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Have you seen the other piles of skulls? This argument always strikes me as curiously ahistorical. The notion that large scale human suffering began with the Enlightenment or its technocratic offspring ignores vast swathes of history. Pre Enlightenment societies were hardly bastions of peace and stability. Quite a few historical and pre Enlightenment massacres were constrained only by the fact that global and local populations were lower, and thus there were fewer people to kill. Caesar boasted of killing a million Gauls and enslaving another million, figures that were likely exaggerated but still indicative of the scale of brutality considered acceptable, even laudable. Genghis Khan's conquests resulted in demographic shifts so large they might have cooled the planet. The Thirty Years' War, fueled by religious certainty rather than technocratic rationalism, devastated Central Europe. The list goes on. Attributing mass death primarily to flawed Enlightenment ideals seems to give earlier modes of thought a pass they don't deserve. The tools got sharper and the potential victims more numerous in the 20th century, but the capacity for atrocity was always there.
The answer that seems entirely obvious to me is that if "good thoughts" lead to "bad outcomes," then it is probably worth interrogating what led you to think they were good in the first place. That is the only reasonable approach, as we lack a magical machine that can reason from first principles and guarantee that your ideas are sound in reality. Blaming the process of reason or the aspiration towards progress for the failures of specific, flawed ideologies seems like a fundamental error.
Furthermore, focusing solely on the failures conveniently ignores the overwhelming net positive impact. Yes, the application of science and reason gave us more efficient ways to kill, culminating in the horror of nuclear weapons. But you cannot have the promise of clean nuclear power without first understanding the atom, which I'm told makes you wonder what happens when a whole bunch of them blow up. More significantly, the same drive for understanding and systematic improvement gave us unprecedented advances in medicine, sanitation, agriculture, and communication. The Green Revolution, a direct result of applied scientific research, averted predicted Malthusian catastrophes and saved vastly more lives, likely numbering in the billions, than were lost in all the 20th century's ideologically driven genocides and famines combined. Global poverty has plummeted, lifespans have doubled, and literacy is nearing universality, largely thanks to the diffusion of technologies and modes of thinking traceable back to the Enlightenment's core tenets. To lament the downsides without acknowledging the staggering upsides is to present a skewed and ungrateful picture of the last few centuries. Myopic is the least I could call it.
It is also worth noting that virtually every major ideology that gained traction after the 1800s, whether liberal, socialist, communist, nationalist, or even reactionary, has been profoundly influenced by Enlightenment concepts. They might reject specific conclusions, but they often argue using frameworks of reason, historical progress (or regress), systematic analysis, and the potential for deliberate societal change that are themselves Enlightenment inheritances. This pervasiveness suggests the real differentiator isn't whether one uses reason, but how well and toward what ends it is applied.
Regarding the idea that the American founders might have changed course had they foreseen the 20th century, it's relevant that they did witness the early, and then increasingly radical, stages of the French Revolution firsthand. While the US Constitution was largely framed before the Reign of Terror (1793-94), the escalating violence and chaos in France deeply affected American political discourse in the 1790s. It served as a potent, real time cautionary tale. For Federalists like Hamilton and Adams, it confirmed their fears about unchecked democracy and mob rule, reinforcing their commitment to the checks and balances, and stronger central authority, already built into the US system. While Democratic Republicans like Jefferson initially sympathized more with the French cause, even they grew wary of the excesses. The French example didn't lead to fundamental structural changes in the established American government, but it certainly fueled partisan divisions and underscored, for many Founders, the importance of the safeguards they had already put in place against the very kind of revolutionary fervor that consumed France. They didn't need to wait for the 20th century to see how "good ideas" about liberty could curdle into tyranny and bloodshed; they had a disturbing preview next door. If they magically acquired a time machine, there's plenty about modernity that they would seek to transplant post-haste.
If a supposedly rational, technocratic plan leads to famine, the failure isn't proof that rationality itself is bankrupt. It's far more likely proof that the plan was based on faulty premises, ignored crucial variables (like human incentives or ecological realities), relied on bad data, or was perhaps merely a convenient rationalization for achieving power or pursuing inhumane goals. The catastrophic failures of Soviet central planning, for instance, stemmed not from an excess of good thinking, but from dogma overriding empirical feedback, suppression of dissent, and a profound disregard for individual human lives and motivations.
