A possible dark side to the Enlightenment and the criticisms from the politically correct pundits.

In spite of Wilson's faith in the Enlightenment and its intellectual project in favor of human progress, he is fully aware of its own problems and limitations. It is, in other words, a critical support that he provides:

The Enlightenment gave rise to the modern intellectual tradition of the West and much of its culture. (...) The causes of the Enlightenment's decline, which persist to the present day, illuminate the labyrinthine wellsprings of human motivation. It is worth asking, particularly in the present winter of our cultural discontent, whether the original spirit of the Enlightenment —confidence, optimism, eyes to the horizon— can be regained. And to ask in honest opposition, should it be regained, or did it possess in its first conception, as some have suggested, a dark-angelic flaw?

(...)

It has become fashionable to speak of the Enlightenment as an idiosyncratic construction by European males in a bygone era, one way of thinking among many different contructions generated across time by a legion of other minds in other cultures, each of which deserves careful and respectful attention. To which the only decent response is yes, of course —to a point. Creative thought is forever precious, and all knowledge has value. But what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality, not sentiment.

(Edward O. Wilson: pp. 21-22)

The second paragraph is directly aimed at those who defend the politically correct. Yes, it has been mainly white men who contributed to Western culture but, then, how could it have been otherwise in a traditional society dominated precisely by... well, white men? And what does that mean, exactly? What does it imply? Does a tree still fall in the forst if we don't hear it? Is a particular scientific theory perhaps not correct simply because it was discovered or laid out by an "old white man"? Are we truly so brain-dead that we have managed to politicize every single field of human activity? We can call what happened in 1492 a "discovery", a "meeting point", an "accident", a "crash of civilizations" or whatever anyone sees fit. We can also stress that the Vikings, the Celts or some advanced extraterrestrial culture settled down in America before Chistopher Columbus and his men arrived that year, but that still doesn't change the fact that it wasn't until 1492 that a permanent and continuous relationship between both sides of the Atlantic started. As Wilson points out, it's seminality that matters, and not our sentiments.