We have recently seen a spate of books defending the Enlightenment, the period of efflorescence in 18th-century Europe that helped shape the modern world.
At the vanguard has been the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who titled his most recent monument to scientific progress Enlightenment Now. The book earned Bill Gates’s endorsement but was widely criticised by historians since it was not an assessment of the Enlightenment at all, but a compilation of data showing us why life was now better than ever.
Other advocates have been more subtle, stressing that what set the Enlightenment apart from preceding eras was less its confidence in reason per se, than its focus on the secular (as opposed to the sacred) as the space in which happiness ought to be pursued and quite possibly achieved.
他们创造了历史，却毫无自觉_销售 sohu.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sohu.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Heart of Darkness to
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Western representations of Africa have been loaded with Orientalist stereotypes of hypersexuality, despotism, savagery and exoticism. In this post-colonialist epoch, many of these representations are routinely criticized and rightly so.
But somehow, if the actors lampooning Africa have a darker skin color, few people care. Take the 1988 film
Coming to America, and its recently released sequel,
Coming 2 America. Every imaginable colonialist trope is reproduced in these films, not least of which is Zamunda’s palace guards, who seem to be taken out of a Tarzan movie. And yet, the media gives Eddie Murphy and his crew a free pass.