The lesson from the 20th century, and indeed from the French Revolution itself, isn't that we should abandon reason, progress, or trying to improve the human condition through thoughtful intervention. The lesson is that reason must be coupled with humility, empiricism, a willingness to course correct based on real world results, and a strong ethical framework that respects individual rights and well being. Pointing to the failures of totalitarian regimes that merely claimed the mantle of rationality and progress doesn't invalidate the core Enlightenment project. It merely highlights the dangers of dogmatic, unchecked power and the absolute necessity of subjecting our "good ideas" to constant scrutiny and real world testing. Throwing out the entire toolkit of reason because some people used hammers to smash skulls seems profoundly counterproductive. You can use hammers to put up houses, and we do.
Great post! I want to focus on a minor point you made:
Unlike the other two, literacy is not an undisputed good. It is a difficult mode of communication that takes years to learn, and about 1/5th of adults in the developed world never learn to read for comprehension. We prize literacy because, for now, it's required to navigate our society. Will that still be the case ten years from now, when your phone can text-to-speech anything you point it to, and will not only read it to you but also answer your follow-up questions voice-to-voice? (I already do this with languages I don't know, except I prefer to read the translations myself.)
It's still significant that literacy is so widespread in the world, because it implies that most people have the resources and the leisure to have their kids spend several years pursuing challenging training. Is this the best use of those children's time? I honestly don't know. I have greatly benefited from my ability to read and write, and I continue to prefer to do so even when I have alternatives: I would rather read a blog than listen to a podcast, and I would much rather read a book myself than listen to an audio-book. But I also know many people who prefer it the other way.
So, is literacy (that is, ability to read for comprehension) truly superior to other forms of recorded communication (audio-visual), and does this superiority justify the years of training one needs to master the skill?
Literacy also seems to contribute to poor memory skills* at a cultural level and, if overindulged in, poor eyesight at the individual level.
*unfortunately I suspect that replacing literacy with TikTok will make the problem better, not worse
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Verbal comprehension is, if anything, easier with the written word than with spoken words. You do lose a little subtext when you don't have body language and intonation cues, but on the other hand it's harder to backtrack to reevaluate confusing parts of a video. And either way, the hard part of comprehension isn't the part where you can translate squiggles to sounds in your head. People who can't correctly answer basic reading comprehension questions aren't going to become able to answer them because a phone reads them out loud. In cases where they realize they're misunderstanding, they might be able to straighten themselves out by asking the phone AI, but too often people don't know what they don't know.
I think where literacy greatly wins out isn't reading for comprehension, though, it's reading for speed, which makes it easy to filter what you read. I naturally read about 3x faster than a natural speaking rate, and I can speed read or at least skim about 6x faster. At those speed differences, reading is just a more profitable use of time than listening ever could be - I can investigate an interesting Motte comment in seconds and decide whether to reread it thoroughly, whereas with something like a YouTube video I have to rely on trusted channels (or in desperation, The Algorithm) to decide what's worth my time. It's only the visual part of the audio-visual media that makes the tedious audio part tolerable; a photo or diagram or so on is often much more efficient than any verbal description of it would be.
Yeah, there's the thing. Doom-scrolling TikTok sounds insane to me, but people do it, even in our mostly-literate world. And the benefits of reading more quickly require you to be able to read quickly; that can be a virtuous cycle if you got into it as a child, or it can be a vicious cycle if you never decide it's worth the bother. It's not a fast cycle, so I wouldn't make any strong predictions about ten years from now ... but a hundred years from now, will reading to your kids so they grow up into the kind of people who enjoy reading to their kids still be an ongoing tradition, not an antiquated fad? I have no idea.
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Literacy is a foul tool of the bourgeoisie. The chidlren should be free to develop their muscles in the coal mines, if this is what is likely to bring added value to their benefactors.
Absolutely. It's the revealed preference of many a child to labor away in the virtual caves of Minecraft. What other choice do they have, when adults are so dull and near-sighted? Hook them up with a VR setup that controls real diggers! Send them to the mines, that's what the
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I'm a ardent transhumanist, but I still think it's rather premature to claim that literacy is of limited utility! We can have that conversation when we develop high-bandwidth BCIs.
There are mixed opinions on how fast humans can process speech versus text. I can tell you that I read ridiculously fast without consciously speed-reading (in that I retain the material instead of running my eyes over it). An old eReader app claimed 450 wpm.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Shows 757 WPM, but at the cost of getting one of the 4 reading comprehension questions incorrect.
