Were the 1990's the peak of Western Civilization?

[Insula Dei]

The peak of Western Civilization were the years following Augustus' victory at Actium. The dawn of the Pax Romana, combined with some of the greatest artists of all time being active.

[/predictable me]

[Insula Dei]

The peak of Western Civilization were the years following Augustus' victory at Actium. The dawn of the Pax Romana, combined with some of the greatest artists of all time being active.

[/predictable me]

what is your sig taken from?  it's hilarious

It's a (most likely apocryphal) anecdote I picked from some blog a while ago. Can't even remember which one.

[Insula Dei]

This is absolutely hilarious.

Why?

First of all, what are these "rights?"  The right to not be a slave?  But Voltaire agreed with slavery, as did Rousseau (though he opposed slavery as a hereditary status), as did any number of other philisophes not named Adam Smith.  How about gender equality?  Take a look at how poor Mary Wollstonecraft was treated, or how Olympe de Gouges was executed by the Jacobins, the most radical segment of society, for claiming that women deserved an equal say in government.  Look how the people most obsessed with Enlightenment ideas, the French Revolutionaries, started a grand campaign to resubjugate and rechain the people of Haiti.  If you think the Enlightenment was a good era for human rights, you've been taken in by the Enlightenment's 200+ year old propaganda campaign, where a couple of decent people (Brissot, Mary Wollstonecraft, etc.) have been taken and used as a figleaf to conceal the actual depravity of the activities of the time.

More importantly, I think there's a fair case to be made that the general thesis of the Dialektik der Aufklärung/Eclipse of Reason crowd is correct and that the way of thinking the Enlightenment represents could not but culminate in the horrors of the 20th century. The totalitarising view of the world that enabled them being a logical side product of the 17th century's love for Analysis and Synthesis.

I don't think that saying 'Well, the Enlightenment coincided with such and such evil practices'  is a correct fashion of condemning it, for it was not the Enlightenment that invented slavery or misogeny, even if some people associated with it condoned such practices, and in a way it was the thought of the Enlightenment that helped banish them. You have to look at what the Enlightenment created (i.e. Modernity and the modern man, if you ask me) to judge it, and I think there's ample munition to throw at it from such a perspective.

Also, of course, what Enlightenment? The Age of Reason being not quite the Aufklärung, and the Aufklärung not quite the Siècle des Lumières. Empiricism and Rationalism or even Pietism, Conservativism and Liberalism, ... all being part of what can be implied by these terms. To look at the Enlightenment as some sort of monolithic event is a mistake, I'd say.

Just my 50 cents