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So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything? The Great Famine of 1315-1322 so thoroughly devastated Western and Central Europe that some populations were even reduced to cannibalism and mass infanticide. And don’t even get me started on all the skulls from the medieval wars of religion, the Crusades, the Roman wars of Conquest, the wars against the Mongols and Huns, etc. (And, of course, that’s just in Europe; much of the pre-Enlightenment non-European world comes out looking even worse.)
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
Weather and disease did not cause Stalin's purges.
Surely you can only blamed in what you had a hand in creating.
There are indeed many reasons to dislike the products of the Enlightenment that aren't based on quantifiable suffering, I find Ted Kaczynski's reasons to be the most convincing myself, but it is perfectly sufficient to judge it as a failure on its own terms.
But if a direct result of the Enlightenment is that states developed the ability to far more easily counteract the ill effects of weather and disease, then shouldn’t pre-Enlightenment societies be held accountable for not developing those same capacities? Weather and disease kill an order of magnitude less people in modern times than they did in premodern times, and it’s not because weather has gotten any better, nor that diseases no longer exist. We’re simply able to deal with them far, far more effectively than we were before. Sure, in some sense technological and medical progress do not necessarily need to go hand-in-hand with liberal/individualist philosophical development. However, the fruits of technological and medical progress can only be broadly distributed by a state with the sort of top-down centralized capacity which the Enlightenment paradigm facilitates.
Ah but if we do that, then shouldn't we also hold enlightenment societies responsible for advancing society to the point where there were millions more people on the planet to get killed in famines? If they hadn't industrialised they wouldn't have had population booms that introduced a lot more people into society, which would have meant the crazy policies would have killed fewer people!
I mean I actually do think that a bad outcome of the Enlightenment is that it led to overpopulation, particularly of populations groups which are not cut out for industrialized modernity. I’m not as big a booster for the Enlightenment as my posts today might indicate; I believe that the Enlightenment focused too much on the inalienable intrinsic moral dignity and importance of each individual human life; this was due to those philosophers operating in a very homogenous context.
With the common knowledge we have now, not only of HBD but also of the unarguable fact that we have (at the very least) millions of human individuals walking among us who are totally incapable of empathy, rational behavior, and forethought, we can see that at least one aspect of the Enlightenment was based on faulty/incomplete premises. That doesn’t require us to scrap the whole edifice, but it does obligate us to at least reconsider and correct for those particular weaknesses. (Yes, my primary criticism of the Enlightenment is in many ways the popular opposite of the mainstream conservative criticism, insofar as I believe that we actually care too much about individual liberties and the sanctity of human life.)
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Given we don't possess a control group Earth that never discovered Bourgeois Dictatorship, I don't think it's that easy an argument to make. I'm not sure how the Industrial Revolution would have turned out if the French Revolution failed.
But that doesn't really matter inasmuch as the Enlightenment's promise was to have all that without the mass death and without dissolving individual liberty.
Like sure, I credit the Soviets for going to space and industrializing Russia, they did do that. But they still failed and produced something that was ultimately unsustainable. I don't see Liberalism's whole run as very different from that.
Had you shown every contributor to the Encyclopedie the world that they would create, would they burn the book or write it with even more enthusiasm? I'm not really sure.
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Oh, they certain count... as support for Enlightenment paradigm when you lack an anchronistic (future-history) basis of comparison.
Pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls were demonstrative of a lack of Enlightenment. Failures in the early Enlightenment were proof of insufficient enlightenment. These are common knowledge that make Enlightenment paradigms look good- after all, no Enlightenment movement had ever done such a thing!
If you're hearing the echo of 'real Enlightenment governance has never been tried,' that's not a coincidence.
Only a common knowledge of the historically unprecedented size of the mountains of skulls that Enlightenment-states could reason themselves into would credibly counter-balance a belief that Enlightened people wouldn't create mountains of skulls like those un-Enlightened barbarians. That is the relevance of the WW1 and WW2 common knowledge. It was a forced entry of common knowledge that, yes, civilized enlightened Europeans absolutely would create mountains of skulls. Enlightened despots would make skull piles on par with or greater than the un-enlightened savages of history, and use Enlightenment themes and principles to lead the publics to slaughter.
But that common knowledge was impossible in the late 1700s when the Americans were forming a state. Because the downsides of the enlightenment, first demonstrated at scale in the French Revolution, hadn't occurred yet.
It would be common knowledge now, however. Which is why @FCfromSSC says
The common knowledge is how the Enlightenment can go off the rails. Had that been known at the time, the American experiment would have proceeded differently on the basis of that (impossible) knowledge.
The Enlightenment regimes don't have to be worse. Equivalence can be just as damning. Equivalence brings into question the value of adopting an explicitly enlightenment model/approach to government as an unproven experiment. The point of the experiment is to lead to different, not equivalent, results / acts of despotism.
