Two Enlightenments, Two Paths
One God
The following continues the thread we’ve been tracing — the lineage of the Enlightenment, its logic and its reason, and how that inheritance shapes our present.
Part one below:
Human(e) Reason(s) - Part 1
The following is a long-form exploration that I originally drafted as an 11-part series. I used ChatGPT to help structure it that way, so each section stands alone like a chapter in a blog-book, formatted for mass consumption. I’m not saying that’s what I prefer, but it’s what the market demands — and like any beast, the market wants what it wants.
Part two below :
Human(e) Reason(s) - Part 2
The following is a continuation of our thread picking apart some of larger philosophical currents from antiquity into our brave new world in the hopes that humanity can survive the transition with the right mission statement.
In this third part, we zoom in on the split itself: two Enlightenments, two paths — and why only one leaves room for rights that endure.
When people speak of “the Enlightenment,” they often imagine a single movement: the Age of Reason, the dawn of modernity, the birth of liberal democracy. But in truth, there were two Enlightenments, and their legacies could not be more different.
The Scottish and American Path: Liberty Anchored in Faith
In Britain — especially Scotland — the Enlightenment was marked by empiricism, skepticism, and a pragmatic spirit. Figures like John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid emphasized observation, reasonableness, and the value of institutions. Their approach was less abstract and more grounded in experience.
When transplanted to America, this pragmatic Enlightenment mingled with the radical dissenting Protestantism of the colonies. Sermons, almanacs, and Scripture were more influential than Voltaire or Rousseau. This was not the sign of an “unphilosophical” culture, as some academics have sneered, but the foundation of a different kind of philosophy: one that grounded human dignity and rights in the transcendent.
Thus, when Jefferson wrote of “unalienable rights” endowed by a Creator, he was not indulging in sentimentality — he was articulating the distinctive genius of the American strand of Enlightenment thought. Rights were not granted by kings, nor manufactured by institutions, but given by God. This is why they could not be taken away.
The French Path: Reason Unmoored
Across the Channel, in France, the Enlightenment looked very different. Voltaire, Rousseau, and their heirs elevated Reason to an almost divine status, severed from revelation and tradition. The Church was the enemy. Institutions were corrupt relics. Society itself needed to be remade from scratch.
This rationalist utopianism bore fruit in the French Revolution: bloody, absolutist, and intolerant. What began as a revolt against tyranny became a new tyranny, this time in the name of Reason. The guillotine replaced the altar. Later revolutions — the Bolsheviks in Russia, the CCP in China — followed a similar pattern, discarding God and enthroning ideology, producing oppression on a staggering scale.
Today’s Echo: Managerial Utopianism
What we see in our own age is not the legacy of the Scottish-American Enlightenment, but of the French-Russian-CCP trajectory. Secular humanism, wedded to managerial rationalism, seeks to “solve” humanity itself. Whether under the banner of Agenda 2030, the WEF’s Great Reset, or bio-digital convergence, the pattern is the same: experts and elites claim the authority to reorganize life, dismissing faith as backward and the masses as sentimental.
But history’s warning is clear. Enlightenment unmoored from revelation does not liberate — it destroys. What began as a revolt against superstition hardens into a new orthodoxy, intolerant of mystery, coercive in practice, and blind to its own hubris.
Why It Matters
To lump all Enlightenment thought together is to miss this critical fork in the road. America’s founding documents were not Voltaire’s bastards; they were the offspring of a marriage between empiricism and faith, pragmatism and revelation.
To recover that heritage is to see that rights are not the product of bureaucrats or global managers. They are not negotiable, not adjustable to the demands of “science” or “sustainability.” They are, as the Founders insisted, unalienable — because they were given, not made.
That is precisely why they remain the surest defence against the new rationalist utopias of our age.
But pointing to ‘God’ as a rhetorical anchor isn’t enough. Too many writers are captivated by the notion that the material ideas of man neatly harmonize with a metaphysical Creator—without asking which one.
