Mankind is not meant to know everything, nor to understanding everything.
Sometimes, the greatest testimony to a person's wisdom is knowing when not to ask questions, not to question for the sake of common argument, or questioning the vain attempt of undoing an established order.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment, which swept 18th Century Europe and the United States, made the vapid claim that man is the measure of all things, that he would progress into full knowledge, catalogue, controlling, then kowtowing nature itself.
Yet the human mind is a product, a culmination of faith, tradition, and culture, without which we would be incapable of understanding, discerning, undertaking, or even describing our circumstances and systems.
Yet if man could diagram the Universe as a rational system, could not the human mind, properly freed from the restraints of superstitious custom and authority, not also designation, delegate, and define a new order, one based on the inner workings of the human mind?
No, and again no.
Aside from man's inherent capacity to escape his self-nature, by no means perfectible within his imperfect hopes, the limitations of man's brilliance could never enlighten the corners of risk and adventure, without which no one essays to explore the still unknown world.
Immanuel Kant, the "catastrophic spider of Konigsberg," with great technical acumen described earthquakes, outlined a "proper" system of state, described an ideal morality originating within man alone, yet he never left his hometown. A man of intense regularity, so much so that the citizens of his hometown timed their clocks by his daily walks, he described an ideal based on the limited inferences and intuitions of the mind.
Yet the mind alone cannot register the shakes and tremors which cause men to quake, nor can the predict, document, or turn the tremors of the human psyche, prone to fears and tremblings when there are none. An intense hypochondriac until his dying days, Kant imagine the good and the bad, never understanding their truth as finite realities.
We do not live in a world of the mind, nor is the world my idea. Enlightenment that challenges mankind's narrow notions of knowing everything casts a pure light on limited reason. Unlimited deference to deranged, fallen imagination invites a hell on earth, unequaled to the Soviet collectivization efforts, the identity politics which scuttle meaningful discussion and retard the individual advancement of a human being, and restrain the natural impulses of the individual, who in his heart will not believe in a world without purpose, yet of himself cannot ascertain its dimension of direction.
Enlightenment sheds light on the times and treasures of times past, which led us to the mountain of experience. We survey the wilderness and the Promised Land, yet we must humble accept the divine guidance of our Creator, the one who put in place the wonders which we ponder and wander about.
To insist on living on our own "inner light", trusting to blindreason, is to fall into a ditch, forever ignoring the beautiful path laid out by others before us, beckoning us forward in trust, not in treachery.
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