Humans speak at about 150 WPM. We can process heard speech faster, like when people speed up audio books, but it probably doesn't go past 450 WPM despite training as it verges on becoming nigh incomprehensible.
At least in my case, I'm very confident that literacy is a handy skill to have. You can read silently, just about anywhere, skip ahead and behind in a stream of information with ease, without much in the way of technological assistance beyond the ability to write or read something written. Worst case, you scratch on stone or in the mud.
I strongly expect that past the early years of childhood, say ages 7 or 8, one's ability to read depends far more on internal proclivity and availability of material rather than intentionally didactic approaches. To be less verbose, they don't teach you shit once you're somewhere past your ABCs.
I wouldn't even call it particularly challenging, despite the failures of modern educational systems and the quasi-literacy many of the "literate" display. You have to go very low in terms of IQ to find humans who can't read at all, no matter how hard they try, without more targeted learning disabilities.
In light of this, I'd teach any kid I had today the ability to read and write right up till the day we had BCIs, and then, I'd expect that it would possible for that interface to inculcate the ability to read without its assistance (there might be a significant time gap, as it's probably easier to transfer sensory modalities versus skills).
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We have, they don't compare by orders of magnitude. You have to go to Genghis Khan to get anything that's in the leagues of Mao or Stalin. And if we start counting war deaths the XXth century just destroys any other period in history with extreme prejudice. Modernity has produced the most evil in all of humanity's history by its own quantitative metrics. There's no need to even grab the spiritual yardstick.
The real question is whether it's produced enough good to offset all that.
Ah yes, it wasn't real Scientific Government. The wrecker cows refused to be spherical. Pesky human beings got in the way of the New Atlantis. But the next time...
Well you see I happen to be a pesky human being, and so are you, not New Socialist Men, so I find it very easy to blame the tool for being ill suited to the task. If we can't reach Atlantis after this much suffering, I see no reason to continue.
Nobody's talking about ditching away reason altogether. What's being talked about is refusing to use reason to solely ground aesthetics, morality and politics, because the results of doing so have been consistently monstrous, while sentimentalism and tradition, despite their flaws, produced much better results.
Handily, you're replying to:
At least do me the courtesy of reading my argument, where I've already addressed your claims.
This mischaracterizes my point. I'm not going all "No True Scotsman" when I observe that regimes like the Soviet Union, while claiming the mantle of scientific rationality, frequently acted in profoundly anti rational ways, suppressing empirical evidence (Lysenkoism being a prime example) and ignoring basic human incentives when they conflicted with dogma. The failure wasn't that reason itself is unsuited to governing humans; the failure was that ideology, dogma, and the pursuit of absolute power overrode reason and any genuine attempt at empirical feedback.
(Besides, I've got a residency permit in Scotland, but I don't think I'd count as a Scotsman. There are True Scotsmen out there)
There's no bolt of lightning from clear skies when people grab concepts and slogans from a noble idea and then misappropriate them. Someone who claims that Christianity is the religion of peace has to account for all the crusades called in its name, that God didn't see fit to smite for sullying his good name.
Like I said, look at the alternatives. Even better, look at the world as it stands, where billions of people live lives that would be the envy of kings from the Ancien Régime. Atlantis is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Uh huh. I'm sure there are half a billion widows who dearly miss the practise of sati:
In that case, it's my tradition, one ennobled by hundreds of years of practice and general good effect, to advocate for a technological and rational approach. Works pretty well. Beats peer pressure from dead people.
Do literary accounts of Atlantean wealth show mass working-class prosperity, or do we just see the elites? This is a serious question.
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I apologize, must have read around that part. I'm tired. I don't really want to get into a black book of communism style argument because it never really becomes productive and there's a million ways to gerrymander responsibility. And I think that what you wrote is a fair treatment insofar as you recognize that industry is a force multiplier.
In any case, the problem with the Enlightenment is that while previous worldviews recognized the darkness in Man's soul and sought to contain it through various means, it explicitly rejected this as superstition that can be overcome by destroying social bondage.
We now know that killing God comes with some consequences. And I think those are not an acceptable trade for vaccines and the pill.
Here I'll throw you back your own argument. If it is unfair for the Enlightenment to carry the burden of its deaths, it is also unfair for it to claim the glory of human ingenuity insofar as it did not directly create it.
