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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.
"We, as individuals, are capable of discovering the physical and moral laws of the universe and in so doing creating a more perfect society."
While this parasitic class clearly exists today, the benefits of scientific advancement were not obvious enough in 1789 for this to be a primary motivator of anyone involved in the French Revolution. Three years later China could still imperiously dismiss the Macartney Embassy, and the idea that Britain would go from producing nothing that they needed to kicking down their doors and taking whatever they wanted by force within a single lifetime was as far from European minds as it was from Asian ones.
I don't hold that more Enlightened = better, only that some minimum threshold of Enlightenment needed to be passed for the Industrial Revolution to occur. Beyond that point, that ideological train was almost certain to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Therefore, I will raise Mark Twain one better: modern technology and Communism were separate but inevitable consequences of the Enlightenment, and the hundred million dead at the hands of the latter were a fair trade for the former.
Bit of a tangent, but we do have examples of highly literate societies that did not produce a scientific revolution, namely Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and pre-colonial Burma.
No argument from me here. I think our priority should be salvaging what is valuable from Western civilization before it implodes and incorporating it into a more sustainable philosophical tradition.
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The consensus among whom? Which proponents of the Enlightenment today do you believe would earnestly claim that the Jacobins better encapsulated the positive core of their beliefs than the Founding Fathers did? Surely you’re aware that a substantial majority of the users of this site would self-identify as fans of the Enlightenment, broadly construed; of those users, how many do you believe agree with the supposed “consensus” that you’re claiming exists? My support for the Enlightenment is guarded and contingent at best, so perhaps I don’t count, but I would certainly say that the naked bloodlust evinced by the Jacobins — the ardent, unthinking zeal with which they pursued their aims, the hasty and slapdash nature of their kangaroo courts, and the resulting devolution into vengeful recriminations and purity spirals — pretty clearly mark them as failing, in a catastrophic way, to hew to the better natures to which the Enlightenment purports to urge us all to aspire. (Note that I’m no great booster of the American Founding either, so this isn’t meant to let them off the hook.)
This strikes me as a disastrously shortsighted comment. You’re just begging to end up looking foolish, making predictions like this. I see no signs that technological advancements (“bedazzling” or otherwise) are slowing down any time soon. My accusation of Traditionalism Of The Gaps is, I’m sad to say, somewhat vindicated by your comment.
The staff of Jacobin Magazine, pretty clearly. Marx, Marxists, people who adhere to bespoke ideological varietals of Marxism hybridized with other stuff. Egalitarians generally, who look down on slave-owning white supremacist founders. If we expand the question to "consider the Jacobins equally admirable as the Founding Fathers", we get probably some number of the Founding Fathers themselves.
Would you consider Mark Twain to be an advocate of Enlightenment thought? Did you read his quote I provided above? Likewise Duranty, and by extension all his colleagues.
For users here, I don't know. That's why I ask. I think it'd be a solid majority of politically-aware redditors, though. I have been repeatedly told by other long-time commenters here that it's understandable to give a pass not only to the French Revolution but the Bolsheviks, because they had "good intentions".
The whole point of the French vs American revolution comparison is that the two revolutions were very different in character, and therefore we ought to be able to say that one was a more central example of the Enlightenment than the other. If you think the American Revolution is the central one and the French is the outlier, then you need to explain why so many experts and elites seem to think the opposite. If you think the French revolution is the more central example, you need to explain why people think that tyranny and slaughter are disqualifiers for placement within the Enlightenment set.
The whole point is that people will claim that the Enlightenment is about liberty and freedom and human flourishing and rule of law, and then will turn right around and argue that ideological movements that claimed to be part of the Enlightenment and were recognized by others as being part of the Enlightenment trampled all these things in horrifying ways, and their crimes were systematically ignored by the Enlightenment's apparent champions. This isn't a subtle pattern.
I like my odds.
Others in this thread are defending the Enlightenment based on the massive increase in wealth and general luxury resulting from the scientific and industrial revolutions. Whether or not Enlightenment ideology actually was responsible for that ludicrous increase in wealth, the increase itself was very real; I'd point to the quote about west Texans supporting FDR because he brought them electricity. That sort of massive increase in standard of living buys a movement a lot of loyalty, and claiming credit for multiple generations of such improvements is how Enlightenment ideology cemented its intellectual hegemony.
Those increases haven't been happening for some time. The last plausible candidate was the Internet, and a decade and change ago I would have argued that it was straightforwardly a wonder of the world. Now I've seen too many downsides, and it seems to me that so have a lot of other people. Scarcity of various sorts is setting in. Increasingly, technology is no longer a source of wonder and delight, but of fear and angst. For previous generations, tech made life glorious; for the current one, it increasingly makes us wretched. And crucially, this stagnation has already been enough to burn down the large majority of Enlightenment ideology's social capital. Trust in The Science, Academia, the Press, trust in experts and elites, trust in social systems, in leadership, all of those have absolutely cratered over the last decade. The Culture War has escaped containment and now crushes all before it. If science and tech could have kept the streak going, probably Enlightenment ideology could have kept policy starvation to a minimum and stayed on top. But they didn't, and so here we are.
Maybe AI will change that, and cause another explosion of prosperity and wonder. And if so, that's wonderful; I've long argued that a resumption of the tech whalefall would be one of the clearest and most likely positive solutions to the Culture War, and in that eventuality, none of this will matter because we will be too busy being fat and happy to bother with it. But if that doesn't happen, if AI or some other pivotal technology doesn't deliver a fair impression of an actual singularity, then the present trends are likely to continue, and the tottering structures above us come right on down, I think.
I don't remember this one. Could you link or elaborate?
"Was the Enlightenment a good idea?"
I am sorry, but all of this seems to me as lots of crying over spilt milk. The Enlightenment bad. What is then good?
The Enlightenment is done deal, there is no going back. Even if you think that humanity peaked in 1700, that palace of Versailles of Louis XIV was the pinnacle of perfection, you are not bringing it back.
The whole world runs on Enlightenment now. Everyone wears Western suits or military uniforms, everyone pays lip service to the high ideas, everyone from Kim and Putin to ordinary African strong man claims to be democratically elected leader serving the people.
Multiparty democracy, one party rule, military dictatorship - all are creations of the Enlightenment.
As they say, TINA. Where are any non-enlightened models in today's world?
Iran? There are elections, parliament and the whole shebang.
Gulf oil states? Areas controlled by Al Qaeda or ISIS? Less than appealing alternatives.
Remember, the Enlightenment won not because of beauty of its ideas, it won because Enlightened armies and fleets trashed all of their opposition.
When Yemen starts sinking US carrier groups, not once in freak accident but repeatedly and consistently, when new revolutionary discoveries and technologies start arriving from ISIS controlled zones in Africa, then we can talk.
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