How you conceptualize God determines the outcome. Not all gods are created equal. In the material world, the god you worship sets the terms of what counts as human, as good, as free.
The distinction isn’t just between liberty and tyranny, or between reason and superstition. It’s about what liberty is ordered toward, and who (or what) has the authority to ground it.
Liberty endures only when it is ordered to something higher than the state—and answerable to Someone the state cannot replace.
1. Ordered Liberty vs. Liberation Without Ends
Ordered Liberty (Scottish-American model) assumes that freedom is not the absence of constraint, but the ability to live in alignment with a higher law — one given, not invented. This is why the Founders could write of liberty and virtue in the same breath: freedom was meaningful only when tethered to justice, conscience, and God-given rights.
Unmoored Liberty (French-Continental model) treats freedom as liberation from all authority, including divine authority. But once you strip away the transcendent anchor, liberty becomes little more than an endless struggle of ideologies — each claiming to be the new lawgiver.
That’s why the secular project always ends in rivalry between “isms.” It cannot rest, because without an ultimate lawgiver, there is no final court of appeal.
2. The “Principalities and Powers” Problem
What we’re describing — liberty without transcendence devolving into ideological warfare — echoes St. Paul’s insight: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers…” (Ephesians 6:12).
When societies reject the Lawgiver, they don’t get “neutral ground.” They get a battlefield where rival principalities — technocracy, nationalism, Marxism, transhumanism, secular humanism — compete to enthrone themselves as gods. Each demands sacrifice. Each produces its own priesthood (the managerial class). Each turns “liberty” into service to another master.
3. The Infinite Substitutes for the Divine
As the search for substitutes is relentless:
Outer space: deifying extraterrestrials or “cosmic intelligence.”
Inner space: worshiping psychology, subjective experience, or self-expression.
Post-human space: elevating AI, evolution, or technology itself as the new higher order.
These are all counterfeit metaphysics. They reduce humanity to parts in a machine or nodes in a network. They demand sacrifices (privacy, freedom, even life) but cannot give meaning.
4. Jesus’ Correction
Against all this stands Christ’s radical claim: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). In other words:
The Lawgiver is not found in nature, ideology, or technocratic systems.
Liberty is not freedom to chase every earthly desire but freedom from the powers that enslave — sin, death, and the endless cycle of false gods.
Human dignity is not earned by evolution, intellect, or progress. It is bestowed because each person bears the image of God.
This is why the Sermon on the Mount is so foundational. It reorients liberty: not liberation from law, but freedom through love, humility, mercy, and truth.
Without Jesus as the Lawgiver, liberty degenerates into war among principalities. With Him, liberty becomes ordered toward flourishing, rooted in revealed Truth that transcends human reason.
Our Rights Endure Only so Long as We Remember the Story that Made them Plausible
Holland, the Cross, and Why “Secular” Isn’t Neutral
If you want to know why “rights” in the West feel self-evident, start at the cross. As Tom Holland shows, crucifixion was Rome’s billboard: raw power humiliating the powerless. Christianity flipped that script and made the victim the moral reference point. That inversion seeded our instincts about dignity, mercy, equality, and the duty to protect the weak.
It also birthed something else we treat as obvious: a secular sphere—Augustine’s “two cities,” Jesus’ “render unto Caesar.” That separation is not a universal human constant; it’s a Christian artifact. When moderns say, “Leave religion out of politics,” they’re speaking Christian without knowing it.
Now remove the theology and keep the reflex. You get a moralized politics that behaves like a church without a creed. 2020 looked less like a rupture and more like a reformation without scripture: public penance, iconoclasm, liturgies of guilt—Christian forms cut loose from Christian content. The energy remained; the ballast went missing.
This matters for the “two Enlightenments.” The Scottish/British strand could coexist with churches because its moral soil was already Christian; it produced ordered liberty. The French strand tried to make Reason the new altar; it produced a moral engine with fewer brakes. If rights are “given,” they outrank the state. If they’re made, the state can unmake them—especially when cloaked in benevolent science.