Surely some credit is deserved for the codification of the scientific method, but anything further becomes harder to argue. Who gets credit for the space race? For
Sure, but a system is what it does. Pacifism is a terrible idea because it has bad consequences. Much of the problems with Liberalism and its offshoots are in fact down to the fact that good intentions do not reliably produce good results.
Look I understand, and I actually think that's fine, but I'm not a Scotsman. So I'd appreciate if you'd stop ruining my continent by introducing fancy new ideas to the Germans that they then proceed to run into the ground.
Fair enough. Happens to the best of us.
This paints with far too broad a brush. Did pre Enlightenment thought actually contain the darkness effectively? The sheer volume of religiously motivated slaughter, systemic oppression justified by tradition, and casual brutality throughout history suggests their methods weren't exactly foolproof. Often, those worldviews simply gave the darkness a different justification or set of targets.
The Enlightenment project wasn't about denying human flaws; it was about proposing better systems to manage them – checks and balances, rule of law, individual rights, the scientific method for vetting claims. It suggested we could use reason and evidence to build guardrails, rather than relying solely on superstition or appeals to divine authority which had a spotty track record, to put it mildly.
Note that we've made meaningful advancements on all these points. The scientific method is a strict subset of Bayesian reasoning, a much more powerful yet fickle beast.
Again, the framing here is reductive. It's not just "vaccines and the pill." It's sanitation, germ theory, doubled lifespans, near universal literacy, orders of magnitude reduction in extreme poverty, modern agriculture feeding billions, instant global communication, and the very computer you're typing this on. That's the package deal stemming from the widespread adoption of reason, empiricism, and technological progress.
Were the horrors of the 20th century a direct result of "killing God," or were they the result of new, secular dogmas (Marxism Leninism, Nazism) that were themselves profoundly anti rational in practice, suppressing dissent and evidence? I'll take the staggering, tangible improvements in quality and quantity of life for billions, warts and all, over a romanticized past that conveniently forgets the endemic misery, violence, and ignorance. Choosing the latter seems like a failure of perspective, or worse.
I'm an atheist, because I remain largely unconvinced that there's a deity there to kill in the first place. If such an entity were to exist, and had condoned the circumstances of material reality without active intervention, then I'd be more than happy to trade for vaccines and pills. They work better than prayer, at the very least.
It's not about claiming direct credit for every bolt and circuit board. It's about acknowledging the operating system. The Enlightenment provided the intellectual framework – skepticism of authority, emphasis on evidence, belief in progress, systematic inquiry – that allowed the rate and scale of innovation to explode. It created the conditions. Denying that connection because specific Enlightenment figures didn't invent the iPhone is like saying the development of agriculture gets no credit for modern cuisine.
We agree consequences matter. But if a supposedly "rational" plan (like Soviet central planning) crashes and burns, the lesson isn't "rationality is bad."* The lesson is "that specific plan was based on garbage assumptions, ignored feedback, and was implemented by murderous thugs." You diagnose the failure mode. You use reason to figure out why it failed – was it bad data, flawed logic, ignoring incentives, Lysenkoist dogma? Blaming the tool (reason) for the incompetent or malicious user is an abdication. The answer is better, more reality grounded reason, not throwing the tool away.
The tradition I'm talking about isn't geographically limited. It's the ongoing project of using evidence and reason to understand the world and improve the human condition. It's a tradition that learns, adapts, and course corrects based on results – unlike static traditions relying on appeals to antiquity or sentiment. It has its own disasters when applied poorly or hijacked by fanatics, sure. But its net effect, globally, has been overwhelmingly positive by almost any objective (via quasi-universality, at least) metric of human well being. I'll keep advocating for that tradition, wherever it takes root, because the alternatives on offer look considerably worse. And yes, that includes weeding out bad applications with more rigorous analysis, not less.
*Don't think that I am arguing, from principle, that "rationality" can't be bad. An alien civilization is gifted the Scientific Method, yet lives under the whims of a devilish and anti-inductive deity. Every attempt to use science leaves them worse off than they found them. In that (contrived) scenario, science would be bad. They'd be better off not trying, at the least. The issue is that it takes such a contrived scenario to show the counterfactual possibility of badness. Or perhaps we get killed by a paperclipping AGI, or the Earth collapses into a black hole thanks to the successor of the LHC. It would take colossal failures of this nature to show that advance of science and reason could even be remotely close to net negative. As we are, it has clearly gotten us further than anything else did, and those options had a headstart of thousands of years.
