Conclusion

Abstract

Imagine a society devoid of Enlightenment-based ideals, values, and institutions, a world in which the eighteenth century European Enlightenment never happened or was extinguished by, for example, burning and banning its books, arts, and other intellectual works, as precisely was done by the anti-Enlightenment like Nazism and American conservatism (Hull 1999). In essence, this is the world of the Dark Middle Ages universalized in Western society and self-perpetuated into the relative infinity of millennia in the form of millennial theocracy a la “God’s Kingdom on Earth” or at least the long durée of centuries (Braudel 1979). It is either symbolized in the original form by the “holy” Catholic Inquisition and Puritan “Salem with witches” or in a modified shape after the image of an Orwellian dystopia of darkness, dissent and sin as crime, tyranny, persecution, human misery, permanent war cum peace, mass death, and ultimately total self-destruction as the path to “heaven” and “salvation,” as committed or prefigured by pre- and anti-Enlightenment religious sects and cults in America and elsewhere.