That’s the hinge to AI: either our systems answer to a moral order we didn’t invent, or they default to the priorities of whoever holds the levers. That’s not an argument for theocracy; it’s a reminder (Holland’s point) that our freedom rides on a story older than the state—and (our point) deeper than fashion.
Tucker Carlson Explodes the Twin Towers of Secrecy
If the Enlightenment’s best inheritance is ordered liberty under moral limits, then our worst habit is managerial secrecy justified by ‘expertise.’ Tucker Carlson’s new interview with Piers Morgan is a live test: not of one man’s theories, but of whether a free people can demand truth without being smeared or seduced by speculation.
Watch for: (a) legitimate transparency demands, (b) leaps from fact to inference, (c) moral claims about protecting innocents that should bind all sides.
Ask: What would count as sufficient disclosure in a republic? What limits should bind state power even after an atrocity? Who decides?
The above video is something people are ready for thanks to the “Covid" years as mentioned by Morgan. Government overreach opened more eyes but additionally created an explosive political environment. The above features claims under active dispute; included here to examine the civic questions of transparency, proportionality, and moral limits.
The main points are well taken:
Transparency builds trust - secrecy increases social unrest
Killing innocents is always wrong, and playing God morphs into a calculation in a world without one.
Define terrorism precisely, lest you become the terrorist.
Hat tip Patrick Wood for drawing my attention to the next video we’ll be discussing.
From Ideas to Infrastructure: How the Managerial State Got an OS
If the last section traced how “reason without reverence” evolved into managerial power, this video shows you its operating system. Palantir isn’t just a contractor; it’s the template for how surveillance, decision-automation, and warfighting tools get privatized, normalized, and then universalized—from counterterrorism to HR, from battlefield targeting to hospital ops.
What Vanessa Wingårdh does well in her video is capture the symptomology of our age: the way one company — Palantir — has become woven into the very sinews of government, warfighting, and corporate life. Her style is sharp, almost cinematic, and the story lands with force: a surveillance Leviathan wrapped in slick branding.
But here’s the irony: she’s still working within the same categories that created the thing she fears. She blames government overreach, corporate greed, and the ambition of people like Alex Karp. Those are real forces, yes, but they are not the root. They are only the fruit of a deeper problem: when a civilization forgets where its rights come from, it inevitably hands them over to managers, machines, and metrics.
That’s why Karp sounds so unnerving. It’s not because he is especially wicked. It’s because he is especially logical. Strip the soil of its transcendent foundation, and the rational managers will do exactly what Palantir has done: build the perfect machine to track, predict, and “manage” human beings — because what else is there to do with us?
Wingårdh packages this as a cautionary tale about corporate capture. But to my eyes, it is something older and larger: the Enlightenment dream of “total information,” reborn as software. Descartes gave us the Cartesian split; the rationalists believed the world could be mapped, ordered, and mastered; the French Revolution gave us the technocratic will-to-power. Palantir is not an aberration — it is the natural child of that lineage.
And that’s why her closing question is the right one, even if she didn’t mean it to be: what’s the solution? Not better audits, or more congressional hearings, or swapping one contractor for another. The solution is remembering that rights are not made by data flows, not negotiated by elites, not “given” by governments. They were given by God.
If we forget that, then Gotham becomes our gospel. If we remember it, then even the most sophisticated platforms must be ordered to serve human dignity — not replace it.
We’ve written about Palantir here before, but not just to say what it is—we’ve been asking why it’s ascended now. The answer lives upstream of code and contracts: it’s about which “Enlightenment” we’ve chosen and what happens when transcendence is swapped for management.
From Diagnosis to First Principles: Peterson, Thiel, and the Two Enlightenments
Wingårdh’s montage puts a harsh light on Palantir’s reach. Fair. But the more important question—our question—has always been why the world is making room for Palantir in the first place. That takes us out of the product demo and into the metaphysics of a civilization that feels both exhausted and endangered.