If pre-Constitution common knowledge had included things like 'the Enlightenment-camp can rationalize class-based persecution as a necessity and morally justified means of social reform,' the merchant-class that was heavily involved in American government formation would probably not have agreed to as much Enlightenment influence at their own potential expense.
These may have been the dark side derivatives of the enlightenment, but there are pretty direct arguments for how each and every one of these historical arguments can tie into various themes and expectations of enlightenment thinkers. It may be in 'that's not what we meant / wanted' forms, but that's a matter of uncontrolled / unpredicted ideological evolution, not a dispute of descent.
The uncontrolled / unintended / unpredicted failure-mode evolutions of the Enlightenment are what are common knowledge today, but not in the past.
I’m not even sure that’s what they demonstrate. I’d argue that they’re more a result of lack of state capacity, and of a lack of alternate methods of adjudicating international disputes.
Sure, we now know that states ostensibly influenced by the Enlightenment are still capable of waging massively destructive wars, at least under certain circumstances. If that’s supposed to discredit the entire philosophical undertaking, then I’m not sure what it would take to rehabilitate it in your eyes. It is, though, a fact that since the end of WWII — a duration of 80 years — the world has enjoyed the most consistently peaceful, prosperous unbroken period in human history. How much longer would such a period need to persist before you’re willing to admit that the Enlightenment is working out well for us? You can always point to the World Wars as a failure mode or black mark on modernity, but surely you have to compare how things actually look over time, instead of hyper-focusing on one very bad, but historically very brief, period.
If it can be shown that, as @self_made_human points out, the Enlightenment has produced incredible flourishing of life-saving technology, peace-facilitating international institutions, prosperity via reliable trade, and general improvement of quality of life for rank-and-file individuals worldwide, then it seems extremely shortsighted to criticize the Enlightenment for failing to be perfect. It’s like people who criticize rationalists for falling short of perfect rationality; okay, fine at least we’re making an effort! Have you seen how much worse the rest of you are doing?!
I think a lot of criticism of the Enlightenment come down to a sort of Traditionalism of the Gaps. You take for granted all of the positive aspects of modernity which you’d be loath to give up, yet pile criticism onto the relatively small number of kinks which Enlightenment rationalists haven’t yet been able to solve.
They're bigger kinks than you imply I think, but I do agree with your overall point. Except about rationalists, who it seems to me do better than 'common sense' thinkers in some areas and much worse in others, particularly when other people are involved, and on average they're about par. But that's another benefit of liberalism - now that we can recognise this flaw and stop putting rationalism on a pedestal we can work to change it. That is the unstated project of the Trump campaign imo, and it will mean rationalists having to put up with some blatantly stupid policies and ideas, but that actually isn't any different from the previous state of affairs, the stupidity was just harder for rationalists to see.
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If I concede you this point in its totality, that yours is the interpretation they would take from common knowledge, would you then still say the American experiment would have been conducted in the same way?
I am going to skip forward a moment here-
-and remind / prod you to remember the context of whose lack of current common knowledge is supposed to shape their decision. The people who would have to make the same decisions even with the advantage of the ahistorical common knowledge are the American founding fathers, not me. That would be 18th century merchant-class elites who identified with their home states more than a common american nationality that wouldn't exist for another hundred years or so.
If the common knowledge of the 20th century totalitarianism was as a descendent of the enlightenment was that 'this can be avoided if we give the state more capacity to centralize power and adjudicate inter-state disputes', do you think the then-independent states of the proto-United States would nod and agree to give up their sovereignty even harder, or do you think their delegations would have run from the negotiating chambers screaming? And then formed their own defense pacts against what was left of the early United States lest it impose such graciousness on them in the name of the common good?
Many of the compromises in the early American government were done to prevent a strong central government dominated by their political/economic rivals. This is why the Senate exists, to equalize power between weak and large states. This is why the 3/5ths compromise on the electoral power from slaves exists, to moderate the ability to dictate influence over interstate commerce rules development. This is why the bill of rights adds several more restrictions to boot, even though an argument against them is that they were so common-sense they shouldn't be needed.
Even then the formation of the American state as we know it was a near-run thing for already being too strong. The founders were fully cognizant of the benefits of centralized power. They were also highly distrustful of others having it over them. Half of the early government formation negotiations entailed some variation of 'that will never happen, that's crazy!'
Why, specifically, should such a group of power-sensitive, self-interested, and future-minded elites who had to be convinced this new government wouldn't one day overtake them give it more power, rather than less, in the name of avoiding... the consequences of too much state capacity and potential for abuse unless given?
Why would they not just re-look the Articles of Confederation, and go 'maybe we should just stick with that and tweak it instead'?
An awareness of the common knowledge of the Enlightenment's failure doesn't mean that the self-interested power-concerned slave-holders suddenly become 21st century progressives, anymore than knowledge of WW1 would mean George Washington would reverse his 'nah, don't get involved when the Europeans are killing themselves' stance.
Edit Cutting off later responses because they didn't really add much.
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