of the British or Scottish Enlightenment are in retreat.  I think we are holding our own against the Mongol hordes of the Jefferson / French Enlightenment barbarians.  I also dispute the idea that the Scottish Enlightenment was the one driven by sentiment, but that is an argument for a different time.

h/t

Hopefully everyone is aware that when I talk about my brilliance, blah, blah, blah, I am just messing around. I derived my 2007 post from How the Scots Invented the Modern World, and even then after I did some Google searching I was able to come up with another example of someone coming up with the same idea back in 2001. In short, it was nothing that original I just hadn't seen it articulated in the blog circles I run in, and if I hadn't just blown the whistle on myself I would probably still be able to claim credit for the idea.