The Enlightenment’s values of reason, progress, and autonomy are still championed by many in the West. But as Aviva Chomsky argues in this interview with the IAI, the way the Enlightenment project intersected with European colonialism meant that these values were used, and continue to be used, for the exploitation of natural resources and the Global South, animating today’s climate crisis.

Aviva Chomsky will be giving a talk on The Specter of the Enlightenment, as part in this month’s IAI Live, November 6, on The Spirit of West: Promise and Peril, featuring a debate between Steven Pinker and John Mearsheimer on The Enlightenment and its Alternatives.  

You’ve argued that the climate crisis has deeper roots than we usually acknowledge, going all the way back hundreds of years, to the Enlightenment or even earlier. How can events that happened hundreds of years ago, long before the industrial revolution and the rise of CO2 emissions, have affected the climate crisis of today?

Rather than tracing the climate crisis specifically to the Enlightenment, I’d place it in the 500-year context of European global expansion, which intersected with the Enlightenment in various ways.