Living In the Dark Ages

Enlightenment. A wonderful term to mean the use of our own understanding "without another's guidance", as Immanuel Kant put it two and a half centuries ago. But are we today enlightened? Or are we ourselves guilty of still depending on another's guidance in this day and age? I argue that we Easterners, especially my fellow countrymen, until today, are sadly, still not enlightened.

I think we simply lack the philosophy that would allow us to become enlightened. We are still drowned deep in the ocean of our dogmatic beliefs. We still believe for example, in supernatural powers, and it is no rare sight to see our people invoking supernatural causes to solve real world problems. No matter how highly sophisticated the technology that surrounds us (e.g smartphones, wifi, gps) we still believe that our troubles and ailments are caused by witchcraft or supernatural beings, and we cannot accept the possibility that we may be at fault for causing them. We somehow refuse to accept responsibility.

Now that's it! We just don't want to take any responsibility. And that's why we are still living in the dark ages. In fact, the characteristic feature of the Dark Ages, if we remember from history, was the witch-hunt. Back then, innocent women, charged with the accusation of using witchcraft to cause harm to their community, were burned at the stake. And all that happened because the people in the dark age society refused to accept any responsibility. They blamed witchcraft and the supernatural for what happened to them. More importantly, they did not use their own understanding, and instead drew hasty conclusions, guided by their dogmatic leaders. And so do we today.

Enlightenment is not the arrogant use of Reason to replace Beliefs. It takes a lot of effort and courage to use Reason. So we cannot say that the use of it is arrogant. Perhaps we say that, because we ourselves lack the effort or the courage to use our Reason. We prefer other people telling us what to do, when to do it and how to do it. That way, we cannot be blamed if something bad happens. We cannot bear the "dizziness of freedom", as Kierkegaard put it.

And so here we are today, trapped in the darkness of our false beliefs. We entrust certain people to guide us along the shortsighted exploration of our lives. We see history only through the lens of our guides and let them tell us the laws that are already set in stone. Of course, we still benefit from the outside world that lends us their scientific knowledge and technology. And we fool ourselves into thinking that our society have progressed because we possessed these technology. In fact we make it our aim, as a country, that one day one of us will win the Nobel Prize.

But we will never win the Nobel Prize if our aim is to win it for its own sake. It will never happen that way. But we cannot see this, because we let others tell us that winning the Nobel Prize should be our aim, when in fact, winning the Nobel Prize is only a by-product of becoming an enlightened society.