“It goes without saying that we owe to the Enlightenment freedom of thought, feminism, socialism, humanitarianism, many of our civil liberties, and much of our republican and democratic heritage. At the same time, this enlightened liberal humanism served as the legitimating ideology of a capitalist culture more steeped in blood than any other episode in human history…. Only Marxism recounts the story of how these two contrasting narratives are secretly one. It reminds us of the mighty achievements of Francis Bacon, but also of the fact that he believed in torture. It insists that modernity means both contraception and Hiroshima, liberation movements and biological warfare. Some people think it Eurocentric to point out that Europe was the historical home of modernity, forgetful that this also means that it was also the home of the Holocaust. The radical answer to the question of whether modernity is a positive or negative phenomenon is an emphatic yes and no. One of the best reasons in my view for still being a Marxist, apart from the gratifying exasperation it sometimes occasions to others, is that no other doctrine I know of claims that the liberal Enlightenment…. has been at one and the same time an enthralling advance in humanity and an insupportable nightmare-the latter tale, moreover, as verso of the recto of the former, the two colliding histories structurally complicit rather than contingently cheek by jowl.”
— Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (via mswyrr)
