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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).
How would you describe this "modern worldview"? Empiricism, materialism, skepticism, rationality, something along those lines?
I am trying to demonstrate how bad philosophical ideas that became dominant in the 18th century infested the West with intellectual and ideological cancer from their inception down to the present day. I am critiquing a specific, coherent stream of intellectual thought that dominated the entire intellectual project of Europe and its colonies from approximately 1650 to the present.
The short version is that as Science began delivering massive, obvious benefits, people noticed that they could lie and claim to be Scientists doing Science, and as long as they engaged in a certain minimal amount of social posturing, the empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality could simply be bypassed, and they could reap all the social, fiscal and political benefits of Contributing to Science without actually having to contribute anything meaningful at all. The more people explicitly or implicitly locked into this paradigm, the lower the incentive to resist the bypass became. The result was a parasite class of "intellectuals" growing fat and happy, while at best actively burning value to accomplish nothing, and more often burning value to produce dangerous forms of self-replicating deceit to plague mankind generally.
This parasite class had already grown to the point of having serious geopolitical influence by 1789, and it only grew from there. It inflicted serious harm worldwide in the 1800s, and very nearly killed our civilization in the 1900s. The pattern that generates this parasite class is still going to this day. It needs to be recognized and killed before it does to this century what it did to the last one.
You should be able to recognize the hostile takeover in the architects, actions and character of the French revolution. You should definitely be able to recognize it in how subsequent generations spoke about the French Revolution; Mark Twain is one of my favorite examples of a purportedly intelligent person spouting insane, mindkilled horseshit. By the time we get to Marx and Freud, it seems to me that failure to recognize the pattern must in some sense be willful; and then there is the 20th century, where we must laugh lest we weep.
This is why I ask people to identify whether the American or French revolution was a more central example of the Enlightenment. My impression is that the consensus answer is the French revolution is the more Enlightened; yet the industrial revolution came out of Britain and then America, both of which stubbornly resisted the succession of ideologies spawned by the French Revolution far longer than their European peers, to their enormous benefit. Likewise, the universal literacy that was an obvious precursor to the scientific and industrial revolutions was a product of Protestant Christianity; the Enlightenment rode that trend, rather than generating it. It seems clear to me that if one actually gets rigorous in assessing where the material prosperity flows from, it is not in fact flowing from Enlightenment Progressivism.
But of course, it is entirely in the interest of Enlightenment ideologues to claim that they alone created The Science ex nihilo, and the alternative to their ideological program is pure benighted ignorance. Getting people to believe this has benefited them massively, and the longer they can keep the scam running the more value they can embezzle from the rest of us.
The empiricism, materialism, skepticism and rationality were never rigorous in any population-level sense. Superstition and ignorance changed their masks, and nothing more. Now that bedazzling scientific advancements are slowing down and we have had a moment to collect ourselves, a modest amount of actual skepticism and curiosity and a memory broader than the last fifteen minutes is sufficient to tear the whole rotten edifice wide open.
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