Someone had an aweful lot of fun making this. The concepts discussed are too out of tune with the present... only discussing past and future.

They say in order to solve your problems you must first define them which this video starts to do but some of the assurtions are wrong or miss directed yes having people with empathy is important but without education they will not know why they fell the way they do. Something advertizers have known for years. freedom justice equality are lofty goals but we can reach them he expresses that knowing where your going is as important and what you have done. And I say he is right but that is infact what lofty goals are for! they are not next day done they are a struggle to reach. Education in it's present form is not the answer but if we had a system of education that taught knowledge and skill that you need in the real world not just a test you take we would all be better for it a system that gives you the skill to do anything that is true power!

I can't really disagree with the speaker in this video, as he does acknowledge that what he's critiquing is more what are widely considered today to be Enlightenment values than the Enlightenment - far too diverse, as he points out, to be reduced to a single set of values - itself. What I find interesting is how the Enlightenment has come to be thought of in the general culture - particularly the idea that utilitarianism, individualism, and the idea of pure rationality are at the heart of it. The physiocrats, the economists (in the 18th century sense of the term), the materialists, the utilitarians were certainly part of the Enlightenment, but not the only part, and not even necessarily the most important part.

I won't bother setting up the usual oppositions (ie, Rousseau might have believed that people are naturally atomized, but Locke believed we are naturally social beings; Mandeville might have believed in the virtue of markets, but Mably certainly didn't; etc.) because the video already points out that the Enlightenment was varied, but I will warn against throwing out the entire Enlightenment because of what we perceive to be a unique set of values emerging from it. We can still learn a lot from the Enlightenment.

(Indulge me with one last juxtaposition. If we throw out the entire Enlightenment because we don't like, say, utilitarianism, then, ironically we're throwing out concepts that utilitarianism had no use for, but which are also a legacy of the Enlightenment. Human rights, for example. The utilitarian Jeremy Bentham called them "nonsense upon stilts." I for one am not willing to give up on them in order to rethink Bentham. (How would that even make sense?))

I think the problem with "Enlightenment" values is that the discussions tend to center notions like civil society, civil rights, democracy, etc. in a Eurocentric context - as though these ideas sprung fully formed solely from the minds of great male European philosophers (the Haitian Revolution, for example, is most frequently ignored while the American and French revolutions are considered benchmarks - and when the Haitian Revolution is discussed it is considered as though it solely derived from the French Revolution and not due to African agency.) For example, we celebrate "250 years of Democracy in North America" as though democracy were not present in the Iroquois confederacy that long predated European ideals. And of course, these great Enlightenment values and philosophers co-existed with slavery - as Dave Chappelle once said "All men are created equal - now n--- go fetch me a sandwich." And of course, at issue is that we want to believe that if Europeans created chattel slavery and colonialism, etc. we can still find the solution for these things in the same values that created them - so that we are supposed to still believe in Enlightenment ideals because "the idea of civil rights derives from them" etc. (This is why most movies on civil rights focus on white lawyers in the courtroom - the idea is that even though white people may be responsible for segregation, in the end enlightened white values on justice are still the solution.)

RSAnimate videos are entertaining, but am I the only one who's slightly put off by egregious underrepresentation of women in this film and others? Among dozens and dozens cartoon men I only counted 13-15 women and out of them, one was wearing a niqab, one was being used as a footstool, one was squeezing her breasts on TV.