This is where the Peterson–Thiel conversation matters. Thiel’s unfashionable claim—that progress in the world of atoms stalled while the world of bits sprinted ahead—lands because we can all sense the apocalyptic mood: power without ballast, speed without aim, safetyism choking risk, and an ambient intuition that our tools are outpacing our souls. Peterson supplies the anthropological depth (mimesis, status contagion, the madness of crowds) and the moral grammar (forgiveness vs. purification), while Thiel points at the historical hinge: sometime after Apollo and before the present, we swapped an outward-facing civilizational confidence for an inward turn, then tried to run a society on abstraction alone.
That swap exposes the rift I’ve called the “Two Enlightenments.”
One lineage (call it Bacon-to-Bunker) treats knowledge as leverage toward mastery: the world as instrument, man as manager:
Francis Bacon (1561–1626): the emblematic figure of the “instrumental” Enlightenment. Bacon’s Novum Organum reframed science as power: “knowledge is power”. His program was not contemplation of truth for its own sake, but the systematic harnessing of nature for human ends. Bacon stands at the fountainhead of the Enlightenment lineage that equates rationality with mastery.
Nuclear Bunker (20th century): the endpoint of that same logic. The rational mastery of atoms gave us the bomb, and the bomb gave us the shelter — a society organized around survival, calculation, and managerial control. “The bunker” here is symbolic: the last stop on a trajectory where rationalism, unmoored from transcendence, produces fear-driven technocracy.
So “Bacon to Bunker” compresses that story: from knowledge as mastery → science as power → rational control of human destiny, culminating in a world where reason serves not truth but survival.
The other (call it Monastery-to-Modernity) insists the world is intelligible because it is created, and that knowledge is stewardship under judgment, not an escape from it:
The Monastery (Middle Ages): In the popular imagination, monasteries were “dark,” but in reality they preserved and cultivated learning after Rome’s collapse. Monks copied manuscripts, catalogued herbs, tracked the stars, and systematized agriculture. Their work flowed from a theological conviction: creation is ordered by a rational God, and so it can be studied, named, and trusted. The monastery represents faith as a seedbed of reason.
The Scholastic University (12th–15th centuries): Out of monasteries grew cathedral schools and eventually universities like Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. Scholasticism (think Thomas Aquinas) insisted that faith and reason are not enemies: both derive from the same divine Logos. This institutionalization of inquiry — disputations, syllogisms, commentary traditions — built the framework of modern disciplines.
The Scientific Revolution (16th–17th centuries): The transition from scholastic theology to empirical science wasn’t a revolt against Christianity but an extension of its confidence in intelligibility. Kepler, Galileo, Newton — all assumed that mathematical laws reflected divine order. Their vision of ordered liberty in nature was inseparable from their faith in a law-giving Creator.
Modernity (18th century onward): When the Enlightenment flowered in the British and Scottish context, it carried forward this monastic heritage. Ordered liberty in politics (Locke, the American founders) paralleled ordered liberty in science (Bacon’s empiricism tempered by Christian metaphysics). Modern democratic institutions and modern science alike stand on a monastery-to-modernity trajectory.
So “Monastery to Modernity” names a lineage where transcendent conviction (God as Logos) → nourishes institutions of learning → births empirical science → grounds a political order of ordered liberty.
It’s the counterpoint to the “Bacon to Bunker” arc: one trajectory cultivates liberty in order, the other slides into power as control.
When the second is eclipsed by the first, we keep the machinery of reason, but we lose its limit. Rights keep their silhouette but shed their Source. The vacuum is filled—inevitably—by managers.
Seen through that lens, “Palantir” isn’t just a firm; it’s the institutionalized instinct of a culture that no longer trusts persons but still needs judgment. So it builds a judgment layer. It operationalizes suspicion at scale. And because the metaphysics underneath has gone thin, we mistake precision for prudence and audit trails for absolution. Thiel hints at the trap; Peterson names the cure.
