Rebooting the Enlightenment in the Age of Trump

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Historian and Stanford Humanities Center Director Caroline Winterer will participate in a panel discussion at the Commonwealth Club called Monday Night Philosophy.

The program considers the variety of ways scholars are, or should be, responding to the gradual shift in norms in public discourse that social media has wrought—a shift that sped up the day Donald Trump announced that he was running for president in June 2015. Standards that have been taken for granted for many decades, with rare breaches proving the unwritten rule, seem to have disappeared overnight.

This panel will discuss how enlightenment values might regain the upper hand, resulting in political leaders who at least nominally favor rational discussion, facts, scientific explanations and social policies devoted to the greater good.