Thanks to the
Scientific Revolution and Newton in particular, we have laws of nature as
understood by science: gravity is universal.
Newton’s considerable impact on the Enlightenment is undeniable, and Voltaire, a main torchbearer in France, was in England at the time of Newton’s
funeral, whose passing was a national event, buried as he was inside Westminster
Abbey. From the laws of nature and Newton’s clockwork universe, laws of society
and those governing man – regarded as rational and self-determining - were
inferred. The concept of progress was also
developed during the Enlightenment from Bacon and Descartes’ earlier notion of
man who was seen as having power over nature and as having the ability to
shape his environment.
Even the
nature of law itself was wedded to science and based on reason. We find it in
Montesquieu, who writes near the beginning of The Spirit of the Laws (1748): “Law in general is human reason
insofar as it governs all the peoples of the earth; and the political and civil
laws of each nation should be only the particular cases to which reason is
applied.”
Reasonable law is, of course, not arbitrary, but written and for all to see, hence the rise of the idea
of constitutions.
An early
instance of experimenting with written constitutional laws occurred at the middle
of the 17th century – also the height of the Scientific Revolution, at
least judging from Hobbes’ work on the mechanics of English politics post-Charles
I as expressed in Leviathan (1651) - during
Cromwell’s ill-fated Protectorate. This was a brief deviation from the much
longer English tradition of an unwritten Constitution. The American Declaration of Independence
(1776), with its Lockean objection to “a long train of abuses” as observed prior
to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, is a document also inspired by the Interregnum of the English Civil Wars, yet an Enlightenment product, as well. Similarly, the U.S. Constitution (1789), with
its “separation of powers”, its framing of American self-governance, and supreme
legal authority is an expression of Enlightenment reasoning.
However, with
Trump we see the rise of the Anti-Enlightenment: racism, xenophobia, nationalism, populism, prejudice, abuses of power, and, of course, pronounced anti-science rhetoric
made more evident by his appalling mishandling of the Coronavirus. The Revolutionary “Declaration of the Rights
of Man and the Citizen” of 1789, although French, was addressed to “man” – a quintessential Enlightenment notion, much
like the Paris Climate Accord (2016) which speaks to the future of mankind. Any informed individual knows
that Trump’s denial of climate change is anti-science and not based on the evidence
or sound reasoning. But what we also need to realize is that his attacks on the
American Constitution, his defence of a 17—year-old alleged killer of two Black
Lives Matter protesters, and his chronic abuse of law in general – is, in effect, profoundly anti-scientific. With respect to this impeached President’s stance
on “law”, Trump mind - from the perspective of Enlightenment reasoning - is wholly
non-science, or rather nonsense, and consistently anti-scientific.