Thiel hints at the trap:
Thiel’s brilliance lies in seeing what most technocrats miss: that the means of Enlightenment rationality can slide into its own cage. He often warns that when reason detaches from transcendence, you don’t get “neutral science,” you get managerial control — a world where systems replace souls. His obsession with declining innovation, the sclerosis of institutions, and the dominance of “indefinite optimism” is another way of saying: we’ve mistaken rational technique for moral telos. That is the trap — the Bacon-to-bunker arc, where technics, unchecked, promise control but deliver sterility.
Peterson names the cure:
Peterson, for all his psychological and clinical framing, keeps returning to a singular prescription: orient yourself toward the transcendent good, embodied in the Logos. His mantra — “pick up your cross,” “speak the truth,” “order your soul before you order the world” — is a modern translation of the Sermon on the Mount into existential terms. Where Thiel diagnoses the impasse, Peterson prescribes the medicine: without a transcendent anchor (Truth with a capital T), liberty dissolves into license, and systems collapse under their own contradictions.
So the short form means:
Thiel sees the cage we’ve built.
Peterson shows the way out — through Christ-shaped transcendence.
Both, in different keys, point back to transcendence as the only thing that can keep freedom from curdling into purification or power into domination.
Which is why this next move matters. If Wingårdh gives us the alarm, Peterson and Thiel give us the map: a way to name the apocalyptic mood without baptizing technocracy. They remind us that when the Alpha is forgotten, we invent new Omegas—“freedom from” (purification by subtraction) and “freedom to” (perfection by augmentation). Both are managerial. Both require Leviathan. Neither can ground inalienable rights.
Enter Alex Karp
Karp is fascinating precisely because he straddles diagnosis and instrument. He sees the rot—our unserious elites, unserious borders, unserious standards—and he wants to defend a West he still believes is worth defending. He speaks the language of merit and responsibility in an age that punishes both. But as we’ll see, he reaches—almost must reach—for a remedy that is quintessentially materialist: encode judgment, instrument precision, and trust the stack. It is the best version of the first Enlightenment’s impulse. It is also where the Christian grammar becomes non-negotiable.
So in the following section, we’ll listen carefully to Karp on borders, on Gaza, on merit, on the “new paganism” in our institutions—and mark both where he’s right and where the ground drops out beneath his feet.
After that, we’ll distill the moral architecture we actually need going forward—what I’ll frame as freedom from, freedom to, and, finally, freedom for. Only the last—ordered liberty anchored in the Giver of rights—can keep us from enthroning Leviathan as purifier or as amplifier. And only there do love, forgiveness, and restraint from judgment stop being pieties and become the operating system of a humane society in the age of AI.
From, To, For
One of the things that keeps getting lost in these discussions is that Enlightenment rationality was never neutral. It always carried with it a hidden grammar, a trajectory — a “from,” a “to,” and a “for.”
From: The Enlightenment was born from Christian soil. Its great project assumed a universe ordered by a Creator, intelligible to human reason because Logos had already imprinted that order into creation. Science was not conjured from thin air; it was a reform within Christendom, an attempt to understand God’s world more deeply.
To: But over time, the Enlightenment redirected itself to other ends. First, to the liberation of man from the tyranny of superstition and church. Then to liberation from monarchy. Then to liberation from gender, from tradition, from nature itself. Each “to” became progressively more radical, until freedom itself was hollowed out — no longer “ordered liberty,” but liberation without limits.
For: And here is the crux. If liberty is not ordered for something higher, it collapses into new forms of bondage. For the Jacobins, liberty was for the Republic of Virtue — and the guillotine. For the Marxists, liberty was for the classless society — and the gulag. For today’s technocrats, liberty is for “safety,” “sustainability,” “progress” — and the digital cage of managerial surveillance.
The cycle repeats: what begins in the name of liberation always ends in Leviathan. Because once you abandon the transcendent “for” — the God who gave rights, the Logos who orders liberty — the vacuum gets filled by power. And power never stays disinterested.
We’ve already looked at Alex Karp as a living case study of this trajectory — part diagnostician, part engineer of Leviathan. The question now is not whether men like Karp will build, but whether the rest of us can recover the grammar to order liberty for something higher than management.