We've had multiple scientific revolutions, yes, most didn't have anything to do with the Enlightenment or its ideas though. So I don't really see how that's relevant unless you're willing to let causality run to its largest extent.
Look either this works for both death and glory or it works for neither, you have to pick.
You bloody well know that Nietzsche was talking about the concept of Divinity as a grounding mechanism for social mores in industrial Europe, not making a theological statement.
It's precisely that destroying the existing prevailing religious tradition would create new dogmas that have little value for human life that he predicted, and that this would have terrible consequences. That was the danger. We toyed cynically with the established meaning of life and we burned ourselves. One would think this would be a good reason not to want to keep doing so.
I don't mean to cherry pick, but this particular nonsense phrase is the core of what you don't seem to want to recognize here. You can't just abdicate responsibility like this. Rationalism (by which we mean here Scientific Government) is an ideology, it does not exist in practice except through such instantiations.
I disagree. I think it is perfectly acceptable to recognize that rationalizing certain social processes is erroneous.
I don't share your commitment to reason as a necessary component of meta-ethics. And frankly that commitment is itself totally irrational.
I think the idea that it takes a contrived scenario to make reason into a bad tool is a big cope when we have plenty of real world examples of people being totally dehumanized by rationally constructed institutions right now, and your only rejoinder to those seems to be that simply not enough reason was applied.
I would ask then of you what I ask of communists: what evidence would convince you that reason isn't a good tool to organize society?
But it seems from that last paragraph that you have the same answer as they have, which is evidence so extraordinary that your certainty may never be shaken. This bigotry is not wise.
Which ones would those be? Isn't the entire concept of a scientific revolution the product of Enlightenment thinking? You could claim that the Enlightenment resulted in a mutilation of man's soul, a great disenchantment that replaced his heart with metal and wheels, but our understanding and mastery of the material world is the one fundamental, undeniable truth about our civilization. To claim that any other society in the 300 millennia that modern humans have walked the Earth has even come close is to claim that Venus is brighter than the Sun. Prometheus may be punished for his hubris, but the fire is real.
At no point were human souls actually mutilated. At no point did disenchantment actually occur. At no point was even a single heart replaced with metal and wheels. And yes, I understand that you are speaking metaphorically here; I am speaking in the same metaphor.
The historical events and ideologies you are referring to in the first part of this sentence were not science in any meaningful sense of the term. The widespread belief that these acts and ideologies constituted a "scientific revolution" is the result of deliberate lies coordinated by specific, identifiable historical figures. Frued, Marx, Dewey, Watson, Skinner and so on sold humanity on "science" that was not actually scientific, and was in fact provably false.
The Enlightenment's core scam is to pretend that it speaks for and owns science in some meaningful way. That was absolutely not true for hundreds of years, and to the extent that it may have become true in the mind of scientists in our own era, science itself seems to have suffered as a result. The Enlightenment is a philosophical ideology. Many of the claims it is founded on are unfalsifiable, and many others have been falsified. It did not invent the scientific method, and it has never been particularly good at applying it.
The actual science, the part that really did deliver all the material benefits you are pointing to, has no actual connection to the ideology that has claimed credit for it.
It seems to me like you're trying to draw an arbitrary box around "bad political ideas from the 18th century" and label it the Enlightenment, when I was always taught that it meant "the entire intellectual project of Europe and its colonies between approximately 1650 and the present." There were plenty of figures like Thomas Jefferson who spanned both the scientific and political sides of this tradition and in their eyes and mine there was little daylight between the two. If I start reading Newton's Principia and finish with Mill's On Liberty I don't observe any discontinuity or hostile takeover halfway through, but a gradual transition from a medieval worldview to a modern one. And yes, this means that Lavoisier and the revolutionaries who chopped his head off were all equally part of the Enlightenment. Obviously the technologies of the West can be copied by other societies today without copying our liberal politics, but I don't buy the argument that they could be invented in the first place without them (N=1, obviously, so if we disagree on this we come to a bit of an impasse as far as the available evidence is concerned, apart from the lack of internal combustion engines in the Roman Empire, Song China, or Mughal India).
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